Free Trickster's Point by William Kent Krueger Page B

him,” Jubal accused.
    “No, honest I didn’t. But if you told him, he’d keep your secret, I know he would. And he’d teach you to hunt like he does, I swear.”
    In the end, Jubal agreed, and when he’d told Sam the truth of his past, Winter Moon said, “The white man took almost everything from us and gave us in return mostly disease and alcohol. But there’s one thing he can’t take from us unless we let him, and that’s our dignity, Jubal. There’s a great heritage in being Indian. I’ll teach you to hunt in the old way, but in return, I want you to begin to think of yourself in a different way. Accept that the blood of your Blackfeet father flows in you, and be proud of that, even if you don’t say a word about it to anyone. Deal?”
    Jubal thought it over and nodded seriously. And that, as it turned out, led to the first time Cork had seen murder in Jubal Little’s eyes.
    *   *   *
    In the fall a few weeks before Cork turned sixteen, he went hunting in the old way with Jubal Little and Sam Winter Moon. They drove in Sam’s old pickup to an area on the eastern edge of the rez, where the backsides of the Sawtooth Mountains were visible in the distance. It was an area well known to the Ojibwe, an area in which big bucks were often taken.
    The day was overcast and wet and cool. They followed a rutted dirt road over bogland where the tamaracks were gold and stood out like lit torches. They wove through birch stands barren ofleaves, with bone white trunks and branches. Sam Winter Moon suddenly braked to a complete stop, then backed up. He swung his pickup onto the grass at the side of the road and, without a word, got out. Cork and Jubal got out, too, and followed. Sam walked down a little spur of road, almost invisible beneath the tall overgrowth of weeds. Cork saw what his own eyes had missed initially but Sam’s had not, an outline where the passage of tires had crushed down the weeds. They came to a black pickup, a newer model, parked behind a thicket of wild blackberry that made it invisible from the road.
    Sam said quietly, “Know any skins on the rez who can afford a new pickup?” He walked carefully around the vehicle, studying the ground. “This way,” he said and began to follow the trail left by those who’d come in the truck.
    Cork realized that Jubal was carrying his bow and quiver of arrows, which he must have pulled from the bed of Sam’s pickup when they got out. Since it wasn’t deer they were hunting at the moment, Cork wasn’t sure why Jubal had done this, but he quickly forgot about it as he became intent on reading the signs of the trail. Wherever the ground was soft and bare of cover, three distinct sets of tracks were visible. Two sets were large—men. One was much smaller—a child. They followed nearly a mile, up a ridge, and as they approached the crest, they heard voices ahead. Cork and Jubal looked toward Sam, who nodded for them to keep moving toward the noise. In a couple of minutes, they came to a meadow full of wild grass and sumac, with three figures at the center, dressed in camouflage and standing over a killed white-tail buck. Cork recognized them immediately: Donner Bigby; his little brother, Lester; and their father, an enormous and brutal-looking man whose name was Clarence but whom everyone called Buzz because of his logging work with chain saws. Bigs and his father held compound bows. Lester, who was maybe eight or nine at the time, held a hunting knife. The blade looked huge in his small hand. He was crying.
    “I don’t want to cut him, Daddy,” Lester said.
    “Your brother and me did all the work of bringing him down,” his father said. “The least you can do is help us dress him.”
    “Make a man out of you,” Bigs said with a laugh.
    “I don’t want to,” Lester cried. He looked down at the deer.
    “I don’t want him to be dead.”
    “He’s not Bambi, for Christ’s sake,” Bigs said.
    “Cut him open like I told you,” their father