BIG PROBLEMS: fiction

After a tragic historical story, I thought it was time for a dynamic contemporary story, and since I usually write stories about boys, this one is about girls again.  The paintings I’m using as illustrations are the work of Rob Akey whose website is Robakey.com.  His phone contact is 406-862-7425.  He lives in Whitefish, MT, where he grew up, and generously allowed me to use his paintings.  He writes a blog about his work.

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This is not by Rob but by Ed Roberts.  I couldn't find the artist to contact him.

The past week had been almost too much.  Graduation from high school, a successful track season, good grades, but her grandma sick, maybe gonna die.  And this fall she would be going to college if she were accepted, but she hadn’t gotten word yet and she should have by now.  She knew there were many changes coming.

Her grandma was really her great-grandma.  There was a generation of women that was missing in there -- drinking, gambling, falling for bad men -- so that her great-grandma had raised her mother and her mother would only say about her mother and aunties,  “They thought they were squaws.”  Then she’d clamp her jaw shut and say no more, except that her eyes said, “You will NOT think you are anything but proud and successful!”

It was a lot to carry, but if there was anything she’d learned from track, it was that she could run her troubles off, especially early in the day like it was right now, just barely light enough to see the road on this clear June morning.  This was her favorite place to run because it was along the east front of the Rockies where for millennia people and animals had moved in the rain shadow that let grass predominate over trees.

It was even too early for traffic but not too early for a meadowlark caroling halfway up the bluff on her left.  Then there was a big dark shape ahead of her and for a minute she thought it was a pickup, but it was an animal.  In fact, it was a bull buffalo!

It it had been white, she’d have thought she was having a vision, but it was a plain brown bull buffalo, the kind that occasionally plagued the keepers of the tribal herd by wandering off, as likely to plow through the fence as not.  She tried to remember what one was supposed to do when encountering a buffalo.  If it were black bear, she should stand her ground but not stare; if it were a cougar, she should puff up, yell and act aggressive; if it were a grizz, she should drop, roll up in a ball and pray.  Although, she remembered a boy telling her that when he met a bear, he sang his bear song and the bear just went on its way.  She didn’t know any buffalo songs.

If she could have thought of an honor song, she’d have sung that, but her brain was only playing a silly kid song from the Black Lodge singers:  “Mighty Mouse.”  Her small cousins had picked it up and went around chanting,  “Is it a bird?  NO!  Is it a plane?  NO!  Omigosh, it’s Mighty Mouse.”  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBcu6Gc5sCU

Or in this case, mighty bull.  “Omigosh, it’s Mighty Bull!”  Mighty Meat?  Her crazy brain went off on a thought about how good the buffalo burgers were last Indian Days and the bull gave a great whooshing whuff, as though it could read her mind.

They just stood there eyeing each other.   Her senses sharpened by adrenaline, she noted that the bull’s cleft hooves overlapped just slightly, the inside over the outside.  She saw that his shoulder height was a good two feet taller than she was though she was a very tall girl.  When he licked his nose to get it wet so he could smell better, she saw that his tongue was purple.  She could smell him and guessed that he smelled the way a buffalo should smell. How else?  He smelled BIG.  But looking at him head-on, once a person looked down the long sides behind his massive furry head, his sides were lean -- not square like a cow bred for meat and shaped like a dining room table.  WHUFFF!  Oh, sorry.

Maybe she should just talk to this animal, in case he were a medicine bull, stumiksahtosee.  “Mister Bull, I respect you and I don’t know how much power you have, but I wonder if you could help my grandmother ?  She is a Blackfeet speaker and would be able to speak to you much better than I can.”  Maybe she was being superstitious, but what could it hurt?  She had a lot of little superstitions about winning at track.

The bull was not wetting the earth with urine or drooling or pawing in the dust of the road.  Those were all good signs, or lack of signs, so maybe the rutting season wasn’t underway yet.  July, wasn't it?  In July?   The bull seemed to nod -- crazy!  She knew that animals could tell female humans from male humans, but what were the implications?  Would it be better if the bull thought of her as female?  Probably.  Less likely to want to fight -- after all, testosterone is about the same in every mammal.  But, well -- being a bull buffalo's girl friend . . .  uh, no.

“I respect you and I honor you for being our source of life and shelter for so many millennia.”  The bull was watching her closely but he swung his massive head back and forth a little, as though favoring one eye and then the other.  His wet nose wrinkled and he made a noise like a pig, grunting.  She couldn’t help giggling.

Then, slowly, the bull turned aside into the barrow pit, walked up to the five foot fence, leapt over it as gracefully as an English thoroughbred horse in a fox hunt, and marched straight up the steep bluff as though it were level ground.  She saw that a coyote had been watching from halfway up.  “Too bad, you dog!  No stomped carrion this morning!”  

Newly energized, she resumed running along the road, and saw that the coyote was running along parallel to her over in the field.  When it sat down, panting, she looked back at the top of the bluff and there was the bull, watching her moving along.  She slung her arms into the air, a victory sign.

There really had been more of a communication than a competition, but her head had cleared.  Whatever happened now, grandmother or college or boyfriends or a summer job -- she could deal with it.  How could any problem be bigger than a bull buffalo?

"BLOOD QUANTUM": fiction

The wind was blowing the day the list was made -- but the wind was always blowing in those high grasslands.  The cavalry tent flapped hard and the private hoped the pegs and ropes had been installed properly.  A fly sheet in front gave some shade, but naturally that was claimed by the officers.  The private, who had been assigned to his task because he had been a schoolteacher in his previous life, had carried a rickety little table out in front of the short row of seated and uniformed old men under whom he served.  On the top of his too small table, he arranged a ledger, his ink pot, and a couple of stones for paperweights.  He kept his quills in his hat band so they would not “take wing.”

Straggling out from his table was a long line of jostling Indians who understood themselves to be signing up for the issue of commodities.  It was important.  The people remained on the remnant of their own lands but were like refugees because they could not follow the nomadic round that provided their food.  The buffalo that were the keystone of their life and their very metabolisms were gone.  The officers were concerned that Indians that should be fed by Canada might be pushing into the American list, but there wasn’t much of a way to sort them out.  The 49^th parallel was an arbitrary boundary that cut across both natural and historical uses of the land.  The whites could hardly tell one dusky face from another.

The first customer was a giant of a man in a tent of a shirt, but no “nethers” except a loincloth.  His legs were like two trees and his face was a thundercloud that he thrust down into the pale countenance of the trapped soldier who squeaked,  “Name please?”

A sound like thunder, unintelligible.  “Again, please?”  Same result.  An interpreter had not been provided.  The second person in line, a round woman with a bold attitude, said, “Beaver Who Prepares For Winter.”  

“I’m not ready for you yet, Ma’am.”

“Not MY name --  HIS name!”  The clerk looked into the thundercloud for confirmation and it nodded.  Then the man stepped over to the side of the table where he clearly intended to remain as some kind of adjunct.  He stayed for the duration, but -- thankfully -- didn’t interfere.  In fact, he gestured people to come forward, hurrying them up.  The round bold woman was named “Her Children Are Strong.”  Sighing, the clerk wrote “Strong Mother.”

The line wasn’t all that long since so many people had died in the preceding years, but somehow it kept growing.  Also, dogs began to join the people.  A few quarreled, making a lot of noise and commotion.  No one moved to do anything about it.  An officer came out of the tent and shouted,  “Who owns these dogs?  Get them out of here!”  The People looked at each other.  What could he mean?  No one owns dogs.  They are a tribe of their own.

Image by Ernest Ulmer, ernstulmer.com

Glancing up while he dipped his pen in the ink, he looked down the line and saw someone he recognized.  It was Joe Oiseau.  He knew the man was French Canadian -- in fact, a trapper from Eastern Canada, not an Indian -- but he liked the man.  Joe had his arm around a very pretty girl, quite a bit younger, wrapped in a blanket and certainly full-blood.  When they got to the table, Joe looked at the clerk and said nothing.   The officers had gotten bored and withdrawn deeper into the tent where the clerk could hear them talking and laughing.  No doubt someone had brought a flask.  

The clerk wrote down “Joe Oiseau” and asked, “Your daughter?”  Joe, tight-lipped, said, “Wife.”  Then he grinned.  The girl peeked over the edge of her blanket with huge dark grateful eyes.  Her name was “The One Who Wakes in the Night.”   The clerk wrote “Mrs. Oiseau.”

As the day went on, warming up as well as windy, people grew tired and dehydrated but there was nothing to drink.  Finally Mrs. Strong Mother brought a bucket from the creek and the People scooped it up with their hands.  Lunch meant that the officers ate in the tent and someone brought the clerk a chunk of bread and some cheese, but there was nothing for the Indians.  It wasn't meanness.  No one had thought of it.  They didn't complain.

A man who had been standing in line with three women, stoically enduring, now became the focus of a quarrel more serious than the dogfights: his wives began to scream and hit each other.  Someone had just told them that only one wife could be put on the list and each was determined to be that wife.  The stoic man ignored them and removed himself to the end of the line.  This did not stop the fighting and screaming until the big man the clerk thought of as “Thundercloud” went back and beat them hard with his hands.  They did not leave, just turned their backs on “Thundercloud” and linked arms.  But they became quiet.  And kept their place.

And so it went. 

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Her bright blood sprang into the syringe when the phlebotomist took it for genetic testing.  The label on the test tube said “Josie Oiseau.”  

“You know, of course,” the woman said, “There is no blood test that will tell what tribe you belong to and anyway, blood quantum is a misnomer.  The records are by descent, provenance, who your ancestors were or at least who they were thought to be at the time the first records of the tribe were made.  In those days no one even knew there were blood types, much less anything like a genome.”

“Yeah.  I’ve been reading up.  There wasn’t even any such thing as a tribe until the whites came along and lumped people together according to language and customs.  It’s an outsider concept.  We were just whoever was there when they made the first list.”

The technician smiled.  “You college kids are so smart!  But then why do you want your blood tested?”  

“I need to prove I’m my father’s daughter.  There’s no documentation: no wedding license or baptismal record.  My mother married other men along the way and the third husband is the stepfather who raised me.  He’s Indian but not this tribe.  My mother is a quarter.  It was her genetic grandparents who were on the original roll as full-blood.  I’ve taken their name and now I need to prove I’m their descendant.  Otherwise I won’t be able to inherit my mother’s ranch or get any help from the government for grad school.”

The technician looked at the beautiful slim young woman with big eyes and black satin hair, and thought, “There’s something stylish about her.  Almost French.”  She asked, “So when is your father coming in for his blood draw.”

“He’s dead.”  Silence.  Then the girl offered a small wooden box with brass decorations, the kind one might buy at an Asian import store.  The technician opened it.  Inside were two thick glossy braids.  “My grandmother saved these when they forced my father to cut them in order to play basketball.  They were considered a hazard: whips.”  More silence as the phlebotomist looked at the braids.

Finally the technician had thought it through.  “Yes,” she said, accepting the box.  “We will use as little hair as we can to get a good genome match.”

THE BRACELET BOY: fiction

Two in the morning and she was trying to cool out, slow down, by cruising YouTube -- Native American stuff since she was teaching on a reservation.  It was contract signing time and she was divided about it.  Loved the kids.  Hated the administration.  So what’s new?  How much trouble had she gotten into this year?  How long should she keep up the struggle?  

Then her hair stood on end.  Figuratively.  Onscreen was the bare fanny of her best writing student, Henry.  Actually, his whole nude back from top to toe, posed like a European classic odalisque, one knee bent so the sole of a foot showed.  She knew who it was only because his uplifted hand, naturally with the middle finger extended, was cuffed by a bracelet she recognized.  It was one-of-a-kind: a wide copper band with Catlinite pipestone cabouchons carved in a Blackfeet design.

She had known he had a secret life -- in fact, he didn’t attend school enough to be called an “A” student.  He never did assignments, but he did twice as much work on his own as any other student and it was the real thing: heartfelt.  One assignment she cooked up -- in hopes of waking up a few dullards -- he actually did with stunning results.  The idea was to read a poem out loud while playing a CD of instrumental music in the background.  His response was to write the poem himself and to play “Reflections of an Indian Boy,” which most of her students had never heard, though they were all Indian.

http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/NR/Paul_Weston/01_Reflections_Of_An_Indian_Boy.mp3

“I rise from my bed at dawn

so we can watch together the sun come up,

red skin against red skin under an ochre sky

across a brilliant land of grass

in this late season.

My heart drums against yours.

My hands entwine with yours.

The sweetgrass scents us both.”

The students knew nothing about the Cherokee composer Carl Fischer’s work or his musical “Tecumseh!”.  Fifties mood music was totally outside their experience, but they had known all along that the boy was gay.  They had been very quiet.  And respectful.  Not because of any political or cultural beliefs about gays, but because each of them, regardless of gender, yearned for a dawn lover.  The teacher not excepted.  

But there in front of her computer -- even as sunrise came nearer -- she had no “frame” or context for encountering Henry’s backside on the Internet.  Just as she was going to investigate further, the electricity went out, as it often did in this foothills village.  All clues were erased.  When the sun rose, she was asleep.

It didn’t seem wise to ask around about where the image might have come from, because she would have to admit she had seen it.  The kids were remarkably liberated about sex, counseling each other more about emotions than practicalities.  They tolerated all affinities and recommended condoms, though they were a little vague about why.  She often overheard them because they had come to accept her -- not as a mark of approval, but because they had decided she wasn’t a threat.  She was just there.  

They didn’t realize how much Blackfeet language she understood.  Sometimes she could hardly keep from putting in a remark as she sat in the corner marking papers.  But she had learned the hard way.  Her previous school had fired her because of a remark she had made about smegma.  It WAS a smart aleck remark.  As a teachers' union counselor told her once, laughing, “You are not a vanilla sort of person.”  

“No,” she had agreed.  “But my skin is vanilla.”  She assumed she was entitled to have opinions so long as she didn’t share them.  And in her opinion Henry was gifted.   What to do about that was another matter.  You can’t just send a poet to college, even though he had a scholarly bent and read constantly.  His manner was courteous, almost courtly.  But Henry probably wouldn’t stay anyway.  So she just put it all off.  She did sign the contract for the next year.  Henry faded from her mind as she began the shift to her own writing for a few weeks and the kids fanned out everywhere across the rez and farther.

catlinite carvings

About pow-wow time in the middle of July she was brewing her morning coffee when the radio reported the body of a boy found in a dumpster in the nearest major city.  He had been beaten so badly that his face could not be recognized.  It wasn’t until she got the newspaper off the porch that she realized who it was. Why did they publish such photos?  A sheet was over him but his arm stuck out to the side and there was that bracelet.  She was too frozen to weep.  And yet, this was what happened on the rez all the time.   Of her dozen fine writers one was dead of alcoholism, two in a car wreck, one had AIDS, one knifed, one suicide and one shot from a distance with a rifle.  A couple went to college where they assimilated, got off-rez jobs, and never wrote again.  Then there's always one kid who just disappears.

It wasn’t hard to figure out, even before the rumors circulated, that Henry’s death had something to do with his gayness.  The community, both red and white, divided into “boots” versus “mocs”, conventional contemporary and contemptuous versus the soft, subversive, and traditional.  She had not known until the autopsy report that he was an HIV carrier.  The kids had known.  They always knew everything.

“Those city gang guys wanted to fuck him,” they told her.  “He told them not to, because of the HIV.  He was trying to protect them.”  She sat there, no blood in her stiff face.  They said, “His grandmother says it was the poetry.  She burned it all.”  Surely there was no blood left in her body.  Nothing was warm and moving anywhere in her.

Weeks later, when school started again, an older Indian man she didn’t know came to her classroom door.  Classes were over and she was sitting in the student seat most distant from her desk, spacing out.  He looked for her, found her and came back to her -- set in front of her something knotted into a bandanna.  He said, “At his age I was a poet, too.  But they didn’t kill me for it.”  Then he left.  He wore boots but he walked softly.

She suspected what was in the small bright bundle and didn’t want to look, but knew she had to.  Eventually she did, though the knots were tight, hard to undo.  The bracelet was not bloody or damaged.  She put it on her own arm, a little higher than her wrist because was bigger than her wrist.  She wore it always after that though it would have looked better against Indian skin.  The kids saw it and smiled.  The administration didn’t notice.  

The attackers were never found.   One day some city gang drunks were blotto in a pickup that burned up with them in it.  The kids smiled.  She asked no questions.  Somehow they managed to get “Reflections of an Indian Boy” off the Internet and sometimes when she walked down the aisle past a student wearing earbuds, she’d catch a hint of it, like a faint scent of sweetgrass near a marshy place.

Once in a while a reporter would come to the rez and want to interview people about the school system.  When they came to talk to her, she was careful not to tell them anything.  The kids had taught her well.  

CONAN THE BLACKFEET

Conan the Siksika knew who he was, but others did not realize that the thick-muscled, obsidian-eyed, bronze-hided gladiator was Blackfeet, admitted to the tribe so long ago that he actually showed up on the first lists of the People made by the cavalry with their little books of fancy handwriting.  He had come to the Nitzitahpi in the midst of a buffalo-running, the piskun ceremony when a group of buffalo are stampeded over a cliff.  

One young bull became enraged when being driven by the whooping people, waving their branches at the small herd they had spotted and hazed to this spot, carefully easing them along until they were close enough to be panicked into full flight.  They were thundering, the grass under their feet pulverizing, when one young bull separated and headed straight for an old woman and her grandson, intent on carrying them on his horns into splintering, blood-soaked  oblivion.  

The old woman put the boy behind her -- he was small and her body might protect him,  but there was no need because into the space between the old woman and the young bull rushed a man of enormous strength, his long black hair streaming on the wind, his massive shoulders gleaming in the summer sun as he swung a huge stone maul with such force that when it hit the bellowing bull right between his bloodshot eyes, the animal dropped -- his skull split.

The boy evaded his grandmother and darted between the glorious man’s muscular legs, intent on scooping out the hot and steaming brains of the bull.  It was good and good for him.  Conan, laughing a mighty jubilance, joined the boy, slathering the soft fatty tissue between his square jaws.  The old woman shook her head, but from that moment on she was committed to this valorous and fearless man.

In the coming days as the band worked hard to process the huge mound of meat at the foot of the cliff, skinning and slicing and smoking and boiling out marrow from the bones, Conan stayed with them, not afraid to do the tedious work that meant the very life of the band.  Not everything is swordplay in combat -- sometimes a knife is useful for other things.

To pass the time as they worked, the old woman told them tales -- not Napi stories but things she claimed she had seen with her own eyes.  For instance, she was so old that in her early youth she had witnessed a battle between a Thunderbird and a Water Bull, huge and dark against a thunderous sky slashed with lightning.  She had been sent to the lakeside to get camp water in her leather bucket made from the whole skin of a fawn, but she had been afraid -- sensing menace -- and had been taking time to scan every bit of the way for strange shadows or dangerous omens.  She did get her skin bucket filled.  But when she turned, what she had feared came to pass.

When the huge bulk of the water bull rose out of the lake, she didn’t run.  She was paralyzed.  The water sheeted off the beast, faster than it sheeted off the coarse-furred buffalos, and steaming because the animal was so hot, its blood was nearly boiling within it so that it could survive the icy waters of the glacier run-off.  It had evolved this way ten thousand years ago when the great mantel of glacier retreated from the whole continent, grinding backwards as it had ground forwards, leaving strange things behind, debris of millennia.  The hot beast had shining white tusks as long as she was tall.

Then, just as she had become able to remember what this creature was called,  “STUMICK !!”  an immense sliding shadow came on the wind, only now and then flapping its leathern wings but all the while clacking its terrible toothed jaws, long as a crane’s bill -- longer!.  The flying monster attacked the splashing bull beast, still belly-deep in water which in an instant was marbled with blood from both beasts.  The bull had a strangely long nose like a hand with which it grabbed that snake-necked featherless bird-thing, pulling it down and down, until the water bubbled with its breath.  When the wide wings were entirely limp and merely floating on top of the lake, the water bull, still gripping its neck, swung it around by the neck, like a football player swinging his stripped-off jersey victoriously over his head.

The woman had run all the way back to the lodge, spilling water on every side and though her mother beat her with a stick, she refused to go back that night.  

Conan grinned.  “I would have gone back.  I would have wanted to see that again!”  

“Is that story true, granny?” asked the small boy.  They were the only lodge in the camp where people were still awake.

“Could be,” she said and handed him her leather bucket.  “Now go get us some water.”

“But, Granny, it’s DARK.”  

“Go.”  He went, his eyes bugging and his hair lifting on his head.

When he was gone, the old woman turned to Conan.  “Why are you here this time?”

Conan was careless and relaxed.  He didn’t mind telling his plans.  “I’ve come to visit Jack the Limping One, who is the Armorer for those in buckskin.  I’m told he has a new kind of weapon very effective in these strange times.  Steam punk guns.”  

Her eyebrows went up.  “It’s true that the world has turned a-synchronist now.  The glaciers are melting back and people are punching holes in the earth.  Strange others are being released on our lands:  bankers, engineers.  We don’t know what they will do to this place we have inhabited for so long.  If they do the wrong thing, the People will die.”

Conan rested on one enormous elbow and looked into the red embers of the campfire.  He had not bothered to really dress except for his loincloth which hung below his Adonis belt, and for moccasins because his feet were still tender from the long walk across cactus country, but the mosquitoes, smelling his smoked hide, did not land.  A look of deep sadness seeped into his obsidian eyes.  “I know,” he said slowly.  I am hoping to help find a way.”

“It may be too late.  Some are already drunk on money.”  She looked around.  “Don’t tell the others, but I’ve already seen black helicopters rise out of the lakes, a hellish mating of the Thunderbird and the Water Bull.”

Even Conan could not keep from shuddering.  He knew what it meant.  Then he heard a sound not unlike a mosquito, but sharper, a zinging from a small flying object.  He jumped to his feet.  “By Mitra, they’re sending observation drones!”  Picking up a stone from the campfire ring, as big as a baseball, and tracking the sound in the dark, he hurled his missile with such force that he knocked the mechanical device out of the sky.  

“I’m going to go meet your boy.  It’s more dangerous than I thought.”

LA FEMME ROUGE (fiction)

There was a buffalo carcass on the prairie.  Small piles of internal organs, appearing to have been sorted, lay alongside in the grass.  No sign of a person.  Then the carcass began to rock slightly and out crawled a small Indian woman.  She was red from head to toe, but her grin when she saw him was white as bone.  Francois thought he’d seen everything but as he sat there on his horse -- which was as braced as he was -- he was staring like a transfixed prairie chicken.   “La femme rouge!” he exclaimed.   

The woman threw some organ or other onto one of her piles.  He was too stunned to think about which organ it was.  She laughed.  Then she looked around in the grass for a small metal-headed hatchet and crawled back into the carcass with it.  Francois dismounted to look into the bloody rib-arched cave where she whacked away with barely enough room to get leverage.  She was very determined.

Pretty soon some other women came along with a horse and travois.  By that time he had realized that this was the only way to approach such a big animal if you wanted the good nutrition arranged by nature inside.  The women with their big knives whacked off pieces of the quivering dark liver and shared it with him.  He relished it.  The women skinned one side of the carcass, cutting the hide down the spine, and he helped roll it over onto the other side.  By then some men had shown up on horseback, also grinning.  One saluted him.  “Bon jour!”  They had known at once he was a French trapper.  And he could tell they were from the Blood sub-group of Blackfeet.

“Bon manger ce soir!”  Francois called, and gave the signal for “good,” sweeping his horizontal forearm and flattened hand out from his chest.  “Sokapi!” he said in Blackfeet, hoping he was saying it right.  The Indian laughed, so probably he wasn’t.  The Indian man said something in Blackfeet and they ALL laughed.  The Indian cut off the buffalo’s tail and pretended to swat flies with it, but then “accidentally” hit himself and fell over, feigning damage.

Francois helped them load meat onto their travois.  It had been a fat animal.  They cracked open the long bones with their trading post hatchets and whatever stones were handy and scooped out the marrow into bags made of hide.  Then they licked their fingers, smiling.  All in all, they were a gleeful bunch, very pleased with themselves.

That night in camp they told stories, using enough gestures that Francois generally got the sense of them, and everyone roared with laughter.  In the morning the women were busy slicing the meat into thin sheets to dry over smoky fires on improvised racks.  He looked around the camp, trying to locate the bloody woman, but everyone was clean by now so he wasn’t sure which one she was.  He could see that one stocky man was scowling at him.

One of the older men took him aside and made him understand -- using sign talk -- that the bloody woman was the scowling man’s wife.  And he did not like sharing.  Nothing had happened, to be sure, but they HAD been alone together for a while.  So before Francois rode on his way, he unrolled part of the pack behind his saddle and took out a couple of yards of the rough red wool called “Stroud cloth” because it was woven in the town of Stroud in England.  He knew better than to give it to the woman, though he wanted to, since it was a sort of acknowledgment of her striking first appearance, so he gave it to the husband.  For a moment the man continued to scowl, until Francois’ diplomat friend made the man understand that Francois was not trying to buy the woman -- that it was a gift.  Then he nodded, rolled up the wool under his arm, and strode off without offering thanks. 

The woman -- he recognized her now -- stood grinning at him.  He slipped her a handful of brass falconry bells before he rolled up his pack and left, rather quickly.  It was just that she was cheerful and frank, so unlike the women he’d known growing up.  Rather like a man, in fact.  Strong.  Competent.

Francois was not much of a Don Juan.  The women who looked him over, whatever their kind or origin, tended to shrug and move on.  Once in a while he’d manage a temporary arrangement, but trappers do not stay in one place for long.  As the years went by, he found his mind wandering back to that bloody little female, that buffalo woman.  He was romantic enough to understand that in the prairie Indian tribes, woman meant nourishment meant buffalo meat meant grass, and sometimes he even tried to scratch out a little poetry along those lines.  

In sensible moments he realized that she must be aging just as he was and that she must have a lot of children by that scowling man.  Once someone at rendezvous had a fiddle and sang “Scarlet Ribbons,” so he thought of her, then scolded himself for being silly.  But when the beaver were exceedingly abundant, just before they all seemed to disappear at once, he spotted at the trading post a red Hudson’s Bay blanket with a black stripe and and four black marks at the edge, a blanket so thick it almost equalled a buffalo hide for warmth and weight.  From then on, no matter where he was, cabin or camp, he slept rolled in it.

Finally it happened.  Maybe it was inevitable.  Along a stream in a familiar coulee often used by the prairie peoples, he pitched his camp in the cottonwoods and was enjoying the fire when a man and woman came riding up.  No children.  It was the scowling man and his wife, la femme rouge, who grinned at Francois, recognizing him at once.  He offered them coffee and fried dough and they shared a bit of dry meat.  Things were pleasant and harmonious.   He was pleased to see the brass falconry bells he had given her were sewn in a row across the breast of her dress.

Finally they laid out their beds and the woman stared at Francois’ Hudson’s Bay blanket, red and heavy as a buffalo hide.  She walked over and put a hand on it, took the edge and looked at the black hash marks.  Her husband paid no attention.  She looked at Francois, searching his face, then went to the fire with her hatchet and broke up some heavy fallen branches to hold the heat into the night, and then she lay down by her husband.

Francois slept soundly even though there was a full moon, which usually made him restless.  He could not identify the sound that woke him.  When he opened his eyes, the woman was standing there, bloody and gripping her bloody metal hatchet.  By moonlight the red blood looked black.  She made a peculiar gesture, holding her forearm straight up in front of her and then making it fall over.

She said, “Je l'ai tué.”  And she signed,  “Now I will go with you.”  When he looked across the fire, he saw that her husband’s head was smashed.  His scowl was gone.  His teeth gleamed white in the moonlight.  The bloody woman lay down beside Francois on his blanket. 

At dawn she went to the stream to wash.  Quickly he took all three horses and rode away at a gallop.  He did not feel badly about leaving her alone on foot.  She had her hatchet.

And he left her his four-beaver red Hudson’s Bay blanket.