Chapter Three

The sun seemed to rise reluctantly on Fort Asher, as if it were afraid of what it might see.

The land here had been set aside as a reservation simply because nobody else had wanted it, and it was easy to see why not. Little in the way of life was to be found here; rain was plentiful enough, but the soil could support little more than prickly grasses. It had rained all through the night, in fact; the collection of shabby huts that dotted the plain were soaked through, and the ground had been turned to sludge.

In a clearing towards the back of the camp, a haggard man dug in the mud.

At a glance, most people would have correctly marked him as a man of learning; he had the bookish appearance, the spectacles, the fine clothes - splattered now with a thick coating of mud. From his gaunt build and haunted expression, most of his fellow scholars would immediately have guessed that he was an anthropologist.

The man's name was Michael Evans, and his occupation wasn't one that lent itself to a cheerful outlook on life.

Evans had come to Fort Asher intending to study the traditional lifestyles and beliefs of the Bangishin, a people originally native to the Northwest Territories. He had found fewer than a dozen of them alive, sharing a reservation with seven other dying tribes. Most of them had fallen to smallpox within ten years of their first contact with European settlers. Of those who'd survived, many more had been lost in the long march from their homeland in Wisconsin to the Indian Territory, more casualties of Jackson's Indian Removal Act. The rest had died here; either of despair, or due to the squalor of their conditions.

Evans had failed to comprehend this last detail at first, since the supplies provided by the government should have been enough to provide adequate food and shelter for the people. Upon further investigation, he'd discovered to his shock that the agents in charge of distributing the supplies had instead been selling the majority to passing settlers. His letter of complaint to the regional governor had received a polite reply advising him to mind his business.

Likewise, his attempts to learn about the traditional habits of the Bangishin had failed - for none of the survivors had known what those had been. The elders had been the hardest hit by plague and poverty, and they'd died without passing on their knowledge. Those who'd survived hadn't bothered, for it had seemed to them as if the world were coming to an end. Those who remained in these days had known only the reservation. In the space of a few generations, all of the Bangishin's long history had quite simply been forgotten.

And here was Evans, digging in the mud - digging a grave for the last man among them.

He returned to Maryland a week later, only to find that he'd stayed with the Bangishin longer than he'd intended to. Almost a year had passed since he'd left home, and civilization seemed alien to him now. For the first few days, he attributed his feeling of strangeness to culture shock; as time passed, however, he began to develop a deepening sense that something was very much out of the ordinary.

At last, Evans managed to place what it was that was the cause of his malaise: the fact that everyone he met seemed to share in his uneasiness. Everybody was testy and restless, but nobody seemed to know why. Despite himself, he found a bizarre conviction taking root in his mind.

Like the Elders of the Bangishin, he began to believe that the world was coming to an end.