Three-Rivers and Angh were carrying the back end of two stretchers between them. These sleeping platforms for hurt people were a marvelous idea. Healer certainly was a fast and precise thinker. They followed behind Healer and Eddie who likewise carried stacked stretchers. They entered the town through the large double-door called a gate and came face-to-face with a lurid fire-lit spectacle of shadow and anguish.

Warned you were war-prophet, bringer of dooms.

The warnings of Father’s ghost now echoed in his mind, the wolves you are letting loose will not stop after running these dogs to ground.

It took a conscious effort to pull himself out of his communion and focus on the task at hand, which was just now, darting around the piles of enemy dead in the slippery red snow; picking their way ultimately to the far end of the joined-stone trail where the Spanish chief lived. Eddie was taking notice of the fallen warriors so that he could come back with Three-Rivers and retrieve them. Angh would be needed to help Healer with putting warriors back together again with his knives, needles, sinew and sticks collected from among the warriors back in the forest, and of course Eddie’s small medicine-pouch.

In the past he would never have been able to tolerate the anguish, the blood and the killing. He would have slipped into the Realm of Ghosts. Before somehow swallowing the hoop that had transformed him into Thunder-Boy, he would not, in the face of this horror, have been capable of remaining in the Realm of the Living. He would have drifted into shadow to walk and talk with the recently slain and hopefully help them along in their search for the place of their grandfathers, whoever they might have been, along the Starlit Path. As it was, he heard the ghost call, but, thanks to the knowing-without-knowing balance that he now felt within him, he was able to resist the call, and remained helpfully among the living.

Many bodies yet moved and groaned as the compassionate snow covered them in their agony. The burning of the many houses was beginning to sound like the roar of the crashing waves down on the Big Salty called Ocean. The prayers and cries and screams of women and the calls for attention from their frightened children echoed among the flaming houses. A great push of women and children and elders were crowding into the church through its one remaining door. Thankfully, no warriors slew them. The only other building not burning was the Spanish chief’s house up above, beyond the two deep wide piles of slain ahead.

One could plainly see how the battle had progressed, with two great clashes, one here in front of the church, and another ahead in front of the chief’s house. He ‘sucked it up’ as Eddie would say and stayed within himself. In the shadowed side-paths beneath the leaping flames one saw warriors slaying half-dressed White Men alone and in scattered groups. The horror threatened to draw him out of his body but he sought the potent Oneness within and remained Thunder-Boy.

At last they topped the hill named by the Spanish for the Mother of Heysuse Christos, and stood before the most terrible scene of all. His eyes were immediately drawn to the giant form of his disciple T.T. Redbone. Mister Redbone had a spear through his massive chest and other wounds. His tuxedo was ruined, and he kneeled in a daze, still clutching a great Spanish tomahawk. Even on his knees he was as tall as a man. He was crying over the small tuxedoed form of Mister Gerald Hicks, who was covered in some snow and barely breathing. Eddie thoughtfully tilted his hat over the squirrel as a kind of tent for dying squirrels, before continuing on to aid Healer.

Three-Rivers forget everything as he knelt down before his dying totem and began to cry like a boy, not acting like a prophet or a wielder of thunder…and the rushing of waters came to him from within...