The Only Good Indians(89)

For the first time Elk Head Woman’s pace steps up.

Denorah falls back, turns it into another push, another run.

What’s it going to take? What else can she do? And, how has she missed her mom? There isn’t some other road out here, is there? If only her dad were here. He knew all the old poacher cut-acrosses, all the shortcuts if you had four-wheel drive.

Denorah falls again, leaves even more hand-meat and knee-meat and mouth-blood on the road, and then she rises again, not running anymore, just stumbling.

She’s not going to make the lake by dark. She’s not ever making the lake.

And—and Nathan, he probably fell off Calico a hundred yards out. He doesn’t know horses any better than Denorah, and he was already half dead anyway.

It’s just Denorah and Elk Head Woman, then. One-on-one.

Denorah walks backward a few steps, sees that distinctive head crest over the road, ears pasted back.

She shakes her head no, no, please, and nearly falls down again, has to catch herself on one of her raw hands, push up hard before it turns into a dirt nap.

Ten, twenty steps later, there’s a break in the grey trees beside her. A—a gate.

Denorah looks back and Elk Head Woman is gone for a moment, so, no time to think about it, she steps out onto one side of the big corrugated silver tube that runs under this offshoot road, and she jumps from it to the top wire of the gate and flops immediately and unintentionally over the top strand, praying she’s not leaving tracks. Without looking back, she staggers ahead, her right hand patting numbly at the point of pain in her belly, probably from a barb. But that hardly even matters at this point. The road’s a two-track, but one that hasn’t been used for however many snows there’s been so far this year.

She tries to keep to the hard hump in the middle but loses the road almost immediately, is in some trees now, is using them to stand, to pull ahead.

Don’t look back, don’t look back.

Just forward, go, keep moving.

Maybe there’ll be a phone booth right up here, she tells herself, her thoughts getting loopy now, the trees smearing into a wall of upright logs. Denorah hand-over-hands down along that wall, feeling for the opening. When she finds it, she was so sure the wall was going to go forever that she falls straight through, is sliding downhill, scraping and rolling through rocks and bushes and dead wood.

She lands in a ball of pain maybe ten seconds later, looks back up.

Oh. She was on a ridge. The road must have hooked back to the right to keep this from happening to all the trucks. But, unlike a truck, she’d gone straight.

Denorah pulls herself up with a bush that scratches every part of her face, even her lips—is this what her dad calls buckbrush? Or, used to call, she reminds herself.

“But I’m a doe,” she says, drunk with the pain of it all, and puts one foot in front of the other, and then repeats that complicated process, and a court length or two into that she realizes that this is what it’s like to die, isn’t it?

You hurt and you hurt, and then you don’t.

It’s soft at the end. Not just the pain, but the world.

And at least she’ll die with that, she knows: The world killing her. Not the Crow. Not Elk Head Woman. Not the thing that got her dad.

“I’m sorry,” she says to the idea of him.

Not because he died however he died, but because she never told anybody to let him stay when they were dragging him from the gym. Because she pretended she didn’t know him. Because she was embarrassed. Because—because she’s still that girl standing on the bench seat of his truck beside him while he’s driving, her hand on his shoulder, the cab full of his stories that were all true, she knows.

Because because because.

Her breath hitches deep and she stops, her hand on an aspen, a birch, she doesn’t know stupid trees, trees are only good to make basketball courts from. This tree holds her up just the same. She pats it in thanks and looks past it, to where she’s going to die.

It’s a field of … not spikes of snow, no, there’s no such thing.

Bones.

“What?” she says.

She—she can’t be that far out, can she? Marias, that massacre or whatever? The bones from that wouldn’t still just be lying out there, would they?

Bones don’t last that long.

Unless. Unless she already died a few steps back, and is walking forward through her people’s past now, maybe. Is that how dying works?

She looks behind her—nothing calling her back—and steps forward gingerly, to crack this last Big Indian Mystery.

It is another world, the kind she wants to hold her breath in. Not to keep it from getting into her lungs, but because it’s sacred. There’s skeletons all around her. Not Indians, she can tell that now, not people at all, but … cattle? Her new dad’s told her about grizzly stashes, but those are always back in the trees, not out in the open like this.

No, this is something different, something worse.

Elk.

Denorah nods to herself, puzzling the bones together in her head.

Elk, definitely.

There’s one side of a rack tilted up over there, even, unbleached and frozen, and—she looks around faster now, more desperate.

This can’t be that place, can it? The place her dad would never tell her about, where him and his friends blasted all those elk ten years ago?