The Only Good Indians(40)
The story on 12b is him, here, sleeping in the cold like the bow-and-arrow days. The story on 12b is how he looks up into the huge white flakes drifting down out of the sky, just like the Thanksgiving Classic.
He raises his face to those cold wet flakes, closes his eyes, holds this elk calf he’s been calling his daughter close to his chest. She hasn’t been growing as fast as Andy, and she hasn’t moved since stabbing that leg up into the air, but she will, he knows. He just has to get her home, to land she knows, to grass she remembers. He’ll watch her grow for the rest of the year, keep the coyotes and wolves and bears away, and, when she can, he’ll let her go on her own, stand there crying from sadness, from happiness. And then it’ll all be over. Indian stories always hoop back on themselves like that, don’t they? At least the good ones do.
Lewis smiles, pulls her tighter, breathing heat down onto her thin ears, and on the ridge above him there’s four men sighting down along the tops of their rifles. He looks up to them, his lips moving, trying to explain to them what he’s doing, how this can work, how it’s not too late, how they don’t need to do this, it’s not like the papers have been saying, he’s not that Indian, he’s just him, locked into the steps of this story but finding his way now, finally, making it all work.
When they shoot is when he finally feels what he’s been waiting for, what he’s been gambling on, praying for: long delicate legs against his chest, kicking once, twice, again. That small head nuzzling up into his neck, and the long lashes of big round eyes brushing his cheek as they open, and then closing against the mist of blood that, for the moment, is its whole world.
Her name in Blackfeet is Po’noka.
It means elk.
THREE DEAD, ONE INJURED IN MANHUNT
Four Shelby men were attacked last night, following the apprehension of the fugitive Lewis A. Clarke (see Wednesday’s edition), who had apparently been fleeing back to his tribe’s ancestral reservation. Clarke was the main suspect in the brutal murders of both his wife and a federal coworker.
Reports indicate this group of four hunters had been out all day, aiding in the search for Clarke. Representatives for the highway patrol say that while armed citizen patrols of this sort might seem helpful, staying off the roads is actually more beneficial to recovery and apprehension efforts.
Reports that these four Shelby men were actually the ones to find Clarke, now deceased, are unconfirmed.
According to sources at the hospital, who were able to speak to the lone survivor before surgery, the four Shelby men had in the back of their truck both Clarke and the deer or elk calf he had apparently been carrying for reasons unknown.
At some point in the drive back to town, according to this survivor, someone stood from the bed of the truck while it was moving. It was a girl of twelve or fourteen, Indian. Presumably she had climbed into the truck earlier, when it was going west.
When the driver of the vehicle slowed to keep her from falling or blowing out, and alerted his three cab mates to her, the survivor says the girl “rushed forward over the toolbox” and “through the rear window” into the cab, which is where the eyewitness testimony ends.
Anyone finding an Indian teenager perhaps hitchhiking or loitering is advised to alert the authorities.
Names of the dead and injured are being withheld until families of the slain can be notified.
More on this story as it develops.
SWEAT LODGE MASSACRE
FRIDAY
The way you protect your calf is you slash out with your hooves. Your own mother did that for you, high in the mountains of your first winter. Her black hoof snapping forward against those snarling mouths was so fast, so pure, just there and back, leaving a perfect arc of red droplets behind it. But hooves aren’t always enough. You can bite and tear with your teeth if it comes to that. And you can run slower than you really can. If none of that works, if the bullets are too thick, your ears too filled with sound, your nose too thick with blood, and if they’ve already gotten to your calf, then there’s something else you can do.
You hide in the herd. You wait. And you never forget.
What you do after you’ve made your hard way back into the world is stand on the side of the last road home, wrapped in a blanket torn from a wrecked truck, your cold feet not hard hooves anymore, your hands branching out into fingers you can feel creaking, they’re growing so fast now. The family of four that picks you up is tense and silent, neither the father nor the mother nor the son saying anything with their mouths, only their eyes, the infant just sleeping. They make room in the backseat because if they don’t stop, someone else will, and the father driving the car says that that never ends well for starved-down fourteen-year-old Indian girls wearing only one thin blanket.
You’re fourteen, then. Already.
Just a few hours ago you’re pretty sure you were what he would have called “twelve.” An hour before that you were an elk calf being cradled by a killer, running for the reservation, and before that you were just an awareness spread out through the herd, a memory cycling from brown body to brown body, there in every flick of the tail, every snort, every long probing glare down a grassy slope.
But you coalesced, you congealed, you found one of the killers about to spark life into the body of another, a life you could wriggle into, look out of. He had to be groomed first, though, groomed and cornered and isolated.