Stealing Indians

by John Smelcer

  Simon ran across the hot, red desert, through its echoing canyons and arroyos, over buttes and mesas, jumping over boulders and tumbleweeds, startling jackrabbits and lizards, his long black hair shining in the sun.

  No one on his reservation could keep up with him.

  Even his shadow had to stop to rest, bent double under a high sun, winded, gray shadow-sweat dripping on the thirsty earth. No one had ever seen anything like him. He’d run up and down the highway, waving at cars and smiling the whole time. His mother used to joke that Simon went straight from crawling to running—just grabbed his milk bottle one day and took off running out the front door, his little, chubby baby legs carrying him all the way to the edge of the reservation before his father caught up with him in a pickup truck.

  And he’d been running ever since.

  Simon’s parents died on his thirteenth birthday. Both of them, father and mother, in a car crash going around Dead Man’s Bend coming home from a funeral. When a drunk driver swerves toward you on a narrow turn with a two hundred forty foot drop, there’s no place to go, no place to run or hide, no safe space in all the world.

  After his parents’ funeral, Simon returned to his mobile home resting on cement blocks, changed out of his secondhand black suit and tie, which he had borrowed from his cousin who was several inches taller and more than a dozen pounds heavier, drank a glass of cold water in one long, breathless series of gulps, ate a bologna-and-cheese sandwich with pickles and sliced green tomatoes, and went out for a run.

  He was gone for three days.

  No one knew what had happened to Simon. The whole reservation heard about his disappearance. Men and women, boys and girls from all over went out looking for him. Twenty-seven pickups—all with mismatched tires and expired license plates—left the parking lot at Fat Mabel’s Bar & Grill, each driver assigned a specific area to search. The congregation of the First Baptist Church of Indian Conversion cooked up a giant batch of fry bread to feed all the searchers. The police put out an all-points bulletin. Fliers were printed and circulated all over the reservation, stapled to utility poles, to storefronts, and duct-taped to abandoned trucks and empty fuel barrels rusting in fields. Someone even stapled signs at all five holes of Big Red Chief’s Mini-Golf.

  Even Simon’s dog, Tonto, went out looking for him. They named the dog that because he followed the boy everywhere, like a faithful sidekick who couldn’t speak a word of English.

  Luckily, his second cousin on his father’s side, Norman Fury, found him running along a backcountry road five towns over. He saw Simon at first from a distance, bouncing slightly with each jogging stride, saw him through heat waves writhing up from the melting, black asphalt, like an apparition only partly of this world.

  The boy almost made it to the state line.

  During the next year, Simon was passed from relative to relative, from one cramped house of poverty to another. No one even knew that his fourteenth birthday had come and gone. In all of his many moves he never once had a room of his own. Each time he moved, Tonto went with him. They were inseparable.

  One day, Tonto, looking down the one lane dirt road, began to bark at a growing black dot on the burning horizon, a cloud of dust building behind it. Simon didn’t know why he felt suddenly afraid of the black dot. He crept behind a corner of the house and watched as the approaching dot turned into a car. When it turned down their driveway, Simon and his dog scooted off, staying low and hiding behind the leaning outhouse—both trying not to breathe as they watched. From his crouching position, the boy saw two white men in dark suits with dark briefcases step out of the black, high-roofed automobile. His grandparents came out from their house to speak to the men. Simon couldn’t hear a word they said, but it was clear that his grandfather was arguing with the men. After a while, his grandfather sat down on a small stool and dropped his head low, while his grandmother went inside the house, calling for Simon.

  When she came out alone, the men went inside to search the house. By the time they started checking the yard and the outhouse, Simon was already a mile back in the canyons, running faster than he had ever run before, the panic swirling inside him, pushing him along like a hard wind.

  The men came for him three more times that month, but Simon was always gone before they even turned off the heavy engine inside the chest of the big, black car.

  One day at the end of summer, his grandparents told him they were going into town to sell hay. They asked Simon to come along, promising him ice cream if he helped unload the heavy bales. The cramped cab of the old truck allowed for only two, so Simon and Tonto jumped into the back and sat atop of the small cluster of bales. They loved riding in the open bed, the cooling rush of wind pouring over them as the truck sped down the road, jack rabbits jumping from the gravel shoulders.

  Dark clouds were building on the horizon. A storm was approaching. Simon was worried that it would rain before they returned home.

  But before they arrived in town, the truck turned on a road leading to a small train station at the edge of town, more whistle stop than station. Simon recognized the place. It was where ranchers sold their livestock for immediate loading on freight trains. His grandfather shut off the engine, climbed out from the cab, and closed the creaking door. His grandmother waited inside.

  “Come on down from there, boy,” he said, lowering the tailgate.

  Simon and Tonto jumped down from the bed, kicking up dust as they landed.

  “You gonna load these bales on the train, Grandpa?” Simon asked, confused because he had never known the old man to sell hay to anyone but locals. Besides, the dozen bales on the truck hardly made up a load worth shipping on a train.

  His grandfather didn’t answer but looked at his pocket watch instead.

  “Five minutes,” he said, as he slid the watch back into his pocket.

  While they waited, Simon tossed sticks for Tonto to fetch. They were out in the nearby fields playing when the train whistled its arrival. Simon ran back, ready to help his grandfather. The locomotive engine was so loud that the boy didn’t hear the high-roofed black car pulling up next to the old truck. Two men slid out like snakes and grabbed the boy from behind.

  Simon struggled to break away, screaming. His dog barked and bit the leg of one of the men. His grandmother covered her eyes with her hands and wept inside the cab, the sun scorched the parched landscape, a lizard darted beneath a rock, and his grandfather stood by sullenly watching the whole thing, squeezing and squeezing his empty hands inside his empty pockets.

  “You got to go with these men,” he said, his voice filled with sadness.

  “But I want to stay with you!” Simon cried, still trying to free himself.

  The old man swallowed his love for his grandson, swallowed his love of his own dead son, and swallowed a thousand years of pride.

  “You must go to school,” he said. “It’s the law.”

  The sound of those words made Simon hate the school already, whatever it was, wherever it was.

  On an imitation leather seat aboard the train’s passenger car, the young Indian boy who loved to run, who could outrun everything but this moment, looked out the window as the train started to move. The powerful engine picked up speed, and Simon watched as the only world he had ever known began to slide away: the mesas, the dull-pink earth beneath the vaulted sky, the arroyos and canyons, the thirsty fields, the hogans, and the government housing that all looked the same.

  Simon watched his faithful dog running beside the train, barking at it as if he might turn the great machine around, just as he sometimes did wayward sheep. Simon watched him struggling to keep pace, until he could run no longer and slowed to a trot and then stopped altogether and sat in the middle of the tracks and howled.

  For many rattling miles, Simon Lone Fight stared out the smudged glass, quietly crying, his heart bursting, his small brown hands pressed sadly against the latched w
indow, closed tight as a fist.

  NOAH BOYSCOUT was hunting alone on a thinly veiled snowy landscape, the waggling trees covered in rime. He pulled his fur-trimmed parka hood from his head, looked far ahead, his eyes narrowed.

  He could see his breath as he breathed.

  Noah stood quietly on the trail, watching the tree line and listening for something that did not come. He thought he had seen movement from the corner of his eye—sudden and fleeting. The day was cold and bright, the sky deep blue, the distant mountains glowing almost pink in the angled light of midwinter. There was only a slight breeze. A squirrel scampered about the top of a nearby spruce tree, deftly tossing tiny cones to the ground, stopping occasionally to make certain the boy was not stealing his food. After a while, the boy adjusted the rucksack on his back and slung the rifle over his shoulder, raised his parka hood, and resumed his homeward trek.

  The sound of brittle snow beneath his feet measured the white miles.

  Halfway to his family’s cabin in the valley far below, Noah again thought he saw something moving, a flashing among the trees, only for a second. He stopped and squinted hard, taking in every little thing—the almost imperceptible sway of treetops, a small flock of tiny birds alighting on a willow, a raven in the distance flying into the low sun. Although he saw nothing that concerned him, the young Indian removed a glove, reached into a pocket on the front of his parka, and pulled out what few bullets remained.

  There were only three.

  He had used the rest to shoot the half dozen rabbits that filled his old canvas pack. After rolling the small brass cartridges across his palm, he slid them back into the deep pocket.

  Noah had hunted in these hills for much of his young life. Although only fourteen, he was already learning the laws of the untamed land. He knew the trails that wound from the valley into the hills and, further still, toward the mountains. Grizzly country. Occasionally, small bands of caribou migrated into the hills, milling about all winter in search of food and escape from deep snow and hungry wolves. In all his years, Noah had never seen a wolf, but he had, from time to time, come across their tracks. Once, he even stumbled on a wolf kill. Little remained of the animal—a young caribou, mostly hair, the head with its glazed-over eyes still open, some bones—at the center of the red paw-trampled snow all around the clearing.

  Noah pulled the thick glove over his hand and took a hard look across the wintered forest before continuing his shuffling descent from the hills, one hand gripping the swaying leather sling of his rifle. He loved the vastness of the land, its power, its great silence and beauty. He loved the time he spent on it, the deep quiet of thinking and daydreaming. Here, among the spindly spruce trees, the wind and flitting birds, he was himself. He was home. He did not belong in the world of man. Nature is harsh—even brutal—but she is honest. A person knows where he stands. Though still a boy, Noah knew these things, and the truth made him happy and sad all at once. As a half-breed—only partially Indian—he was already an outcast of sorts, not fully fitting in anywhere. Other people, his own parents and friends included, did not understand him. They did not understand his need for the wild or why he sat for hours sometimes, listening to ravens or the sounds of wind and river.

  Noah found peace where others found nothing.

  More than anyone else, his own mother did not understand him. She was not Indian, and she did not understand things the way Indians do. Sometimes, Noah would come home from a day alone in the forest all excited about an experience.

  “Mother!” he once yelled, as he entered the small cabin and closed the door.

  “What is it, Noah?” she asked, putting down the dish she was washing, knowing that her young son would ramble on about something in which she had no interest or, worse, that he would tell another of his tales about taking chances in the wilderness.

  While taking off his parka and boots, the boy happily related his story.

  “I was sitting by my campfire eating my lunch, when a fox came and stood close, maybe a dozen steps away. I started speaking to him real soft, asking him to stay and visit. When he came closer, I could see he was nervous, but I kept speaking soft and smiling at him. When he was only a couple steps away, I held out my hand and he came up to it and smelled my palm!”

  As she listened, his mother’s boredom turned to concern. Her white face showed more and more a grim intensity as she listened.

  The boy continued his incredible story.

  “Then I slowly raised my hand and stroked the fur on his head, rubbing behind his ears. He didn’t seem to mind. I think he liked it, so I started petting his head with both hands. Then he came in even closer and pressed his body against mine. I wrapped my arms around him and held him close, petting his back and belly while whispering to him, telling him what a pretty fox he was.”

  His mother’s expression now was of troubled worry tinged with anger.

  “After a while he just pulled away and trotted back into the forest. You should have seen him, Mom. He was such a nice fox. I think we’re friends now. Maybe I’ll shoot a rabbit for him next time I see him.”

  That wasn’t the only time Noah had told of such encounters. In fact, nearly every week or so he had another story to tell, like the time a newborn moose calf teetered clumsily out of a willow patch, walked right up to him, pressed its head against his hip, curled up on the ground beside him and took a nap with its little blonde moose head snuggled on the boy’s lap. They sat like that for hours, the boy gently caressing the top of the calf’s head and its long, stiff mane, the moose sleeping, warmed by the high summer sun.

  Of course, the boy kept a wary eye out for the mother.

  After such stories his mother would kneel down before her young son, grab him by the shoulders, and tell him to stay away from those dirty animals, saying how they might bite him, how they might have rabies. To his mother, the idea of humans and animals dwelling on the same land, that their lives are intertwined, related, that they are somehow brothers and sisters was an idea that was at best troubling and at worst disgusting, even horrible. To her, the land was fraught only with menace.

  Noah adjusted the biting leather rifle sling as he continued his lonely descent from the snow-clad hills. A raven flying overhead landed on a tree branch and watched the shuffling figure. As the figure drew close, the bird cawed out to the boy, who cawed back. Noah spoke raven and grouse. Pleased with the news, the raven flew away, its sharp eyes searching the earth for something to eat.

  A half hour later, Noah saw them clearly for the first time, hiding behind trees and deadfalls on either side of the trail. From where he stood he counted six or seven, but there may have been more. They were still far away, watching him and turning to look at one another, waiting for a signal. They were gray-coated, and they easily vanished in the gray-white landscape.

  The boy knew they had been following him for a long time. He had sensed them earlier up in the hills. He increased his pace, looking left and right of the trail at all times. The wolves were working their way closer. They knew they had lost the element of surprise, but they had sheer numbers in their favor.

  Seven of them against one skinny boy.

  Within minutes they were close enough that Noah could hear the sound of panting. He stopped, slid the rifle from his shoulder with one hand and the pack from his back with the other. With the rucksack on the ground beside him, he worked the bolt of his single-shot rifle—a boy’s rifle—and reached into the pocket for the extra shells. He was afraid, but he would stand his ground.

  For an instant, and only for an instant, Noah wondered in that way men sometimes wonder about the absurdity of their circumstances. At a time when many homes had a television, when the energy of the atom had been harnessed, here was a boy standing in a far white field in the middle of nowhere, facing a pack of encircling wolves—snarling and baring and snapping their teeth.

  Knowing it unlikely that he co
uld kill a wolf with his small rifle, Noah fired one shot into the air to scare them away. But the sound of a .22 in vast and open country is hardly enough to frighten even a small bird. The wolves stopped for a moment, their ears perked, their shaggy heads cocked sideways, but their response was curiosity, not fear. They resumed their methodical attack almost immediately. They moved nervously around the boy who turned to meet them, loading another round into the breech. He couldn’t spare another warning bullet; each one would have to count.

  Then two of the wolves, pack leaders, stopped and held their heads high to smell the crisp winter air, their noses black and wet. Noah had noticed others of the pack doing the same, at some distance, but this time—the seven wolves close enough so that Noah had to turn his head from side to side to see all of them—the behavior caught his eye. Every wolf was sniffing the air. A realization then flashed in Noah’s mind.

  The wolves weren’t after him. They smelled the rabbits. They wanted the rabbits.

  Slowly, his eyes fixed on the wolves. He stooped and felt for the top of the canvas pack. With one hand he loosened the thick strings, which cinched it closed, and pulled out a dead, stiff rabbit. It was like a slow-motion magic trick. The wolves stopped their sniffing. Now their eyes, yellow and keen, proved what their noses had told them. This was what they wanted. It was what they had wanted all along. Noah stood up and with all his might tossed the rigid rabbit beyond their heads. They turned and ran after it. One after another, he flung all the dead rabbits as far as he could, and one after another the wolves broke off, each finding its own easy meal. While they were busy, Noah grabbed the empty bag and started for home, frequently looking over his shoulder, his nearly useless rifle at the ready.

  Bend after bend, only his lean shadow followed him down the frozen trail, as the winter sun sank lower, barely skimming the bulging edge of the world.

  Night had shredded and gulped the land as voraciously as the wolves their rabbits when Noah finally arrived at his small cabin. Light from inside shone through the darkness, and, as if struck from flint, sparks slipped up through the chimney pipe from the wood stove and danced skyward, taking their place among the stars. Noah paused to watch rising sparks before noticing a tall black car parked in the driveway. He had not seen it at first. Thinking only that his parents had strange visitors, Noah knelt to remove his snowshoes. Once removed, he leaned them upright against the porch, stepped into the warm house, closed and latched the heavy door, and hung his parka on a nail near the wood stove.