Free Sing Down the Moon by Scott O’Dell Page B

sundown but I was so excited that I did not hear much of it.
    Our hut was too small before Tall Boy moved in with us. Now there was no room, so we made a lean-to of willow poles and earth nearby. It was really more of a cave and in it we stored the things we did not use every day and food if we had more than we needed, which was not often.
    Snow came early that year and melted and then a freeze came with a cold wind and the earth was as hard as stone. The white soldiers drove their wagons through the village every week and ladled out flour. But the ladles were smaller than they had been in the summer. Flour always ran low before the wagons came again and people began to go hungry. All but the Apaches, who were fed first.
    Once more there was talk that the Long Knives wanted us to die. Before winter was over all the
Navahos would starve to death, the old men said.
    Snow fell and the wind piled it up around our hut so we had to dig a tunnel to go out. People fell sick and died. Scarcely a day went by that you did not hear a chant for the dead, the wind blowing and the voices singing. Often times it was hard to tell one from the other. It was then, at the time the big snow melted when so many were dying, that I made up my mind.
    My husband and I had gone down to the river, using the old speckled horse to gather firewood. After the wood was cut and loaded on the horse, we stood on the bank for a while to get our breath. The gray walls of the fort were the color of the sky and the sky was the color of the land stretching away in the sunless morning. Some soldiers marched up and down, beating on drums and blowing horns.
    I said to my husband, "I think of our canyon. I see it before I go to sleep, sometimes in my dreams, and always when I wake up. I see the high stone cliffs and the trees standing against the sky. I see my sheep wandering about with no one to tend them."
    "They are not wandering now," he said. "The wolves have killed them and there are none left. You had better think of something else besides sheep."
    His words made me angry, though I did not show
it. "Some are still alive," I said. "That is why I see them."
    He looked at me as if I had turned into a witch. "If some are alive, why is it that I do not see them?" he said. "Do you have a true eye or something that I lack?"
    "I suppose I see them because I want to," I said. "And you do not see them because you do not want to."
    "I never had any sheep to see," Tall Boy said. "A few goats but no sheep."
    "But you can see the canyon if you look," I said. "You were born there and lived there as a boy and grew to be a man. It was your home and it still is."
    His long hair was braided into two ropes that lay forward on his chest. He tossed both of them back. "I do not want to think of the canyon," he said.
    "My father does not want to think of the canyon either," I said.
    "This is not the time to think about the canyon," he said and shouted to the horse.
    We climbed the riverbank and set off toward our hut. The white soldiers were still marching around the fort.
    I said nothing more that day about the canyon or the sheep. But I made up my mind as we went back through the village, past the rows of brush huts where
people shivered and were dying. Within the rising and waning of five moons my baby would be born.
    "It will not be born here, in the shadow of the gray fort," I said to myself, "not here."

21
    T HERE WAS NO WOOL to be found anywhere in the village and when I asked one of the Long Knives if there was wool at the fort he did not answer. I thought that he did not understand Navaho so I made the sign of a blanket and weaving. He sat on a horse, beside the wagon that was bringing us flour. He looked away and said nothing.
    Soon afterward I traded my turquoise bracelet for three old blankets of a fine black and white design. By taking one of them apart I was able to save enough thread to repair the other two. The family used them at night, but I took good care of them