The sky was a blinding blue, without a cloud in sight. Grassy plains rolled away to every side, and when I swiped the screen to turn my head, I could make out a distant network of canyons and arroyos carved through the jagged sandstone spires.
It looked just like home.
Or what home would have looked like, a hundred years before Lozen was ever born. What the rez might have looked like before all the buildings and the stress of a whole tribe crammed into one little plot of land. What our original home must have been like, before the government chased us off and penned us in. Before Lozen and Victorio fought their last stand and lost. Before my parents felt so trapped with the tribe that they took me hundreds of miles away from it.
This was the land from Nana’s stories. This was my birthright.
A grin spread over my face, and I turned slowly in a circle, my avatar’s hooves scuffing audibly through the dusty soil. Everything was rendered down to the finest detail. Every blade of dry prairie grass. Every pebble disturbed by my passage. The distant sandstone cliffs, striped like red-hued candycanes.
A whole world, wide open and waiting for me. [7]
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[7] My Nana once told me that a whole third of America used to be prairie. Before settlers came and twisted the land up and made it into flat, faceless wheat. It used to be forests, rivers, mountains, and prairie. Where we could roam free and follow the paths our ancestors had forged a thousand years before. For the first time, I could really see what she meant.
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I picked a direction almost at random and set out, my avatar’s hooves drumming up a cloud of dust that billowed behind me like a flag. The plains might look flat and monotonous, but life was everywhere. Birds chirped and darted closer to me than any real bird ever had. Rabbits watched me approach with almost human intelligence before darting away into the grass. Beetles and grasshoppers hummed among the stalks as they pursued mysterious errands of their own.
After an hour or so — buffalo never seemed to tire — I could make out a town on the horizon, and headed towards it. The land seemed flat on approach, but there was a subtle incline now, and I was startled when I found the ground beneath my hooves dropping abruptly away to reveal a vast orchard spreading out through a fertile canyon, a river wending its way through the centre of the trees. It was an undeniably beautiful spot, with rich velvety grass and plump red apples, but…it seemed somehow out of place. To go from the dry, sandy prairie to this sudden oasis seemed subtly wrong.
As I looked down, trying to puzzle it out, I heard shouts.
“Buffalo! Buffalo on the western slopes!”
The voices did not sound friendly, and I tapped the screen hard, and my character flattened herself to the ground, ears pressed back against her skull. Ponies galloped into sight, bedecked with cowboy hats and checked shirts, and they snarled and shouted expletives as they thundered towards the threat.
But to my shock, none of them gave my ledge even a glance. They pounded through the orchard to the canyon’s end, where a single ray of sun illuminated a distant form. I squinted down at the screen, trying to make it out, and then it burst into motion.
The stranger charged the furious ponies without even a thought, head lowered, and they scattered before her like bowling pins. She pulled up on the other side of the group and skipped sideways to dodge a buck from one of the stallions, and her pale horns flashed in the sun.
My heart did a somersault. A buffalo!
Before I fully thought it through, I was swiping to get my avatar up and moving, galloping down the narrow cliffside track to get to her. She needed my help!
As I barrelled towards the fight, she slammed her forehead into a pony’s, stunning him, and then feinted past him just enough to dip her head and hook her horn through a bucket standing at the foot of a nearby tree. Catching it up in her mouth, she darted away from the pursuing ponies and made for the river. The eagle feathers woven in her hair bounced and fluttered as she ran.
“Stop!” yelled one of the stallions, desperately, but she didn’t falter for a second and whipped her neck round to send the bucket sailing through the air, trailing brown sludge as it went, before landing with a splash in the river.
“You beast!” screamed the incensed stallion, charging for her with murder in his eyes, and I didn’t hesitate. I lowered my own head and galloped for all I was worth. My skull impacted with his withers and sent him tumbling to the ground, and I had to dance back out of the way to avoid his flailing limbs.
The buffalo calf — she couldn’t be much older than me — stared at me in shock, but then it melted into a wicked grin and she slapped a hoof against my shoulder.
“Thanks, stranger!”
Then she was off again, dodging the cowponies and snagging more buckets, hurling them one by one into the river.
“Please, don’t!” cried the ponies. “We need that fertiliser!”
She just tossed her head, wild and imperious. “Well, we need our ancestral stampeding grounds! Get your trees off our land!”
When it was finally over and the last bucket was floating merrily downstream, after we’d escaped, laughing breathlessly and scraping the last remnants of the brown muck from our coats, she grinned again and introduced herself.
“I’m Little Strongheart.”
“Cedar Shield,” I replied.
“You sure know how to handle yourself in a fight!” She laughed again and shook her ears. “I bit off more than I could chew back there; don’t know how to thank you enough.”
I had to know more. “Who were those ponies? They took your land?”
Her face clouded. “Settlers.” She said it like it was a dirty word. “They moved in here a few months ago to found some new pony town, claimed the land was theirs — never mind that it belonged to my tribe for a thousand years!”
My breath caught. Settlers. Injustice. Stolen land. It was just like what my people had suffered, two centuries ago. Just like Lozen’s fight against the army, when they forced the Kiowa Apache onto the rez! I knew straight away what we had to do.
“Strongheart, we have to fight them.”
“We will,” she answered immediately. “You and me, Cedar, we can take them on and win!”