Thunder Horse
The Cheyenne medicine men once spake of the blue vision. Those vast, delft-shaded distances across the plains, splendorous views of- nothing, nothing at all. Nothing save for the endless green sea of the prairie and the cobalt vault of the sky which joined together far away at the edge of the world. Sensuous in its simplicity, monotonous yet sublime. Here one could sit among the rippling waves of grass and be at peace with the world, letting the mind empty out into the prairie.
The only breaks from the rolling fields were the animals in their millions. Dark splotches of hundreds of bison grazing together, a brunette sea flecked with the cinnamon hides of calves. Fleet-footed pronghorn flying like birds over the wildflowers, always glancing anxiously around through lustrous black eyes, justifiably alert to danger. Wolf packs stealing silently through the tall thickets of bluestem; catamounts slithering like serpents toward unsuspecting quarry. The black humps of lone grizzlies standing like glacial erratics, trailing herds of mustang and elk beyond counting. An endless Eden bound only by the blue pyramids of the mountains far to the west and the azure firmament above.
Land without time, land without men
A complete Heaven crowning a complete Earth back then
Antelope, bison, cougar; for lordship of a scrap wolf and bear may brawl
But mighty Thunder Horse is still the king of them all
Known to all who travel the plains, the vast space of the blue vision told of still vaster time, of ageless ages before man, before the bison, before even the boundless waves of grass that gently swelled on the summer breeze and blurred off into the distant yonder.
It was in the blue vision, this liminal, ever-shifting boundary of the time between space, the space between time, that Thunder Horse dwelled.
Invisible he canters over plains of air
Riding the Chinook-way down the prair’
Kicking up thermal and storm b’neath his hooves
Beware, for Thunder Horse is on the move
The climate of the plains was a fickle thing. Often pleasantly warmed by prevailing winds blowing forth from the stony mountains like exhalations from the lungs of the earth, yet prone to savage outbursts, lashing out with a repertoire of tornadoes and thundersnow, duststorms and derechos, sweeping without warning down onto the rolling prairie…
Blue sky vanishes ‘hind derecho’s hooded bell
Clouds black as death and gales howling afore the supercell
Midday turned to night, we pray for Father Sun
Take cover, for Thunder Horse is on the run
In the vale between two hills the pronghorn are first to flee. Ever wary they take off, soaring over the ground, lithe legs scarcely clipping the sod. Clever coyote is next, loping away from the fast-approaching thunderhead with his tail between his legs. Wolf and elk, mustang and bear… all run in unison from the coming stormfront. Hearing those first faint, infrasonic rumblings of thunder, or feeling in their bones the subtle change of air pressure as the mighty steed steadily approaches. Lastly, in a snorting panic, the mighty bison spring up from their dusty wallows when the first crack of lightning lashes down.
The nimbus deity’s hooves stamp clovers in the clouds
Each rhythmic beat booms thunder through skies fresh-plowed
Lightning cannonades spray like sparks flung from flint
Flee for your lives! Thunder Horse is coming at a sprint!
He is vast, vast as the nightblack sky. A colossal rhinoceroid figure cut out of the brume. Clear at first against the blue, then seen but indistinctly between lightning flashes as he races past. Stout and brawny, his broad, flat horn splayed out proudly like the figurehead on a galleon, twin beams cutting a vast Y through the thunderhead. Huffing and snorting as he runs through, red eyes gazing haughtily at the fleeing herds. Kin to the rhino indeed, but distantly- his closer relations are the mustangs now driven in braying panic before him.
He lived before the grass, when all the world was woods, Nebraska a balmy forest, and he dined on tender leaves grown out of ashes sprayed by volcanoes long dead. He has no love for the plains, the grasses too tough and stringy for his palate. His bones bake in the kiln of the earth, under layered slabs of clay. But sometimes during these summer storms he lives again, galloping across the skies of his lost homeland.
Lightning, gale, and rain; all the fury of the sky is his to wield
Ferocious winds his flaring breath, hooves pounding sleet upon the fields
Wreaking havoc and mayhem like no thing that ever flew
Lord have mercy! Thunder Horse is galloping through!
Stirred from his nameless throne for arcane reasons, he was heir to no kingdom of man. He knew not that his bones had long been turned to stone, permineralized by crushing weight and vast aeons to become like those of the Water Monsters before him. He knew not that the very floods he wrought sometimes exposed his own skeleton to the light again, to the wondering eyes of the Sioux. They would mistake his broad horn, proud Y protruding from above his nares, for an Indian rider with arms triumphantly outstretched. They would say the black-shelled belemnites he exposed were lightning-arrows, fired off by the mythical rider. They would say he slew entire herds of bison, pointing to the ashfall bonebeds exposed by his receding floodwaters as proof. They would say he was their savior, driving the panicked bison into their own waiting arrows.
One day another race would claim these lands and call his mineraled bones Megacerops, studiously excavating and scrutinizing and cataloguing them in their little museum drawers. They would build flimsy clay models and fiberglass replicas of him for children to gape at. They would say he was an outdated lifeform doomed to extinction, that the senescence of his kind had been foretold by his proud fighting horns.
At all this, Thunder Horse would have scoffed. Let them embellish and explain, and tell their just-so tales. The truth is too fierce and wild for a species of such feeble-minded narcissists. He runs because it is his way. He is an agent of change, an impartial chooser of the slain. He knows neither malice nor mercy. Woe betide any who are caught beneath the sparks of his great hooves, or in the flash floods that dig new gulches across his domain.
And just as quickly as he arrived, Thunder Horse is through. He lurches on, angry and alive, snorting his disdain in the last few rumbles of thunder as the clouds dissipate and the sun returns. He switches his tail and swings his vast head as he fades back off into the yonder, to a younger Nebraska of wood and leaf.
He gallops onward, leaving lightning-busted sod behind in his wake
’Round new coulees carved, a score of soaked survivors shiver at stormbreak
Indifferently he dissolves, dissipating back into the ether, homebound
Yet Thunder Horse will return, wild and free, once again to spurn the ground.