Free The Scalp Hunters by David Thompson

trail. The scalp hunters would track them and kill them, and that would be that.
    For a few moments Evelyn hung on the cusp of despair. But then something her pa had been drumming into her since she was a sprout took root. “Never give up,” he’d often said. “Kings aren’t quitters. When the going gets tough, we do what we have to.”
    Evelyn had more of her pa in her than she imagined. She refused to give up. She refused to let the scalp hunters kill her friends. But how to stop them when they were seasoned slayers while she was what some would call a slip of a girl and her friends were the most peaceable people on earth?
    As her pa would say, where there was a will, there was a way.
    Evelyn raised her head and peered into the night. Yes, they were in the middle of the prairie, but the prairie didn’t lack for cover. There were rolling hills and washes and gullies and tracts of woodland. There were streams and a few rivers. They must use the land to its best advantage.
    Dega had been noting her every expression, and at the look on her face he said, “Evelyn?”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œWhat you think about?”
    â€œHow to win?”
    â€œWin?” Dega recalled that to win was the purpose of a game called checkers she had been trying to teach him.
    â€œHow to keep you and your family breathing. We have to make it cost the scalp hunters more than you are worth so they’ll give up and leave us be.” Evelyn gnawed her lower lip. “Either that, or we have to kill every last one of the buzzards.”
    â€œScalp men are birds?”
    Evelyn laughed. She had to remember that he took her every word literally. “Not the way you mean, no. When a white says someone is a buzzard, it means they are no account.”
    Dega tried to make sense of it. “Buzzard is same as vulture, yes?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œVultures eat dead things. That what they do. That their…” Dega struggled for the right white word. “…purpose.” He beamed, pleased with himself.
    â€œYes, that’s true, too.”
    â€œHow that be bad?”
    â€œIt isn’t. It’s the nature of things.”
    â€œThen how scalp hunters same as vultures?”
    Evelyn wrestled with her wits to get it across. “A lot of whites don’t like buzzards. Same as they don’t like skunks. So when they don’t like someone, whites call that person a buzzard or a polecat.”
    â€œWhy whites no like vultures?”
    â€œBecause they eat carrion. Sorry, they eat the flesh of dead things.”
    â€œBut that what vultures do.”
    â€œAs you said, it’s their purpose, yes.”
    Dega scrunched up his face in annoyance at his failure to understand. “So white people not like vulture to be vulture?”
    â€œIt’s the eating of dead things. The notion makes white people sick to their stomachs. Besides which, buzzards are ugly as sin.”
    Dega was on the verge of a headache. Vultures couldn’t help doing what they did. It was their nature. As for being ugly, all living things were of Manitoa, each according to their own kind, and had a beauty in their own right. He’d always thought that a vulture in flight was a noble sight. Now Evelyn was saying whites thought vultures were ugly. “I be a poor white.”
    â€œHow’s that again?”
    â€œWhites not think like Nansusequa. Whites think white. I try but not think same.”
    â€œWell, of course, silly,” Evelyn said. “You have to be you. Just as I have to be me. That doesn’t mean we can’t have a meeting of the minds, now does it?”
    Dega was ready to scream from confusion. She had just asked him a question and he had no idea what she had asked. She was right that he had to be him, but then, who else would he be? And she was right that she had to be her, but if she were someoneelse, she wouldn’t be Evelyn. And if he was him and she was her,