First published in 1972 in Marchers of Valhalla, reading from the 1978 Berkley edition, pages 147-176

The Thunder-Rider is an intensely bizarre fantasy presented as the racial memory of a modern Comanche corporate sell-out, about a 17th Century ancestor who adventured among enemy tribes, ancient troglodytes known as “the Terrible People” who wield great axes [and are reminiscent of the monster tribe in the recent Kurt Russell film Bone Tomahawk], and against evil Aztec sorcerers. There is a female character, a Spanish-Pawnee, serving as a blood-thirsty love interest. But most of all, is the unifying theme of the story, the thread that runs through the entire thing—blood memory, upwelling race identity that informs the conscious mind of he who would listen to his unconscious, epitomized by this passage, “…for in our souls stirred the echoes of ancient legends.”

What follows are excerpts from the narrator’s extensive introduction, which spends three pages convincing the reader that the writer behind this character must have felt that there was some truth to the fictional assertions. He sits in a tall office building:

“I speak of sure knowledge of the medicine memory, the only heritage left me by the race that conquered my ancestors.”

“If I look down I will see only strips of concrete…here no solitude and vastness and mystery to veil the mind with all-seeing blindness and to build dreams and visions and prophesy. Here all is matter reduced to its most mechanical tangibility—power that can be seen and touched and heard, force and energy that crushes all dreams and turns men and women into whimpering automatons.”

“As I sit here and stare out upon the new wasteland of steel and concrete and wheels it all seems suddenly tenuous and unreal as the fog that rises from the shores of the Red River in the early morning. I see through it and beyond, back to…”