“You teach white ways?” Dega voiced his innermost concern.
“White ways. Shoshone ways. All that I have learned I would pass on to them.”
“Oh.”
Evelyn was puzzled by the disappointment in his voice. “Isn’t that what any parent would do?”
“What about Nansusequa ways?”
“We would teach them those, too. It goes without saying,” Evelyn assured him.
“Nansusequa and white and Shoshone,” Dega said.
“Yes.”
“All three.”
“Doesn’t that make sense?”
Until his talk with his mother, Dega would have agreed it made perfect sense. Now he harbored doubts. “Then they not be Nansusequa.”
“What are you talking about? If you teach your children your ways, they will be as Nansusequa as you are.”
“No. They be white and Shoshone, too. Only be Nansusequa if they only learn Nansusequa.”
Evelyn was trying to comprehend his insistence. “I was raised white and Shoshone, and look at me.”
“You mostly white.”
“Not entirely,” Evelyn objected, even though he was right. She’d never taken to the Shoshone way of life as fully as her brother. Not that she had anything against them. She had just always favored her father’s side of the family, not just in looks. She liked to eat white food and to wear white clothes and she had loved town and city life. How strange, then, that she was in love with someone who wasn’t white.
“I need children be Nansusequa,” Dega said. “Only Nansusequa. Not white. Not Shoshone.”
“Oh,” Evelyn said, deeply disturbed. “When did you come to that conclusion?” This was the first she had heard of it.
As they talked, the valley darkened with the onset of night. In the distance carnivores made their presence known.
“The day before this one. What it be called again?”
“Yesterday.”
“Yes. Yesterday,” Dega said, bobbing his chin.
“What brought it on? Why is it suddenly so important to you that your children be raised Nansusequa and only Nansusequa?”
Dega helped himself to a carrot and bit off the end. He chewed slowly, the crunch loud in his ears. “Important not just me. Important for people.”
“But you five are the last Nansusequas left,” Evelyn brought up. “You are your people.”
“Want more of us,” Dega explained. “Want many Nansusequa. Like before white men attacked village.”
“You aim to rebuild your tribe?” Evelyn was appalled that he was bringing this up now, of all times. She reached over and placed her hand on his. “We can talk more about this when we get back.”
“Now,” Dega said.
“Why is it so blamed important?” Evelyn was growing annoyed. All the trouble she had gone to, and he threw this into her lap. “You and me wouldn’t have kids for a good many years.”
“Must find out now.”
“Why, consarn it?”
“So have right woman.”
His reply was akin to a physical blow to Evelyn’s gut. He was saying she might not be right for him. “Let me be sure I savvy. You’re saying that any children of yours have to be raised as Nansusequa and nothing but Nansusequa?”
“Yes,” Dega confirmed, happy that he had gotten his point across.
“And you don’t give a hoot about the wife’s feelings? She can go to Hades for all you care?”
Dega was worried; she sounded mad. He remembered that “hoot” was the sound an owl made. How that applied in this instance was a mystery. So was “Hades.” Shakespeare McNair had used that word once or twice and he recalled it had something to do with people who lived deep underground. So if he understood Evelyn, she was saying he was not sounding like an owl and he wanted his wife to live under the earth.
“You’re not being reasonable,” Evelyn said. “If a person is half-and-half and she has a baby, there is nothing wrong with her wanting to raise it whichever half she’d like.”
“You want raise baby white and Nansusequa?”
“That’s fairest.”
Dega was torn between his mother’s appeal and Evelyn’s logic. Both had merit. But his mother had touched him deeply with her desire to see their tribe reborn. The Nansusequa could rise again—only if he and his sisters stood firm in how their children were to be reared. Suddenly standing, he declared, “I must think.” The hurt that came into Evelyn’s eyes made his gut tighten. She was upset and he couldn’t blame her. Wheeling, he crossed to the forest. Clenching his fists in anger at how their outing had been spoiled, he realized he had left his lance by the fire.
Evelyn was in despair. Always before, they talked their differences out. Granted, most were minor, and she had come to think that they saw eye to eye on most everything. This new spat didn’t bode well for their future. She reached for the tin of raisins and put it down again. She wasn’t hungry anymore.
Dega stopped and looked back. He wanted to go to Evelyn and embrace her and tell her everything would be fine, provided she agreed to bring up their children as Nansusequa. He took a step, and froze. A stealthy scrape had come out of the undergrowth to his left. Fingers flying, he unslung his bow and set the string. He slid an arrow from his quiver and nocked the shaft and drew the string, the barbed tip trained on the vegetation. It could be a deer. It could be a rabbit. It could be the beast that slew the Sheepeaters.
Something moved.
Dega strained his eyes. The thing appeared to be on all fours. He stood his ground, aware that if he loosed his shaft it might be deflected by intervening brush. Let the creature come closer, he told himself. Let it come out where he couldn’t miss. It was staring at him, as if curious. His fingers began to hurt from the strain of keeping the string pulled.
Suddenly the thing started toward him.
Over by the fire, Evelyn decided to try to hash out their differences. She gripped her Hawken and entered the woods, where she saw he had an arrow to his bow. “Dega?” she asked in concern. “What is it?”
Dega saw the shape stop and turn toward her. He still hadn’t had a good look at it.
“Dega? Didn’t you hear me?”
Like a rush of wind, the thing was off. Dega glimpsed pumping limbs—and something else. He blinked in surprise, and the apparition was no longer there. Lowering his bow, he plunged into the brush after it, certain he must be mistaken. Ahead, the shape flitted between two trees. He ran faster, but when he got to the same trees, beyond was a wall of woodland awash in the pale glow of the full moon, and nothing else. “Where did you get to?” he asked out loud in his own tongue.
“What did you see?” Evelyn came to his side, breathing heavily from their sprint.
“I saw…thing,” Dega said.
“Was it the mountain lion?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
Dega shrugged, a typically white gesture he had learned from her. “It ran off.”
Evelyn lowered her Hawken. “Well, if it wasn’t a lion and it wasn’t a bear, we have nothing to worry about.”
Dega was inclined to agree, but ferocity came in small sizes as well as big. Wolverines weren’t half as large as bears, yet they were every bit as formidable.
“Want to head back?”
“Wait.” Dega hoped for another glimpse. It had to have been a trick of the light, but he needed to be sure. The woods stayed silent save for the sigh of the wind and the keening of a fox.
Evelyn shifted her weight from one foot to the other. They were wasting time, in her estimation. “I’d really like to talk more about this Nansusequa business.”
“Children must be Nansusequa,” Dega declared. Or it would crush his mother and be the end of his people, forever.
“Dang it,” Evelyn said. “Why are you being so pigheaded?”
This was a new one to Dega. A pig was an animal the whites raised. He had seen a few and their heads were nothing like his. “I do what must,” he said. Since the thing in the woods was gone, he wheeled and made for the fire. He sat cross-legged with the bow across his legs and glumly stared into the flames.