“Don’t pretend you understand me,” Rabedy told him. “You don’t know me and we’re not friends.”

“I only . . .”

“You only nothing. I’ve watched you from the beginning. Watched you play on Big Dan’s greed. I don’t know what your game is, but I know that whatever you do for anyone else, it’s only for your benefit.”

“Then why didn’t you say something?” Odawa asked him, his voice cold.

“Because who’d ever listen to me?”

“How sad.”

“Right now,” Rabedy said, “I’m not important. You’re not important. All that matters is that we do something to stop this.”

The blind gaze regarded him for a long moment, then the green-bree smiled. There wasn’t even a hint of warmth in that smile.

“That, my little high-minded friend,” he said, “is something you’ll have to do on your own. I have a corbae to kill.”

And with that he stepped away and Rabedy was left alone on the cliff top, looking down at more buffalo green-brees than he could ever have imagined existed.

Geordie

It was an astonishing sight, this view that Timony showed me of thousands of buffalo gathered on the plains below. It was like a sea of brown waves undulating softly as the individual cerva stomped and pounded their drums.

This, I thought, was what it must have been like in the old days, when the early explorers first reached the prairies and came upon the vast herds that lived there. The difference was, the European hunters immediately started butchering the buffalo for their hides, leaving the skinned carcasses to rot on the ground by the hundreds of thousands, while Timony and I would just as soon stay off their radar completely.

Thinking of those killing fields, I didn’t have to ask Timony what he meant by his simple reply of “War.” But then something else occurred to me.

“Fairy followed the buffalo hunters, didn’t they?” I said.

Timony shrugged. “I suppose. I wasn’t here in those days. I came on the later boats, after one of those big wars where you people killed each other.”

“So when you said war, did you mean with humans or fairy?”

“Fairy,” he replied. “But if they’re successful in that endeavour, I don’t doubt that they’ll turn their wrath on your people.”

It was weird, his constantly saying “your people.” I didn’t feel the remotest connection to those early explorers who only saw the Americas as a source for monetary gain—no more than I do now with the big companies that run roughshod over anyone and anything that gets in the way of their profits.

I returned my gaze to that vast gathering of buffalo cousins. Their numbers seemed endless.

“There’s nothing we can do about this, is there?” I said.

“A doonie and a human? Hardly.”