Free The Eagle Catcher by Margaret Coel Page A

mirror, one white, the other Indian, standing in the parking lot, looking after her as the Bronco squealed onto the street.

8
    V ICKY GUIDED THE Bronco down the broad main street of Lander. Flat-faced, two-story buildings stood side by side, like ponies tethered together in a corral. Late-afternoon shadows floated down the buildings and out onto the sidewalks past wooden boxes of wilting petunias. An array of pickups, all different colors and sizes, lined the curbs.
    She could still feel the warmth of anger in her face. She gripped the steering wheel as she swung the Bronco onto Highway 789 and held it steady all the way to Hudson. Anthony would have to level with her, tell her everything. There was no other way. This wasn’t just his life, his future, for Christ’s sake. This affected the people. Everything Anthony might be able to do someday for the people could be lost at this moment, torpedoed into oblivion.
    It should be like it was in the Old Time, Vicky thought. In stories of the Old Time that grandfather had told her while she was growing up, the best people always stepped forward to help the others. Took their places, ran to their responsibilities, became leaders; chiefs looked out for the people. Now the best, like Anthony, wanted to look out for themselves, and that made her angry. Angry at him and angry at herself, because she’d come to care so much about such things, and there was so little she could do.
    Slowing past the family restaurants and stores on Hudson’s main street, Vicky made a left turn onto Rendezvous Road. The blacktop cut diagonally across the reservation’s southeastern corner, slicing through fields of sagebrush and wild grasses and running parallel to the Popo Agie River. The river had been named by the Crow people. It meant “Beginning of Water.”
    At Little Wind River Bottom Road, Vicky took another left, then a right onto a narrow dirt road. The magistrate had also said that Anthony was not to contact Ernest Oldman, which, by implication, extended to her as Anthony’s lawyer. But she was no longer Anthony’s lawyer. She had just fired herself.
    She made a sharp left into a driveway, and the Bronco veered sideways, spitting up clouds of dust. “Oldman” was etched on the lopsided wooden sign hanging on a rail fence. Ernest still had part of his great-grandfather’s name.
    Arapaho names were funny business. Vicky was always explaining to white people why some Arapahos had Indian names, others didn’t. Grandfather had often told the story. Names belong to individuals, like fingerprints, the whorl of ears, the sheen of hair. They symbolize the person’s spirit. And names can only be given away to someone who has the same kind of spirit. It is a special gift, when someone gives you his or her own name.
    But Mathias Cooley, the first government man at Wind River, didn’t like Indian names. It was too hard to keep track of his charges when people in the same family had different names. While her great-grandfather was alive, the agent couldn’t do anything about it. But as soon as Chief Black Night had died, Mathias Cooley set about bestowing proper English family names on Arapahos. The name of Ernest’s grandfather was shortened from Old-Man-Who-Carries-Spears to Oldman. Harvey Castle’s grandfather, White Eagle, got the name of a medieval dwelling place. Other Arapaho families received names of famous people, which accounted for the Franklins, Washingtons, Lincolns, and Roosevelts on the reservation. One family became Chaucer. Mathias Cooley must have been laughing up his sleeve at that one.
    She had loved her first name, the name grandfather had given her, Bi’h’ih Be’i’no. It meant Singing Deer. On the night she was born grandfather had told her, he had gone into the foothills to pray for the new human being soon to come into the world, and as he prayed he had heard the deer singing. Her mother called her