Free Code Talker by Chester Nez Page A

stole the big bags of food our parents had packed for Dora and me.
    My friend Robert Walley took matters into his own hands, deciding one winter that he’d had enough of school. He ran away with a couple other boys. They headed southeast, traveling through Arizona into New Mexico.
    I kept up with my studies, but I missed Robert. We usually studied together. And other boys had begun to join us. Our group of boys played together on weekends. Without runaway Robert, and several others in the gang who’d escaped with him, weekends dragged.
    I walked over to the trading post. The dimes and nickels in my pocket jiggled against each other. I liked having my own odd-job money. For a long while I stood in front of the candy display. It all looked good. Then—as usual—I chose red licorice. I selected a few marbles, paid for everything, and headed back to the dorm.
    That night I paid a dime for a movie, finding a seat between two friends who hadn’t run away with Robert. Some school movies were free, but the good ones cost ten cents. This one was a Tom Mix story. Pretty much all the movies were about cowboys defeating Indians. I liked Tom Mix. I also liked Buck Jones and Hopalong Cassidy, both popular movie choices at the school. After watching those movies, some of the little kids planned to be cowboys when they grew up.
    A month passed. No Robert.
    The boys in my age group were sitting at lunch when—despite the ban on talking—a buzz went around the cafeteria. Navajo police had captured the runaways at their homes, returning them to Fort Defiance. Tired of studying by myself in my dorm room and spending weekends without my good friend, I felt relieved to hear the news.
    A hush blanketed the room. No clink of silverware. No sounds of chewing. I looked up from my beans. Robert and the other escapees filed into the cafeteria dressed as girls. They stood against one wall, their heads hanging, for what seemed like forever. Everyone stared.
    I sat like the others, mesmerized by the girls’ clothing. And when I went to get Robert that night to study, I was told that the runaways were not allowed to associate with the other students for a month.
    Robert hadn’t told me about his plans to run away. It was all very secretive. But I would not have joined them, anyway. I’d already seen too many kids humiliated after making a dash for freedom. And I didn’t want to leave Dora.

    I traipsed through the trees in the school yard, keeping an eye out for the right kind of stick. The day before, I’d shattered my old stick. There! The fallen branch was straight, with a curve at the end.
    That afternoon my friends—now ten years old—gathered at a vacant field to play hockey. I swung the new stick a few times, getting used to its balance. When twelve boys had arrived at the field, we chose up sides, two teams of six.
    We buried a ball in the dirt. Everyone raced in, using their sticks to unearth the buried ball. Each team fought to hit the ball into its opponents’ net to earn a goal.
    After about an hour of play, a younger boy ran up. “The football pants are here!” he said. Everyone abandoned the game and ran down to the classroom that was used as a locker room. Sure enough, a few new football pants lay spread out on a desk. There was never enough money for full uniforms, so we wore the pants with T-shirts.
    Most of the boys at school loved football. We made our own cleats, fastening a kind of tack to the bottom of our everyday shoes. Our helmets, made from a canvaslike material, tied under our chins. The flat devices offered very little protection and were nicknamed “fried bread” helmets. If we got lucky, we made it to the locker room before a game in time to get a set of upper-body protective pads. There weren’t enough pads to go around, and we often played pickup games of football without protection.
    â€œToo bad we can’t just take them back to the dorm with