Surrounded by Injuns

 
                                    -Joseph Lightning
Midewiwin Medicine Man
 
At 11:11pm on June 27^th, 2008, deep in a clandestine, underground, secret-government, RAND Corporation research facility in the Big Horn Basin of the north Wyoming Badlands, something was about to go south.  The “Philadelphia Room” where the hyper-dimensional energy influx experiment was being conducted would barely shudder but the rest of the world would change forever when a 434-gram teardrop-shaped alloy orb comprised of 3 rare elemental metals, fullerium, raw wilsonium, and balonium absolute, was suspended in a high-mobius pulse-fractalated invert Tesla field in the hopes of perfecting control over the precursor event to time travel - fellated-time phase shifting.  No fellation or phasing occurred that evening, but a time shift did.
 
In 1985, the sleepy residents of La Grange, Illinois wowed and fluttered on their way to work as a small 3.0 earthquake rocked their lives.  Not even the twinkiest New Age advocate in the small Chicago suburb had a holographic inkling that the ley line running through the then-nonexistent Philadelphia Room and passing through La Grange on its way to its source at the ancient remains of the Oracle of Delphi was the conduit for the aftershock of an event scheduled to commence 23 years in the future.  Neither did they intuit that the brilliant wünderkind scientist (and not-so-oddly enough, child of La Grange) responsible for inaugurating this great future feat was, in 1985, despite her parents relentless efforts to the contrary, still crawling backward and slowly coming to terms with potty training and flushing by stealthily hiding her bowel movements in her younger brother’s underwear drawer while shamelessly blaming him for her coprophillial misdeeds.  This innate ability to back-pedal and lie in boldface would be a huge future asset and be put to good use during her first job in government as primary science liaison to a largely uninterested and scientifically illiterate general public.
 
Correspondingly on the holographic timeline and a tangentially intersecting ley line, about 70 miles west of Chicago on June 28^th, 2004, some of the sleepy residents of Troy Grove, Illinois were roused at 1:11am from their peaceful rural slumber to dishes rattling and dogs barking as a magnitude 4.3 earthquake rumbled across the Illinois midsection.  Most folks got up to straighten the china and quiet the dog and went back to bed with the notion to wonder about the whole thing over breakfast.  Only local survivalist, explosive ordnance enthusiast, and okra farmer, Mose “Gumbo” Jenkins, had reckoned correctly when, while reaching for his teeth, he groggily muttered, “da’ goddam gubbamint done gone and blowed up tumpin’ agin’”.  Despite correctly deducing the earthquake’s novel genesis, even Gumbo was oblivious to the fact that when he and the rest of the modern world woke up that morning it was actually 66.3866 days later.
 
Early that same Monday morning on the Menominee Indian Reservation in Keshena, Wisconsin, tribal elder and Midewiwin medicine man Sosa Namake got up to piss but damn if he didn’t feel achier and, well, shittier than he did most mornings since his thrombosis surgery.  “Ain’t been much of a spring, Heanu, and summer’s only half over, but I’ll be damned if these old joints aren’t telling me fall’s done crept in overnight.”  Hearing its name, the snoring coonhound pressed its arthritic hindquarters to the corn stove and farted.  “Jeez, dog!  Mom been sneakin’ you that ol’ commots cheese again, init?  Or that week-old funeral meat?”  The old Blue Tick grunted and answered loudly with a rank blast of commodity flatulence.
 
It had been a while since Cecil Black Creek was around to see old Sosa since he owed him money he borrowed against his sawmill stipend…