His mind whirled a little, and he commanded it to stop. The music, yes, the infernal wailing-chanting, quavering high in the scale, sliding melismatically downward and softer, sailing high again, bursting up, then arcing down, like the howl of a wolf. But more grating, by far, than a wolf’s cry, because it was human. To Dylan’s ears it was not graced with the human. Dylan kept telling himself that if not for the music, surely, this ritual, this whatever-it-was of the North Piegan Indians, would not seem so… He would be able to bear it. Which he wasn’t sure he could. He looked sideways at the man who brought him here, Bleu, the fort interpreter, and got a stern look for his trouble. There would be times, Bleu had told him, when they could take a break from this ceremony, and Bleu would let him know. Obviously not now. The dark and the bonfire didn’t help. The dancing figures, firelight flickering off their red bodies, looked like devils.
