The Only Good Indians(19)

Gabe either.

He popped the handle of his door, rolled down into the snow smooth as anything, his rifle whipping out after him.

Following his lead, nobody said anything, just fell in, Ricky coming out his door, Cass trying to jam the truck into Park so it wouldn’t roll over the rock lip it was teetering on.

The door on Lewis’s side opened like a whisper, like fate, and when he committed his right foot down to the powdery surface that ended up being two feet deep, he just kept falling, his chin stopping a hand’s width into the powder the front tires had churned up. His forward motion never faltered, though. He crawled ahead like a soldier, pulling with his elbows, his rifle held ahead to keep the barrel clear.

And—that was when the frenzy washed over him.

He’d seen big herds in the Park, over at Two Dog Flat, had seen them in spring over by Babb, bounding across the road at night, but this many huge perfect bodies against all that stark white was something he’d never seen this close before. At least, not with a rifle in his hands, and no tourists around to snap pictures.

Gabe’s rifle going off was distant, was down at the other end of some long, long tunnel.

Lewis, knowing that this was how you got to be a good Indian, finally remembered how to jack a round in. Once it was seated, he pulled that Tasco up until it cupped his right eye, and he was firing now as well, and firing again, just waiting to pull the trigger until he could see brown in the crosshairs. Just anywhere near the crosshairs—how could he miss?

He couldn’t.

Three rounds, then he was rolling over, digging in his pants pocket for shells, and the elk, trained in the high country, the sharp drop in front of the truck throwing the sound every which way, their first instinct was to crash uphill, to what was supposed to be safety.

On the other side of the truck Ricky was screaming some old-time war whoop, and Gabe maybe was too, and so was Lewis, he thinks.

“You couldn’t hear if you were or not?” Shaney asks.

Lewis shakes his head no, he couldn’t.

But he does remember Cass standing behind his opened door, his rifle stabbed through the rolled-down window, and he’s just shooting, and shooting, and shooting, only stopping to thumb another round in, and another, one of them launching onto the dash and clattering the whole way across, hissing down into the snow by Lewis.

“We could have fed the whole tribe for a week on this much meat,” Lewis says, his eyes hot now. “For a month. For the whole winter, maybe.”

“If you were that kind of Indian,” Shaney says, getting what he’s saying.

“There’s more,” Lewis says, finally looking to the masking-tape elk on his living room floor.



* * *



In the hollow deafness after all this, the four of them stood there on that rocky ledge, the snow skirling past, the weather almost on them, and Gabe—he always had the best eyes—counted nine huge bodies down there in the snow, each probably pushing five hundred pounds.

Cass’s Chevy was a half-ton.

“Shi-it,” Ricky said, breathing hard, smiling wide.

This was the kind of luck that never happened, that they had only ever heard about. But never like this. Never a whole herd. Never as many as they could bring down.

“Okay there?” Gabe said across to Lewis, and Cass reached up with the side of his finger, dabbed at Lewis’s right eye.

Blood.

Before, when he’d had scope-eye as a kid—when the scope had recoiled back into his eye orbit—he’d felt that shock wave move in slow motion from the front of his head to the back. It makes your brain fluid for a slowed-down moment, leaves you scrambled, and because of that you can never remember what exactly it is you’re doing to make this scope-eye happen. Except the obvious: pressing it right up to your eye, pulling the trigger.

This time Lewis remembered every shot, the lead-on-meat slap of every slug, but never even felt the force of that sudden recoil going from front to back through his head.

Five years after this a dentist will look at his X-rays and trace out the bone evidence of this trauma around his right eye and ask was it a car wreck, maybe?

“Almost,” Lewis will tell him. “But it was a truck.”

The last time he saw Cass’s Chevy, it was up on blocks by a barbed-wire fence over at a high place north of Browning, the windshield caved in, the hood yawning open like a long scream. The engine must have been good enough, otherwise it would have still been there. The wheels and tires had been yanked as well. After Lewis left that part of the country for what he secretly knew was going to be forever, the first cinder block holding that truck up went soon enough, he imagines, a rust-coated brake drum crumbling down through that stony grey, making the truck look like a horse kneeling, and after that it would have been fast. The land claims what you leave behind.

That day with all the elk, though, back then the Chevy was still on its first or maybe second life, was young and hungry, was telling the four of them it could carry as many elk as they could pile in. Realistically, even just three elk in the back of a half-ton is pushing it, is going to have that truck sitting down on its springs, the nose pointing at the sky, the front brakes useless.

And that was if the stupid come-along was going to cooperate, help get those heavy bodies up the slope, and if four Indians without gambrels or cherry pickers could somehow get the second and third elk in on top of the first.