“You are correct in remembering that this was Watches-Over-The-Land’s resting place,” he said, after a long silence. “As I have told you, he was a Medicine Chief, and a very great one.”

He paused, and she waited. He would tell her what he knew, but he was clearly thinking this through as he spoke.

“There is something wrong—besides this vandalism,” he said after that long pause. “I am looking at these pictures, and there is more malice in the last looting than in the rest. There are no bits of pottery or beads left there; absolutely everything was taken. Further, no one but you, or I, or some other immediate ancestor, should have been able to find that grave. Not simply because it is—was—hard to find. Because they should not have been able to see it. Because it was protected.”

She nodded, slowly, and then with vigor. Of course! That was what the back of my mind was trying to tell me! Of course the place would be protected—how could it not have been, with a son who was a Medicine Chief himself seeing to the cairn? And with every descendant since watching over the site?

Magics like that were only supposed to grow stronger with time, not weaker. And now she knew what Mooncrow had been up to, each time they had visited the place. He had been reinforcing those protections.

So what had gone wrong?

“So something has gone wrong,” he said, echoing her thoughts. “Something has gone very wrong with all of the protections that we tried to keep in place.” He pondered again for a moment. “So, here is something new to add to your equation. A new story for you, and it is one of ill omen; one I would have told you when I taught you the rituals to protect our Ancestor. There was a—a thing—that Watches-Over-The-Land defeated. This was later, after his visions, or he would not have been strong enough to defeat it. It was something evil, and he defeated the evil man that created it as well, killed him, and buried him with all his evil things. Watches-Over-The-Land told his son that he had seen another set of visions, visions that showed that if he did not defeat this man and his evil object, the Osage would go the way of the Hard-To-Kill-People, and disappear; and lose all that they had to the Long Knives, like the Thing-On-Its-Head-People did.”

The Osage disappearing, like the Sac and Fox, where I don’t think there’s a single pure-blooded member of the tribes left. And losing literally everything, like the Cherokee, who were driven out of the lands in the South, had homes and farms and businesses stolen from them by government order. …