Ah’tahe

By Dane Zeller Submitted to Corner Post

Silver Eye pointed her nose east down Kansas Highway 36. Nothing to smell there; nothing to see. Then, to the west. Only the wind coming from Colorado, unfettered by hills, trees, crops and buildings. She glanced up at the man whose curiosity matched hers. His face eroded by his seventy years of life in the sun and wind, and his body supported by the rear fender of a Chevy pickup parked hood-up alongside the road.

C.W. Pogue wore his gray-white hair swept back over his ears and under his hat. He grasped the hat and pulled it tighter to thwart the wind on its mission to blow everything to Nebraska. He wore a faded and oversized sport coat, made and bought in better times. From an inside pocket of the coat, Pogue pulled a pack of cigarettes. The cigarettes had shared space with a small bible, a gift from a preacher who had given him a ride near Atchison.

Follow my decrees and be careful to obey my laws, and you will live safely in the land. — Leviticus 25:18.

Accompanying the bible in that small space was a thirty-two caliber Smith and Wesson revolver.

Pogue moved to put the pickup between him and the wind. Silver Eye followed; her black coat of hair no longer bent back by the wind. Cigarette smoke wafted through Silver Eye’s nose and headed on to the east. C.W. looked in the bed of the truck and opened a small cardboard box. It was a box of #2 roofing nails.

They weren’t his. But then, neither was the truck.

A speck appeared on the eastern horizon. It could be a farmer going to Mankato to the implement dealer to get a part for his irrigation equipment, a housewife going to the Walmart in Smith Center for a week’s worth of groceries, a person at odds with the law, and wanting to travel the path of least authority. Sometimes, but only a few times, someone would be on their way to Denver, and found I-70 to the south too crowded and bustling for western Kansas.

Pogue’s companion discerned it first: A Mercury Marquis as black and quick as Silver Eye. It turned from a speck to an automobile that pierced the wind silently until it came to a stop in front of the pickup. The front passenger window rolled down as if by itself, and C.W. removed his hat, bent down, and stuck his hand in to greet the driver. A smile deepened the crevices in his face, and, as he opened the car door, the electric door lock clicked on the back passenger door. Pogue would have to explain to the traveler that the dog would not be coming with them.

It wasn’t his dog, but it was more than that.

“Ah’tahe,” said Pogue. A spirit, as best he could translate from the language of his people. It did not mean “dog.” It stood for something that had two opposite meanings at once. Something black and white. An idea of beginning and ending together. In the case of Silver Eye, a fierce warrior who could protect you with his quickness and sharp teeth or set a stranger at ease with a flick of his tail.

If the driver was allowing the dog to get into the car, then he had seen Silver Eye. He had seen the dog that wasn’t there. He had seen “Ah’tahe.”