Free Fools Crow (Contemporary American Fiction) by James Welch

will I find this place?” he said.
     
    Mik-api broke into a smile. “I will tell you,” he said.

    Red Paint sat outside her mother’s lodge in the warm sunshine of midmorning. Her robe, gathered around her legs, was almost too warm. Her shiny hair was loose around her neck, framing a bird-bone and blue-bead choker. Her light, almost yellow eyes were intent on the work before her. She had passed, over the winter, from child to woman with hardly a thought of men, although judging by the frequency with which they rode by her mother’s lodge, the young men had thought plenty about her. It was clear that when or if Yellow Kidney returned, he would be besieged with requests to court his daughter. But for now, as she bent over her beadwork, she was concerned with other things. Her mother, Heavy Shield Woman, had become so preoccupied with her role as Medicine Woman at the Sun Dance that she hadn’t noticed her two sons were becoming boastful and bullying to their playmates. One Spot had even tried to kill a dog with his bow and arrow. And, too, Red Paint was worried about a provider. Although White Man’s Dog still kept them in meat, she felt that one day he would grow weary of this task. Without a hunter, they might have to move on to another band, to the Many Chiefs, to live with her uncle, who had offered to take them in.
     
    She held up the pair of moccasins she had been beading. She had taken up beadwork for other people, particularly young men who had no one to do it for them. She was good and her elaborate patterns were becoming the talk of the camp. In exchange, the young men gave her skins and meat, cloth, and the Napikwans’ cooking powder. They brought her many things for her work, they tried to outgive each other, but she paid attention only to their goods. Now she looked for flaws in the pattern on the moccasins. She wanted them to be perfect. They were for her mother to wear at the Sun Dance ceremony. She stretched her neck and allowed her eyes to rest on the figure astride the gray horse moving away from camp in the direction of the Backbone. The white capote that the rider wore blended in with the patches of snow and tan grass. Beyond, the mountains looked like blue metal in the bright light. Red Paint bent once again to her work, sewing the small blue beads with an intensity that made her eyes ache.

    In a draw just below the south slope of Chief Mountain, White Man’s Dog made his camp. He built a shallow lean-to of sticks and pine boughs and covered the floor with branches of fir. He had enough branches left over to cover the entrance. Then, in the dying light, as the sun turned Heart Butte to the south red, he gathered the wispy black moss from the surrounding trees and balled it up. He struck his fire steel into this ball until he coaxed a yellow flame. He piled on pieces of rough bark stripped from the lower dead twigs of the trees and soon had a fire. He put several twigs on the fire and sat back. Even three moons ago he would have been afraid to be alone in the mountains of the Backbone. As he watched the chunk of meat on a tripod before him sizzle and splatter the fire, he felt comfortable and strong. The fat real-bears would still be sleeping in their dens and the bigmouths would be hunting in packs on the plains.
     
    The young man thought about the following day, for it would be the most important in his life. He knew where to find the four-legged trapped in the steel jaws. Mik-api had given him good directions, and the spot was less than half a day distant. He put the hood of his capote over his head and felt the hunger gnawing at his belly. If his luck stood up, he would find the spot behind Chief Mountain, release the four-legged and be back to this site by nightfall. He was certain that the animal was a wolverine. Mik-api would not call it by name, for to name another man’s power animal would rob that man of its medicine. So Mik-api had pretended dumb. But White Man’s Dog knew that the