The Only Good Indians(18)

Since Cass’s squarebody crew cab didn’t have a winch, each time he couldn’t tell where the road was and slogged out into the soft stuff, everybody had to pile out again, take turns on the stretched-out come-along, the other two digging with planks and trying to do some magic or other with the jack, one person behind the wheel to feather the accelerator and work the shifter, keep the truck rocking back and forth.

Four separate times at least, certain death loomed, but either that wobbly high-lift sliced down into fluffy snow instead of crunchy skull, or the come-along hook snapped back over the cab of the truck, instead of through any faces.

It was so funny even Lewis was laughing.

It didn’t feel like anything could go wrong.

Sure, yeah, he wanted an elk and wanted it bad, but all the same, this was what hunting is about: you and some buds out kicking it through the deep snow, your breath frosted, your right-hand glove forever lost, your Sorrels wet on the inside, Chief Mountain always a smudge on the northwest horizon, like watching over all these idiot Blackfeet.

At least until they got to where it happened.

It was a steep hill, maybe a half mile in from the lake. The big snow was already crowding in, pushing the wind ahead. That’s the only thing Lewis has to explain how the elk didn’t hear Cass’s Chevy struggling through the snow. The squirrels had been chattering about it, the few birds that were still out were annoyed enough to glide to farther-and-farther-away trees, but the elk, maybe because of that wind in their faces, they were oblivious, just trying to chomp whatever they could, since it was all about to be buried.

Looking back, Lewis tells Shaney that the one thing that could have maybe saved them was some horses, the wild ones that were always showing up in the least expected places all over the reservation, their eyes wide and crazy, their manes and tails shaggy and tangled. If four or five of them had pounded through on some important horse mission or another, that might have spooked the elk, or at least got them listening closer, smelling harder, paying better attention.

But there were no horses that day. Only elk. What happened was the same thing as had been happening the last half mile: Cass lost the road again, in spite of Gabe guaranteeing that it turned here, here, here. Instead of trying to back up and find the road again, though, Cass drove into this wrong direction, his foot deep in the pedal, the wheels already churning for purchase, the only thing keeping the truck going its own sagging momentum.

“Going for the record, going for the record here …” Gabe said, lifting his butt off the seat like he was the thing weighing them down, and, in the back, Ricky rocked forward, trying to help the truck along. Sitting beside him, Lewis wondered what the penalty was just for being in the elder section. But he knew: nothing, so long as you’re not rifled up. If you are carrying, though? Denny throws the key away.

“We’re gonna make it, we’re gonna make it!” Cass said, one hand on the wheel, the other to the four-wheel-drive shifter to tap the transfer case into high should they be so lucky as to need it. What he was doing, not exactly on purpose, was driving from one part of an S-curve in the road to the other, snow flying every which direction, the tires spinning great white rooster tails of it up and over, some of it probably not even landing, just hitching a ride on the wind, to sift down over Cutbank or Shelby—somewhere so far away from this as to, right then, just be a legend, pretty much.

“Shit, shit,” Lewis said, hooking a second hand through the grab strap, straightening his legs against the floorboard even though he knows that’s the wrong way to take a jolt. It was just instinct to brace himself, though. Three times already they’d barely missed a lichen-shadowed boulder left behind by some glacier twenty thousand years ago. They had to be owed one right in the grill-teeth sooner or later, right?

Instead of that granite stop sign, what they almost drove onto and down into was open space.

Cass didn’t have to hit the brake, he just had to stop gunning the truck forward.

“What the hell?” Ricky said, not able to see from the backseat. Lewis, either.

The engine sputtered out, dropping them into a vast silence.

“Good one,” Cass said, disgusted, trying to clear his side of the windshield, finally cranking his window down instead, and Lewis was just thanking any gods tuned in right now: they should be a smoking wreck at the bottom of this drop-off.

“Shh, shh,” Gabe said to them all then, and leaned forward over the dash, looking down and down.

And then.

“What?” Shaney asks.

Then Gabe reached over for his rifle, his fingers coming into place on the pistol grip one by delicate one, like all four at once might be too loud.



* * *



What Lewis remembers clearest about the next sixty seconds, maybe closer to two impossible minutes, is the way his heart clenched in his chest, the way his throat filled with … with terror? Is that what too much joy and surprise can ball up into, when it comes at you all at once?

There was the instant sweat, his head full of sound, his eyes letting in too much light for his head to process. It was like … he doesn’t have words for it, really. “That fight or flight rush,” he tells Shaney, only, running wasn’t even a distant option. It was what he’d always imagined war to be like: too much input all at once, his hands acting almost without his say-so, because they’d been waiting for this moment for so long, weren’t going to let him miss it.