Free The Color of Lightning by Paulette Jiles

heights, mile upon mile, when heavy clouds white as glaciers sailed up from the northwest.
    One early morning there was a heavy fog. They broke camp in a strange isolate stillness as if in a world just formed and not yet emerged into definition. Every limb adorned with lines of tiny drops and the grass wet. They walked on with soaked, dark legs, and they covered many miles in silence, going nowhere in the same spot with the blurring fog all around them. By midmorning the fog had separated into phantom banks lying apart like grounded clouds among the ekasonip, the stands of red grass. Then it rose up and fled
    away overhead in a low, rolling tide. At every draw Eaten Alive’s two wives slid from their ponies to collect deadwood. Elizabeth gathered as much as either of them. She packed it with great crashes onto a travois. The Dismal Bitch avoided Elizabeth and would not look at her. Elizabeth picked up a heavy stick and stuck it in her belt. She secretly marked the days on it, one notch after another. Her checkered dress grew larger as she shrank inside it and the hem tattered into fringes.
    After the Wichita they came to the Red River, and Elizabeth knew that beyond the Red was these people’s dwelling-place. Where she would be beyond help and beyond anyone’s reach in an alien country whose landscape was known only to a very few. The Happy Wife, Pakumah, had taken Lottie to herself now, maybe to spite Tabimachi, the Dismal Bitch, who sulked thin and bitter in her own eight square feet of space beside her parfleche boxes, packing and unpacking obsessively.
    Elizabeth slept outside or just inside the tipi entrance, which she learned must always face to the east. But she did not care because Lottie was now wrapped in a four-point blanket beside Pakumah and ate from Pakumah’s bowl and slept soundly all night. She had begun to smile again. They had tattooed a star on her forehead. Pa- kumah and her sisters gave Lottie anything she asked for. When she screamed and threw things they smiled and tried to soothe her with little gifts of egret feathers or a pinch of sugar or a prairie chicken’s air sac dried and blown up like a small transparent balloon.
    Elizabeth knew she herself was spending her life force like a running stream but she had ceased to care.
    They came to the Red River bottoms at a place where the river made a loop to the south and so the current was slow and there was a tall forest in the flats. There were open stretches of pure white sand. The cottonwoods and the sycamores grew to great heights. Banks of jaunty Carrizo cane with its plumes and shakos. The water itself red as rust, as brick, red as wine. They camped on the south side at a place where it was clear they had always camped, and the men herded the horses through the trees and urged them into the river.
    The horses hesitated and dodged and turned back, and then the leaders went in, and then the rest. They poured over the bank into the water in erupting sprays; pintos and duns, gruellas of dove gray, bays and blacks. They were stolen Texas horses with long backs, or the Comanche mustang ponies with trim clean legs and heavy manes and tails. Their tails floated behind them as they swam and then they footed themselves in shallow water and stood drinking greedily. The men and boys rode in after them and slipped from their horses’ backs into the water, unbraided their hair and ducked themselves again and again.
    Elizabeth walked a long way in search of firewood. Pakumah gave her a worn little mare and a travois, and so she left Lottie in the young woman’s care and went more than a mile in a wandering route through the woods. The vines and saplings made dense thick- ets and the trees were skirted with heaped driftwood brought down by floods. Elizabeth delighted in the shade, the scattered sunlight, after the relentless sun of the open country. She loaded branch after branch. Her hair hung down in separate dirty locks and several of her fingernails were