Free Brave Warrior by Ann Hood Page A

not sound like a very scary name, but this boy was frightening, Maisie thought.
    “His hair,” Yellow Feather added.
    “Where is he taking us?” Maisie asked as two other boys arrived leading horses.
    Curly himself answered.
    “The Black Hills,” he said. “To my people.”

CHAPTER 7
Touching the Enemy
    A mong many other things that she considered on that long, hot day sitting behind Curly on a horse, Maisie wished she had paid more attention to the US geography unit in school last month. Every day, Mrs. Witherspoon had handed out xeroxed maps of different sections of the country, starting with New England and moving to the Mid-Atlantic states, the South, the Midwest, all the way to the Pacific Northwest. And somewhere on one of those xeroxed maps were the Great Plains states. To Maisie, they had looked like Legos, a series of big squares or rectangles, indistinguishable from one another. Now she was moving across those squares and rectangles toward the Black Hills, a place she vaguelyremembered Mrs. Witherspoon talking about. But what had she said about them? And where were they exactly?
    Maisie sighed and shifted her weight. She’d had no idea how sore a person got riding a horse for all these hours. And Curly apparently was not a believer in stopping to take a break. Her father always stopped when they took family trips. He stopped for coffee and French fries and to read roadside signs and historical markers. He stopped to stretch his legs. Her mother, on the other hand, never stopped. “Why dillydally?” she would say. “Let’s just get there already.” “The journey is half the fun,” her father always answered philosophically. Maybe a difference like that was one of the reasons they got divorced. Maybe a person who enjoys the journey shouldn’t marry a person in a hurry. Maisie sighed again. She was a person who liked to take a break, she decided.
    As if he’d read her mind, Curly suddenly stopped.
    “Horses need water,” he announced.
    “People need water,” Maisie muttered.
    He gave her that look of his that told her he did not like her, not one bit. Then he led the horse down a small embankment to a river.
    “Um, could you help me off?” Maisie asked him, peering down the great height of the chestnut-brown horse.
    Curly scowled but offered his hand. She landed with a thud.
    “Thanks,” she said, hoping he caught the sarcasm in her voice.
    Maisie dusted herself off and watched as the others appeared over the hill. She was happy to see Felix, who looked as miserable as she felt, sitting behind Little Thunder.
    “My rear end is killing me,” Felix whispered to her when he finally got off the horse.
    “I know,” Maisie said. “How far do you think the Black Hills are, anyway?”
    Felix shrugged. “They’re in South Dakota,” he said, as if that meant something.
    Of course he’d paid attention to the US geography unit. His teacher, Miss Landers, at least made things interesting. Each student in his class got assigned a state, and they had to give an oral report and make a visual representation of it. Felix’s state was Alabama, and he’d used the state nut—the pecan—to create its shape. He’d loved his project, loved presenting allthe facts about Alabama: state flower, the camellia; state tree, the southern longleaf pine; state fruit, the blackberry; state capital, Montgomery. He’d played the song “Angel from Montgomery” on a continuous loop in the background. It was one of his father’s favorite songs, one that he played a lot in those days after they’d told Felix and Maisie about the divorce, before he actually moved out.
    Felix tried not to think about that now. No divorce. No Alabama. In fact, what he wished was that his state project had been on South Dakota, because then he might have some idea about where they were going and when they might get there.
    “South Dakota,” Maisie was saying. “The Black Hills.”
    “I think the capital is Pierre,” Felix said