The Only Good Indians(90)

But it is that place.

Denorah swallows, settles down to her knees, her hand tracing the gentle curve of a weather-smoothed rib until it’s shattered about halfway down. And the rib beside it as well, just the same. From a gunshot. Maybe even from a bullet shot from her dad’s gun.

Denorah looks up the steep slope, can almost hear the rifles, can almost see her dad and Cassidy, Ricky and Lewis, so proud, so thrilled with their luck, with what great hunters they were.

Her heart beats once, seems to stop in her chest.

“Dad,” she says.

This is where it happened.

Part of her new dad’s story of this, too, the end of it, was her real dad and his buds throwing their caped-out trophy bull back down the slope, after trying to bargain to keep just it, please, not even any of the meat, not even the young little elk.

That’s when she knew it was a true story. Because that’s exactly the kind of thing her real dad would have asked for: the horns.

But, that story being true, it also means—it means her dad really and truly did this, doesn’t it? Instead of being the one down in the encampment, bullets raining down all around, punching through the hide walls of the lodges like she knows happened to the Blackfeet, to Indians all over, her dad was the one slinging bullets, probably laughing from the craziness of it all, from how, this far out, they could do anything, it didn’t even matter.

“I’m sorry,” Denorah says to the elk rib she’s touching, and closes her eyes.

This is a good place, she tells herself. A good enough place. She can lie down here with them, can’t she? If they’ll have her.

When she opens her eyes ten, twenty seconds later, it’s from snow crunching behind her.

She sways her back in but she has to do it, has to look around.

Elk Head Woman.

This close, her head is even more wrong.

But she’s not looking at Denorah, has forgotten all about Denorah.

Elk Head Woman falls to her knees too, her human hands to these elk bones, her nose dipping down to touch a skull, and staying there.

Denorah is breathing heavy, can’t move.

All at once Elk Head Woman thrusts up, casts her long head around, looking for, looking for—

There.

Just an icy patch of grass like all the rest.

But not to her.

She makes her way over, falls to both human knees over it, lowers her head.

“You—you were here that day, weren’t you?” Denorah says, and Elk Head Woman snaps her face over, her eyes hot and fierce.

Denorah starts to reach a hand across, like the daughter of Elk Head Woman’s murderer can do anything good here at all, but then she remembers Victor Yellow Tail’s broken body. And Cassidy’s, and Jolene’s. Her dad’s. She pulls her hand back to her chest, holds it there.

Now Elk Head Woman is leaning forward on her right arm, her palm to the bare dirt, like she can feel something down there.

Denorah can feel it writhing around down there, too.

“What is it?” she asks without thinking, but Elk Head Woman is already digging, frantic, her elk mouth making desperate little chirping sounds.

Denorah, shaking her head no, leans in just enough to see the birth: a fragile brown leg kicking up from the dirt, ten years after it should have rotted away, and then a thin little flank there under a swipe of earth, and now Elk Head Woman is digging faster, more desperate.

An elk calf, still wet, shivering.

She pulls it up to her human chest, its neck too weak to hold its head up, its chin on her shoulder.

Elk Head Woman’s whole body hitches up, and then sighs with the perfectness of this skin-to-fur contact.

Which is when the rifle shot opens up the world.

Just past Elk Head Woman, a spurt of snow geysers up, the powder hanging there while the sound rolls away. Denorah looks back up the long slope, to … to—

“You made it,” she says, in wonder.

It’s her new dad, in his Fish & Game shirt.

Meaning—meaning Nathan made it. He Paul Revered into Browning with half his blood gone, must have ridden right up to the Game Office, stayed conscious long enough to tell Denny Pease that his new daughter, stepdaughter, she was out by the lake, Duck Lake, and there’s a … there’s a monster—

Her new dad knew just where to go, and just how to get there. There’s only one spot Gabriel Cross Gun’s daughter would end up. Where his daughter would be.

His next shot slaps into the ground just in front of Elk Head Woman, like showing her he can shoot past her, and he can shoot just short of her. Translation: she’s next.

Elk Head Woman understands this, resists all her instincts to run, instead turning to curl around her calf, give her back to the slope, hoping her body can be thick enough to keep her calf safe. Because that’s what an elk mother does, isn’t it? That’s the only thing you’ve ever really wanted to do this whole time, ever since you found yourself suddenly back in the world. Just—your anger, your hate, it was coursing through you so hot, and you got lost in it, and—

Denorah looks up that long hill, into the winking scope and dead eye of her new dad, and then she looks to Elk Head Woman, to the calf, and she sees now that both her fathers have stood at the top of this slope behind a rifle, and the elk have always been down here, and it can stop … it has to stop, the old man telling this in the star lodge says to the children sitting all around him. It has to stop, he says, brushing his stubby braids out of the way, and the Girl, she knows this, she can feel it. She can see her real dad dead in that burned-down sweat lodge, the back of his head gone, but she can also see him up the slope ten years ago, shooting into a herd of elk that weren’t his to shoot at, and she hates that he’s dead, she loved him, she is him in every way that counts, but her new dad shooting the elk beside her isn’t going to bring him back, and as long as she keeps dribbling behind her back when she doesn’t have to, then her real dad won’t even really be gone, will he? He’ll still be there in her reckless smile. Because nobody can kill that.