How can people who are so smart be so gullible? he asked himself for the thousandth time. These guys aren’t stupid; it takes a lot of brains to horse one of those rigs around. I should look on the bright side. When they stop jawing, I can probably talk them into staying off the job now. But how can guys who laugh at people who’re afraid of black cats turn around and believe in the Little People?

He used to believe in all that nonsense—well, maybe not Little People, since that was an Osage thing and not Cherokee, but in spirits, and totemic animals, vision-quests, and all the rest of it. Medicine. Stuff that got all the New Age, Dances-With-Credit-Cards crowd so misty-eyed.

Newage. Rhymes with sewage, and the same watered-down crap. He suppressed a smile at his own cleverness.

He had more sense than that now; it was just one more way for people to delude themselves. Look what had happened to Wovoka and the Ghost Dance Movement! More of the People had been shot down because they believed that those stupid white shirts would keep them bulletproof. …

Peyote, and too much imagination. That’s all right if you’re making a painting, or writing a poem, but we’re trying to keep some People out of jail, here.

Oh, he went to various rituals; even Peyote ceremonies, although he wouldn’t go so far as chewing the stuff himself. Partially because he didn’t like giving up control to anything, he liked knowing he was always completely in control of his mind and all his senses. But he went because his mentors pointed out it was important to go—“politically correct,” as it were. It would look bad if he didn’t participate, as if his spirit wasn’t in helping his People.

And he did believe that there was something Sacred out there, that there were special places that had a special power for the Peoples. Hell, even white people had places like that, places where powerful things happened, like Lourdes, Mecca and Jerusalem. It only made sense that there were places like that for everyone. And the earth itself was sacred, if only because it was the only place to live that humans had, and when they didn’t treat it like it was sacred, they messed it up.

And there’s something out there that’s for us, all the Peoples, something that doesn’t fit the white idea of God the Caucasian Father. That only makes sense too. The Judeo-Christians don’t have a lock on truth any more than anyone else does.

But he just couldn’t handle all this superstitious stuff. He believed in the power of Lawyers, not Little People; of Media Pressure and not Medicine. You could smoke a sacred pipe till you choked; it wasn’t gonna do you a damn bit of good against a bunch of U.S. marshals with guns.