Starfish (10 page)

B
UCKSKINS
• W
ORDS OF
A
DVICE
• F
AREWELL

THE NEXT
morning, their grandfather woke them and told them to dress. Lionel crawled from beneath the buffalo robe and stumbled to his clothes, which were stacked in a neat pile next to the fireplace. Folded on top, Lionel found the buckskin leggings. He looked over excitedly and saw Beatrice pulling on her new shirt.

Along with her long braids and hawk feathers, Beatrice looked like a page from the painted picture book of “savages” that the Brothers had showed Lionel once in the library at the boarding school. well, except for the fact the painted “savage” in the book wore a fierce scowl, not the ear-to-ear grin that was plastered across Beatrice's beaming face.

Once dressed, they had berries and coffee for breakfast—Lionel showing better judgment this time as to the amount of berries he ate. Then their grandfather walked them through all that he had showed them, starting at the stream with the berries, then turning to the garden, the Great wood, and the smokehouse.

They returned to the lodge, and Grandpa brought his mule around and loaded up his gear. while he packed, Beatrice and Lionel sat with him; Beatrice doing her best to tie small cardinal and blue jay feathers into Lionel's growing hair.

Then Grandpa cinched the last of his belongings. “Well, I best be goin'. The soldiers will be back by my place the day after next. I counted.”

He kneeled down and pulled Lionel and Beatrice close.

“They make their rounds about every ten days or so, and I'm sure they'll be eager to come by my place and check for you. Soldiers are prone to stick to their habits, I've noticed.”

Grandpa looked sad as he hugged them. He stood and threw his leg over his old mule.

“You two take care of each other, you hear? I'll be back as soon as I can, and we'll figure out our next move.” Then he spun his mule around and vanished into the Great wood.

A dark sense of melancholy hung over Lionel and Beatrice that afternoon. They stayed busy, continuing their grandfather's prescribed daily regimen of tending the garden and practicing with their bows and arrows, but it wasn't the same.

As the days passed, their moods improved, and they soon found themselves laughing and taking turns telling each other of the travels of Napi the old Man and counting down the days until their grandfather's return.

L
ONG
D
AYS
, C
OOL
N
IGHTS
• D
RUMS IN THE
D
EEP
W
OODS
• B
USHWHACKED

SPRING SOON
turned to summer, and the children did as their grandfather had taught them. They swam in the cool pools of the stream and raided the hillsides for blackberries and raspberries, much like the grizzly. They dug for grubs and beetles under the rotted logs of the forest as they had observed the wolverine and the badger do. Like the hawk and eagle, they waited patiently for the precise moment before releasing the taut string of the bow while hunting the squirrels and rabbits; and they silently stalked the elk and deer just like the mountain lion.

Their feet grew tough; Lionel's hair grew long; and Beatrice's grew longer. In their buckskin leggings and shirts that Grandpa had made, it would have been hard for anyone from the boarding school to even recognize them.

They started each day by swimming in the stream. Then they saw to the garden or hunted or fished, depending on what the stores in the smokehouse dictated. At night they sat around the fire making arrows or lay in the cool grass of the meadow, staring up at the endless sea of stars.

The children cut the hides and skins of the elk and deer from their hunts and fashioned them into clothes to repair or replace the worn-out wool and heavy canvas garments that had been issued back on the reservation. They missed their grandfather but soon came to enjoy the solace of their new home and made friends with their neighbors the grizzly, raven, wolverine, and the other creatures that occupied the Great wood.

After a while, Lionel noticed that Beatrice was growing anxious that their grandfather still had not returned. She checked the food stores and then decided that they should venture deeper into the Great wood to hunt, and to see if the thaw had brought any signs of trouble from the government men or the school.

That night they cleaned the rifle and packed a bushel of berries and what remained of the smoked meat. They fastened quivers made of birchbark and filled them with the arrows that their grandfather had showed them how to make. Beatrice collected feathers from the edge of the Great wood and wove them into Ulysses's long, flowing mane, and when they woke early the next morning they were prepared for their latest excursion.

The children rode out of the meadow high on Ulysses's back, looking every bit the young wanted warrior outlaws that they now were. They rode through the Great wood and continued up into a strange tangle of trees that they had never seen before. Game was surprisingly scarce, and Lionel began to wonder who or what had scared it all away.

By midday the woods opened, and Lionel questioned how far they planned to travel from the lodge in the meadow. Sometime that afternoon they heard what they thought to be the distant sounds of drums. Beatrice proceeded toward the drums with caution, and soon the woods once again grew thick and the trees began to twist and turn their branches, tying themselves in knots overhead. Then the drumming stopped.

For some reason this scared Lionel more than the sound of them beating. Beatrice pulled Ulysses up and listened.

“What is it?” Lionel whispered.

“I'm not sure,” Beatrice answered. “Something ain't right.”

The next thing Lionel knew, he was knocked from Ulysses's back and had landed with a thud on the thick carpet of the forest floor. He rolled over as soon as he hit the ground and saw Beatrice lying next to him with a large, fat boy standing over her.

Beatrice tried to get to her feet, but the boy knocked Beatrice back to the ground and then stood over her, clucking and pawing at the dirt like an overstuffed prairie chicken. The boy had feathers in his hair, and he began to squawk and occasionally jumped sideways, striking Beatrice with the end of a short stick as he did.

Lionel looked around and saw that the boy was not alone. The trees seemed to come alive with children, ranging from Lionel's age to well over Beatrice's.

The other children—Lionel counted ten—circled them. one by one they stepped forward, trying to grab ahold of Ulysses's rawhide reins. Beatrice sprang to her feet, driving the fat boy back and knocking a smaller kid away from Ulysses's right flank.

Lionel grabbed the reins from Beatrice and backed himself and Ulysses against the trunk of a large tree. Beatrice turned to face the fat boy. He stomped at the ground and continued to shriek and jump from side to side. Beatrice circled him patiently, and the next time he lunged at her, she twisted him sideways and threw him over her leg. The boy hit the ground hard, and in a flash Beatrice had Grandpa's knife nestled between the folds of his chubby throat.

She looked up at Lionel, who along with Ulysses held off the other boys. “That's enough,” Beatrice announced.

The children stopped and turned to her. Her braids with their hawk feathers fell to the sides of her face, the knife catching the slightest hint of the late afternoon sun through the trees.

“He won't do it,” cried the fat one, mistaking Beatrice for a boy. “Get the horse!”

The rest of the children, Lionel included, froze, unsure of what to do. Lionel looked around at the faces of their attackers. They were painted, some of them poorly, and they wore an odd combination of government-issued uniforms and makeshift versions of the traditional clothing of the Blackfeet.

Lionel recognized the school uniforms from the day of the football game. They were from the Heart Butte boarding school, and the fat boy was Barney Little Plume.

“Get off of me,” Barney screamed, wrestling Beatrice with little success. Beatrice held him firmly to the ground, the knife carefully hovering over his throat. “I was just counting coo. Get the hell off!”

Ulysses was doing a good job of keeping the rest of the children back, but Lionel was having trouble hanging on to the reins, the big horse pulling him from the tree and dragging him sideways with his sporadic leaping kicks. Lionel wrapped the leather strap around his hand and held the horse as best he could. Ulysses jumped again, and Lionel lost his footing but somehow managed to hold on.

“Come on now, easy, boy. Calm down, you're gonna be all right.”

Lionel looked up and saw a boy slowly moving toward Ulysses, his voice just a notch above a whisper.

“Remember me? Sure ya do. You're gonna be all right. There's nothin' for a big old horse like you to be scared of….”

It was Corn Poe, Corn Poe Boss Ribs. Lionel wasn't sure who was more surprised to see the boy—Beatrice, Ulysses, or himself, but he noticed that Corn Poe's soothing voice was having an effect on the horse.

Lionel tucked the bear claws into his shirt and got to his feet to help Corn Poe bring the big horse around. Corn Poe looked different. His skin was tan with summer, and his hair had indeed grown out. True to his promise, tattered feathers and tiny strips of flannel were knotted in his hair; his clothes were dirty and torn to shreds.

“Corn Poe?” Beatrice said, with her knife still at Barney's throat.

“You know them?” Barney responded, having given up his struggle.

“Sure,” said Corn Poe. “That there's Lionel and this is Beatrice.”

“Beatrice?” Barney stammered, looking at her clearly for the first time. “You're a girl? But you're the same sonuvagun that broke my leg.”

R
ENEGADES
• C
ORN
P
OE'S
M
ETAMORPHOSIS
• O
LD
M
AN
S
TEALS FROM THE
S
UN

BEATRICE EVENTUALLY
let Barney up and Corn Poe did his best to calm things, introducing his two friends to this newly formed band of renegades. The children walked back to their camp as Corn Poe told them of news from the outpost and how he came to be in the woods with Barney and the other Heart Butte students. Beatrice helped two of the smaller children onto Ulysses's back and then led the horse by the reins. Barney walked at their side.

After the soldiers questioned Corn Poe in the Boss Ribs' valley, he took another beating from his father and decided that enough was enough. He stole one of his father's horses with the intention of joining Beatrice and Lionel in the mountains. That was over two weeks ago, and now the horse was dead.

Corn Poe ate what he could of the horse, but besides that, he'd had little in the way of food. He survived the journey to the edge of the woods by raiding the small gardens and chicken coops that he found along the way. He wandered in the Great wood for three days before he found this band from Heart Butte.

“There weren't much news from the fort, exceptin' that they started to send out search parties again and that the one that calls himself Jenkins claims he's gonna kill you,” Corn Poe concluded, pointing at Beatrice.

Barney punctuated this grim announcement by staring at Beatrice. Beatrice seemed to be unaffected, but the whole exchange weighed heavily on Lionel's mind.

Lionel walked along among this ragtag group, eventually wondering out loud, “How did the rest of you end up out here?”

“They wouldn't let us from the Heart Butte School go to the Fourth of July horse races and Powwow. They think that we're makin' good progress at not bein' heathen and didn't want us to get wrongly influenced by the old folks, so we run away and come out here on our own accord.”

They continued walking until the thick canopy overhead began to thin. There, the wood opened into a clearing, and in the midst of it stood a small hovel covered in army blankets and animal skins. There was also the remnant of a large fire. A cold-water creek ran through the far side of the trees.

“We're having our own Pow-wow,” Barney went on. “I know we'll catch hell when we get back, but it's worth it. I'm tired of them telling us what we can and can't do.”

They entered the small camp, and a couple of children set about gathering more wood and starting the fire. Barney sat down on the ground and someone brought him a bucket of water from the creek. He drank from it and then offered it to Beatrice.

“What about you? I heard y'all ran away and stole the captain's horse. where you been keeping yerselves?”

“Just travelin' the woods,” Beatrice said. “Headin' north.”

“Yeah, that's what I heard. To Canada.”

“Yep, Canada.”

“Ya know the government put a bounty on yer heads? Five bucks a piece for your return, fifty for the horse.”

Beatrice looked up at Barney with an icy stare. “Is that right?”

“Yep, and they're offerin' up to ten whole cents for a gopher tail,” Corn Poe spat. “Tryin' to rid the reservation of 'em for the farmers.”

Lionel looked over at Corn Poe, who stood over the fire. He couldn't believe how different he looked. He thought that he must have grown a couple of inches to boot.

Corn Poe threw some more wood on the fire. “We're gonna do a sweat, then dance. Last night I had a vision.”

“You ever had the vision?” Barney said, standing.

Beatrice shook her head.

“You should stay and join us,” Barney replied, placing a couple of smooth river stones directly into the hot coals. “We'll heat these up and then bring 'em into the lodge. Pour on some water and they steam 'er right up.

“Saaám,”
Barney concluded, more to Beatrice than anyone else.

Beatrice nodded as if she understood.

“We ain't ate nothing in two days. Barely had any water. Right, Barney?” Corn Poe added. “Helps you get your vision.”

They sat by the fire, heating the rocks as the day crept across the woods into early evening. Lionel was hungry. He thought about the food that he and Beatrice had packed and was troubled that he would not be able to touch it until after the ceremony had taken place. Lionel considered that he and his sister had already done this ceremony “of not eating” the two days after they left the school, and he wasn't all that excited about doing it again, especially when, this time around, they had more of a choice in the matter.

Barney stepped around the fire and toward Ulysses. Ulysses pawed at the earth and lowered his ears.

“Didn't this horse win the pull last year?” Barney asked, trying to smooth Ulysses's mane.

“Might have,” Beatrice answered suspiciously.

“Yeah, I can see why they put up the fifty. That there is a helluva horse you stole.” Barney left Ulysses and sat back down by the fire. “Did you ever hear about Napi the old Man?”

Lionel looked up, full of excitement. “Yeah, our grandpa told us about him.”

“He used to
steal
things too,” Barney said, poking a stick into the fire and looking at Beatrice.

Lionel noticed that Beatrice didn't like the way that Barney emphasized the word “steal.”

“No, we never heard about that,” Lionel said.

“You ever hear that old Man and the Sun were friends?”

“The sun?” Lionel responded, now more confused than ever.

“You betcha, and they loved to hunt. See, the old Man liked venison, so he says, ‘I like venison. Let's go hunt some deers.' That's all it took. So, the twose of 'em got their kit together for the hunt, with the Sun bringing out the most beautiful pair of leggings that Napi the old Man had ever seen. Porcupine quills were embroidered down the sides, along with feathers and pieces of strange shells the likes of which he'd never before laid eyes on.”

Lionel noticed that Corn Poe was reaching across a small kid sitting next to him, trying to touch the leggings that Lionel's grandfather had made him. Beatrice saw too and promptly reached out and slapped Corn Poe's hand.

“‘These here leggings carry big medicine,' the Sun told the old Man. ‘when I'm wearing them, all I have to do is walk around a bush and it will light on fire. The fire drives all of the deers out of hiding so that we can hunt them.'

“With that, the two went out to hunt, and just as the Sun had said, the first bush they passed burst into flames. Two large white-tailed bucks ran from the brush, and the Sun and the old Man shot them. That night they went back to the Sun's lodge, ate well, and with bellies full of venison, turned in….

“But the old Man could not sleep. He knew that the Sun was his friend, but he could not help but think about stealing the leggings from him.

“With them leggings, I'd never go hungry, the old Man thought. So, that night, after everyone was sound asleep, he stole them.”

With this, Barney looked from Beatrice to Ulysses. Beatrice looked from Barney to her knife. “Old Man ran as fast and as far as he could,” Barney continued. “But after a while he got tired, so he lay down, resting his head on the leggings, and fell asleep. The next morning the old Man woke and sat up with a start. He was back in the Sun's lodge.

“‘Old Man,' the Sun asked, ‘why are my leggings under your head?'

“The Old Man looked around. He couldn't understand how he was back in the Sun's lodge.

“‘Old Man, did you not hear me? why are my leggings under your head?'

“‘Oh,' the old Man said, ‘I couldn't find anything else for a pillow.'”

“A pillow?” Corn Poe blurted out. “Did they even have pillows back then?”

Barney answered by reaching over and popping Corn Poe on the back of the head. “That's how I heard it. You mind if I finish?”

“No, go right ahead. Just wonderin',” Corn Poe returned sheepishly.

“Well, the Sun believed him 'cuz they were friends, see? So, that night when they went to sleep, the Old Man stole them leggings again. This time, Old Man didn't stop running until almost morning. He was so tired he put the leggings under his head and again fell asleep. when the Old Man woke, he was once again in the Sun's Lodge. Old Man realized that the whole world is the Sun's lodge and that the Sun was on to him.

“The Sun stood over the Old Man and said, ‘Pillow or not, seems that you like my leggings. If this is true, I will give them to you.' The old Man said that it was true, thanked the Sun, and quickly went away.

“The Old Man continued his travels. He wandered across the land until he was out of food. Then he put on the leggings and set fire to the brush to hunt. once again, the fire drove the deers toward him, but the Old Man noticed that the fire was getting close, so he ran away. But the fire chased him. Old Man ran faster, but the fire gained on him, and the leggings caught on fire. old Man ran to the river. He jumped in, but when he hit the water, the burned leggings fell to pieces and floated down the river. Old Man couldn't handle them leggings.”

“Boy, I'll say,” Corn Poe emphasized.

“I think the Sun gave them leggings to the old Man to teach him a lesson.” Barney looked around dramatically. “You can't escape the Sun. He sees everything.”

Barney sat silently for a moment and then motioned to one of the smaller children to bring the hot rocks into the sweat lodge. Barney drank what remained in the rusty bucket and tossed it toward another kid, who immediately picked it up and proceeded to the creek.

Lionel didn't like the way that Barney pushed the other children around. It reminded him of the constant orders and directions back at the boarding school.

“Sstsiiysskaan nin,”
Barney said, standing and stripping off his clothes down to his dirty long underwear. “I don't think that they usually allow the women….”

But Beatrice did not let Barney finish. She stood, pushing past him toward the sweat lodge. She threw open the deer-hide flap, and looked inside.

“Kitái'kó'pohpa?”
Barney pushed, calling into question Beatrice's bravery.

Beatrice answered by stripping off her clothes, pausing only as she undid her belt to look at the sheath knife that Grandpa had given her. Lionel watched as she carefully wrapped the knife in her bundle of clothes and then disappeared into the low structure.

Barney did the same, and when he did, two smaller children pulled hot rocks from the fire and followed.

“Let's go,” Corn Poe said, stripping off his clothes and following. Lionel took another look at Ulysses, then at the setting sun, and followed the others.