Free The Night the White Deer Died by Gary Paulsen

left her feeling more alive than she’d ever felt.
    “We had wars,” he started. “And it was thus and so that after the Great Mother gave us this place and thismountain as our own, there were others who came from the south, way down where they had nothing but sand and dryness because they had displeased the Great Mother and that is all she would give them.”
    And here even his body showed the scorn, the utter degradation of the others who came from the south and who had displeased the Great Mother, and Janet felt almost ill at the thought of them.
    “And they came up north to take what was ours, because we had water and good soil and stood in good relation to the gods. Tscha! They were fools and thought they were warriors of such stature that they brought their women and children and even their dogs with little skids to carry their meager supplies and clothing.”
    His movements dipped and whirled so that Janet could see the dogs and children and the little skids, poles going back alongside the dogs and the dust of their walking, and she squinted, looking out with her mind at the picture of them walking and coming.
    “We met them in the big flats of desert out away from our corn so they could not ruin crops, because we did not know if they understood the saving of crops even in battle. And we heard later that they had told their women to be ready to live in the small rooms of the pueblo by nightfall.”
    He minced to show the women laughing and dancing, and Janet caught herself smiling as she saw them—women from an age dead and gone centuries before she was born—getting ready to move into the pueblo.
    “Ahh, there was fighting that day that the people from the south could not expect, could not believe. They came to kill, to conquer, and instead they died, and their women sang the death songs for many, many days.
    “We took our women with us to the battlefield to show them the scorn we held for them, to show them how little they were. And we stood in ranks with lines straight, and the women in back, and we used the big clubs with the sharp points on the end, and we killed them as they came at us, killed them and threw them over our shoulders like meat for dogs, and the women in back stuck little knives in the backs of their heads to make sure they were dead and cut them to show what we thought of them as men, and when that day was done, the people from the south were no more, no more, and the crows were fat for a whole summer with what they had to eat.
    “We threw their bodies down in the gully south of the pueblo and took their women and children into our tribe, and those people were no more, nothing but a stink in the afternoon.”
    He stopped suddenly, and Janet could smell the blood and dust in the heat of that day, could hear the women screaming and wailing, could see the wild savagery of the battle, and a part of her was sickened by it and made sad by the women’s crying and the children without fathers because they’d been killed in the battle.
    But another part was thrilled, was excited by the story of the battle, and she related to the winning side because she sat now with one of the warriors. And as she looked up, his age vanished and the time vanished so that what stood before her was not Billy Honcho, old man in buckskins, but a young brave.
    Tall, he stood, shining with his leather clothes in the new morning light, fresh from a battle three hundred years old, fresh with ancient blood and victory and with strength and sureness showing in and around him like something alive, a glow of life, and she reached out from where she sat, let the blanket fall and reached out.
    And Billy reached down and took her hand and held it for a second and released it, and there was much that went between them, whole
worlds
that went between them when they touched there in that cold, still morning on the edge of the partially frozen pond.
    She loved him. Not so much him, and it was not so much gushy love, but she loved