by John Smelcer
His parents sat at a small table drinking tea with a white man Noah had not seen before. As the stranger in a black business suit and hat, which he did not remove, stood to greet him, his mother began to cry and ran into the bedroom, slamming the door. Noah’s father comforted and assured his son that his mother would be all right, then motioned for him to sit beside him. The man with the briefcase placed several folders on the wobbly table and spoke about how Noah had to go away to a school just for Indian boys and girls. He opened one of the folders and spread out several pictures of the school. One photograph showed a group of unsmiling Indian children standing beneath an iron archway with the school’s name spelled out in black letters. Numerous buildings and a neatly rowed cemetery were barely visible in the background.
While stars slid slowly across the world’s cold rim, the man who had arrived in the car as black as the night sat across the small, paper-strewn table calmly telling the boy how he was to be sent there without his family, how he would benefit from the marvelous opportunity granted him by the government, how he would make his family and his village proud.
ELIJAH HIGH HORSE fired two shots across the narrow lake. It was a hundred yards to the other side, more or less. The shots roared in the cup of the frosted valley, and a flock of small birds lifted from a leafless tree and flew over the white hill.
Elijah lowered his rifle and rubbed his shoulder after the jolts from the big rifle’s recoil. His first cousin, Johnny Big Jim, stood beside him, looking across the lake, his long, black hair lifting slightly in the breeze.
“What are you shooting at?” he asked, squinting to see the distant shore.
“That deer on the sand bar. Right there,” Elijah replied, pointing.
Johnny’s eyes followed his cousin’s arm and pointing finger.
“I don’t see anything,” he said, still squinting. “There’s nothing there.”
But Elijah worked the bolt, shoving another cartridge into the chamber. He brought the butt of the rifle to his shoulder, set it tight, aimed carefully, and fired again.
Johnny raised his own beat-up rifle and looked through its scope across the water.
“What are you shooting at?” he asked again, his voice growing impatient.
“That big buck standing right there. Can’t you see it? Look at the size of those antlers!” he exclaimed, his head moving slightly left as if he were following something moving on the other side.
“Damn it. There he goes. Damn. He got away.”
Johnny raised his rifle once more, looked for a moment, and then turned to his cousin.
“There wasn’t nothing there,” he said, shaking his head. The tone of his voice was perplexed, but honest. He wasn’t kidding.
“It was right there, standing on the shore by those willows. You had to see it!”
The cousins, their mothers being sisters, had grown up together. Everyone in the village grew up together in one way or another. It was too small not to be otherwise. Although barely fourteen, the boys spent a great deal of time in the forest hunting and fishing. They loved the woods, the wildness of it. When they went into the woods, they thought of themselves as hunters, the way hunters were meant to be. They were Indians. This is what they were sure they knew. For the cousins, who were as irreverent as any 14-year-olds, their time in the woods was nearly sacred—a time to be what their grandfathers had been long ago. For Elijah and Johnny, the woods was not a place for joking.
They stood arguing as the sun set over the hill and its shadow fell into the valley. It would be dark soon.
“I’m not joking, Elijah!” Johnny said for the fifth or sixth time. “There was nothing there. You were shooting at nothing.”
But his cousin stood his ground, certain of what he had seen.
Finally, near darkness, they overturned a canoe, which had been left partially hidden among trees for hunters to use, and paddled across the lake to where Elijah had seen the deer and walked up and down the shoreline for a while before giving up for the night.
“I don’t get it,” Elijah finally said, puzzled, his warm breath rising on the air like the flock of small white birds they had seen earlier. “It was right here. I swear.”
They both looked down again. The ground was sandy and so soft that they could see their own boot tracks weaving around where they had searched for sign. But there were no other tracks of any kind. Nothing had walked across that spot in days or maybe weeks. There had been no deer—only emptiness and the rolling hills of spruce and pine in the distance.
As darkness settled upon the land, curling on itself like a fox trying to get comfortable for the long night, the two young Indians paddled back across the flat, dark water. A loon called from the far side, and an owl’s hoot came softly through the night.
That night, their campfire embers glowing outside, they lay inside their fluttering tent talking about the vanishing buck.
“I saw it as clearly as I see you right now,” Elijah whispered. “I’m serious. I had it dead on.”
Once he fell asleep, Elijah slept restlessly, dreaming strange dreams. He awoke often, thinking he heard rustlings outside the tent. A bear or cougar perhaps. Two years earlier, a hungry cougar had come down from the hills and killed his family’s dog. But maybe this is nothing, he thought after listening for a long time, warm in his sleeping bag.
It was a long night.
The next morning they packed up camp and hiked home. They stopped at their grandfather’s house. He was a traditional chief and a deeply spiritual person. He had been born back when Indians still spoke their inherited language, when they remembered the old ways, before things changed forever. He had told them the old stories. The old man was outside, wearing a baseball cap, blue jeans and a thick red flannel shirt with suspenders. He was changing a tire on his car. The boys helped.
“Grandfather,” Elijah said after the tire was mounted and the lug nuts tightened. “I have to tell you something.”
He told the story of the previous evening, how he had seen the big buck and shot at it, twice. Johnny told the part how they searched for but found no tracks in the soft earth.
“It was like the buck was never there at all,” Elijah said.
The old man sat down stiffly on a rusty fifty-five-gallon drum turned on its side. There were dozens of them scattered around the field like wild flowers. At the far edge of the field near the tree line, abandoned cars, two Chevrolets and a Desoto, decayed slowly, becoming homes for small animals.
His grandfather listened without interrupting, his eyes focused on the woods beyond the field. Then he looked at his grandson for a long time before he spoke.
“That’s because it wasn’t really there, Elijah,” he said slowly, the way elders always spoke, as if nothing was in a hurry anymore—not their thoughts, not their words.
“You saw the spirit of a deer, its ghost. When an animal dies—a fox, beaver, grizzly bear, coyote, or deer—its spirit stays in this world. This is heaven to them. They still walk around doing the same things they always did. They don’t know they’re dead. But people can’t see them. They exist only in the spirit world. They are all around us, even now, here in this field, in those cedars and spruce on the hillside. Even the spirits of salmon swim the rivers following their children and grandchildren as they spawn each summer, and dense, reeling flocks of invisible birds blot out the sun. Only a shaman can see them.”
Elijah knelt down closer to his grandfather as the old chief continued.
“When you were born, we knew that you would be a shaman one day. When the local priest came to baptize you, your nose started bleeding when the holy water touched you. All the elders remember that day. But no one can tell when it will begin. Sometimes it doesn’t happen until one is very old and is willing to see the world of the dead. Sometimes it happens too soon, when one is unwilling to believe his eyes. The visions can use up a weak man, overwh
elm him. Not every man can carry the gift. We knew that you would see what you must see when it was time. There was no reason to tell you while you were so young. We knew that one day you would come to us.”
Elijah and Johnny walked the old chief to his house, helped carry in two five-gallon jugs of drinking water, which they placed in a corner near the wood stove and left. Then the two boys walked down to an open area along the river, which was low. This late in the fall, rivers began to shrink before the long winter freeze. They built a fire and rolled two big, round firewood logs close to sit on. They didn’t talk for a long time but stared into the fire and out across the river toward the great mountains in the distance.
Elijah finally broke the silence.
“I have to tell you something,” he said quietly.
Johnny turned away from the spell of the fire to face his cousin.
“That deer wasn’t the first time. Last winter, I was hunting rabbit up in the hills behind my father’s winter cabin. It had been snowing hard for a long time and the snow was deep. I got up one morning and snow-shoed up into the hills. I must have shot five or six rabbits, I think. I don’t really remember.”
Johnny turned his body more toward his cousin, and waited.
“On the way back, I saw a buffalo. It was all white. I had never seen anything like it. The snow was so deep that it had a hard time moving. I don’t know why, but I started chasing it. I wasn’t going to shoot it or nothing. I was just having fun. I remember it as clearly as I see you sitting here. It was running, stumbling in the deep, crusted snow. I can still see it in my mind—its breath rising up, its eyes wide and white in fear. I could even see its muscles moving under its white hide. I kept chasing it, laughing and out of breath. Little by little, it got farther away until it finally reached the timberline and vanished. I stood in the deep field catching my breath, listening to the wind and the silence. I took off my hat and gloves to cool down.”
Johnny looked at his cousin, who had turned back toward the fire, a tear rolling down his face. He didn’t understand why Elijah should be crying.
“I remember I turned around and started back for the cabin when it dawned on me that there was something wrong. I realized there were only my tracks in the snow. I walked all around looking for that buffalo’s tracks. I walked nearly to the tree line where it disappeared. I looked for so long that the sun went away, and I was left alone in the dark. I never found a single track, only mine. I didn’t know what to make of it.”
Elijah was silent after that, trying to reposition a log in the fire with a long stick. When he was satisfied, he spoke again.
“I’ve never told anyone about it until now.”
Johnny nodded without saying anything.
As the low, red sun set over the far mountains, and darkness settled over the land as soft as falling snow while casting long shadows in the quiet forest, the two young Indians sat beside the dying embers of a fire as stars began to shine and as the indifferent spirits of animals began to walk around them, beside them, through them—while the cold night began to sleep.
A week later, just before the first snow, below a long wedge of migrating geese, Elijah’s father drove him to the train station, handed him a tight-packed suitcase, a brown paper bag filled with two large pieces of fried chicken and a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, two apples, and a one-way ticket.
Johnny was there to say goodbye. He wasn’t going. The government had already taken two of his older brothers and a sister. He was allowed to stay. Not all Indian children were taken from their homes. That would have been unnecessary and, practically speaking, impossible. Neither the available room nor the funding would allow it. The government’s goal could be achieved by taking only some, similar to the way the government didn’t draft every young man from large families into military service during the war against the Nazis and the Japanese, over for only a few years.
“Be careful,” Johnny whispered as he held his best friend close. “Watch yourself.”
Johnny had heard stories from his older brothers and sister. He knew about the schools, about what happened in them, the sadness, the despair, things better left unspoken. With that said, he straddled his bike, waved one last time, and pedaled homeward.
When the porter blew his shiny whistle announcing the train’s impending departure, Elijah’s father left without saying goodbye, shuffling toward their old truck without once looking back, his eyes on the ground the entire time, as if he were looking for the pocketful of pride he had lost somewhere a long time ago.
Frightened and alone, Elijah High Horse slung his knapsack across a shoulder, lifted the suitcase with the other hand, and stepped aboard the passenger compartment as the whole line of cars jolted forward. The young Indian found a seat beside a window and sat for a long time quietly staring at the small piece of paper with the name of a place he had never heard of. He cried on and off during the next two hundred miles, wiping away tears with quick, frequent, but discreet motions so that the man sitting across from him never noticed.
Chapter Two
AFTER HOURS of driving the narrow, winding highway, the high-roofed black car with little Lucy Secondchief sleeping on the back seat stopped at a small diner. The sound of a door opening awakened her. Lucy watched as the taller man rose out from the passenger seat and went inside. The driver, shorter and heavier than the other, sat behind the steering wheel smoking cigarettes, one after the other, his window rolled half way down to let out the billowing cloud. After what seemed a long time, the other man came out of the diner with a bag in his hand.
“I got everything,” he said, in a dull monotone to the driver as he sat down and closed the heavy, squeaking door.
The car started again, turned out of the gravel parking lot, and accelerated back onto the highway. The tall man pulled a burger wrapped in tin foil from the brown paper bag and handed it to the driver. Then he pulled one out for himself. He unwrapped a corner of the tinfoil and took a bite.
“What about the kid?” the driver asked, looking back at Lucy through the rearview mirror.
“I didn’t get her nothing.”
“What do you mean you didn’t get her anything?”
“I didn’t even think about it, that’s all,” replied the man holding the paper bag on his lap. He took another bite and chewed with his mouth open.
The driver looked at the mirror again. He could barely see the little girl’s face and was impressed by the haunting look he saw there. Even in the dimming light, he could make out an odd expression, perhaps a kind of sadness, perhaps a sadness so deep that light barely reflected from her face, as if her great sadness were some kind of black hole from which nothing could escape. He didn’t like how the look made him feel.
He didn’t like the little girl. It wouldn’t matter if he did. She was a job to him, a delivery, that’s all. He was sick and tired of transporting Indian children. He turned his eyes away from the mirror, concentrating on the road in an effort to lose his awareness of the despair seated so close behind him.
“Even Indians gotta eat! Give her my damn fries!” the driver barked at the other man, his voice angry.
The tall man sighed impatiently, turned around in his seat, and handed Lucy a small, grease-soaked bag.
Lucy had never tasted French fries before. She liked the saltiness.
After eating, she curled up on the back seat and slept, dreaming of her home and her mother as the shiny black car sped into the night toward a distant, unfamiliar future—sadness trailing in its wake like swirling black snow.
Several hours later, Lucy awoke to a gentle shaking.
“Wake up,” the driver said, leaning over her, the back door open.
Lucy sat up and looked around. It was night. They were in another town, and street lights lit a corridor of darkness. Buildings surrounded her. Lights were on in some of the windows, but most were black. Nothing mov
ed on the quiet street except a stray dog that crossed two blocks down.
“It’s time to go. Get out of the car,” ordered the man, stepping back to make room for her.
Lucy hopped down from the seat, rubbing her eyes and yawning. She was tired. She needed to pee.
“This is a bus station,” the man said. “You’re taking a bus for the rest of your trip.”
He led her inside and told her to sit and wait in a hard, plastic chair, while he went to the counter and bought a one-way ticket.
Lucy wrinkled her nose. The station smelled stale. A few other people sat sleeping on the uncomfortable seats, each with a suitcase or cloth bag alongside. But Lucy had nothing, only the clothes she had been wearing when the men took her away. They were secondhand. Her blouse showed a repaired tear, where her mother had sewed one night while they sat in their warm cabin telling stories and drinking weak tea. Lucy reached for the torn place, felt the uneven stitches, felt her mother’s rough fingers. Tears built in the corners of her eyes until they were too heavy and slid down her brown cheeks. A man sleeping nearby coughed, turned his head, muttered something, and fell back asleep. Lucy wiped away the tears with her sleeves until the cuffs were damp.
The driver returned. He knelt and spoke gently as he removed the handcuffs.
“This is a ticket,” he said, handing her the thick, pink paper. “A bus is going to take you the rest of the way. You have to go by yourself from here on. The bus driver will tell you when to get off. He’ll be watching after you. Do you understand?” he asked, his voice softer and kinder than it had been before.
