Some might go for the sprig, the sprout, the lovely offshoot, the younger and flashier, the darker-hooded eyes. Me, I’m strong enough, or so I think, to go for the source: the mother. She is all of them rolled up in one person, I figure. She is the undiluted vision of their separate loveliness. The mother is the one I will try for. As I am falling into sleep I imagine holding her, the delicate power. My eyes shut, but that night I am troubled in my dreams.
I’m running, running, and still must run — I’m jolted awake, breathing hard. The camp is dark. All I’ve got is easily packed and I think maybe I should take the omen. Break camp right this minute. Leave. Go home. Back to the city, Gakaabikaang, where everything is set out clear in lines and neatly labeled, where you can hide from the great sky, forget. I consider it and then I hear the sounds of one lonely passionate stick game song still rising, an old man’s voice pouring out merciless irony, no catch in his throat.
I walk to the edge of the rising moon.
I stand listening to the song until I feel better and am ready to settle myself and rest. Making my way through the sleeping camp, I see the four women walking again — straight past me, very quickly and softly now, laughing. They move like a wave, dressed in pale folds of calico. Their pace quickens, quickens some more. I break into a jog and then I find that I am running after them, at a normal speed at first, and then straining, putting my heart into the chase, my whole body pedaling forward, although they do not seem to have broken into a run themselves. Their supple gait takes them to the edge of the camp, all brush and sage, weeds and grazed-down pastures, and from there to alive hills. A plan forms in my mind. I’ll find their camping place and mark it! Go by with coffees in the morning, take them off guard. But they pass the margin of the camp, the last tent. I pass too. We keep looping into the moonlighted spaces, faster, faster, but it’s no use. They outdistance me. They pass into the darkness, into the night.
My heart is squeezing, racing, crowded with longing, and I need help. It must be near the hour that will gray to dawn. Summer nights in high country are so short that the birds hardly stop singing. Still, at dawn the air goes light and fresh. Now the old man whose high, cracked voice was joyfully gathering in money at the gambling tent finally stops. I know him, Jimmy Badger, or know of him anyway as an old medicine person spoken about with hushed respect. I can tell his side has won, because the others are folding their chairs with clangs and leaving with soft grumbles. Jimmy is leaning on a grandson. The boy supports him as he walks along. Jimmy’s body is twisted with arthritis and age. He’s panting for breath. They pause, I come up to him, shake hands, and tell him I need advice.
He motions to his tired grandson to go to bed. I take the medicine man’s arm and lead him over tough ground to where my van is parked. I pull out a lawn chair, set it up, lower him into it. Reaching into my stores, I find an old-time twist of tobacco, and I give it to him. Then I add some hanks of cut beads and about eight feet of licorice for his grandkids. A blanket, too, I give him that. I take out another blanket and settle it around his back, and I pour a thermos cap of coffee, still warm. He drinks, looking at me with shrewd care. He’s a small man with waiting intrigue in his eyes, and his gambler’s hands are gnarled to clever shapes. He has a poker-playing mouth, a head of handsome iron-gray hair that stretches down behind. He wears a beat-up bead-trimmed fedora with a silver headband and a brand-new denim jacket he’s probably won in the blackjack tents.
I’m an Ojibwe, I say to him, so I don’t know about the plains much. I am more a woods Indian, a city-bred guy. I tell Jimmy Badger that I’ve got a hunting lottery permit and I’m going to get me an antelope. I need some antelope medicine, I say. Their habits confuse me. I need advice on how to catch them. He listens with close attention, then smiles a little crack-toothed pleasant smile.
“You’re talking the old days,” he says. “There’s some who still hunt the antelope, but of course the antelope don’t jump fences. They’re easy to catch now. Just follow until they reach a fence. They don’t jump over high, see, they only know how to jump wide.”
“They’ll get the better of me then,” I say. “I’m going to hunt them in an open spot.”
“Oh, then,” he says. “Then, that’s different.”
At that point, he gets out his pipe, lets me light it, and for a long time after that he sits and smokes.
“See here.” He slowly untwists his crushed body. “The antelope are a curious kind of people. They’ll come to check anything that they don’t understand. You flick a piece of cloth into the air where you’re hiding, a flag. But only every once in a while, not regular. They’re curious, they’ll stop, they’ll notice. Pretty soon they’ll investigate.”
NEXT DAY, THEN, I set up my booth just exactly the same as the day before, except I keep out a piece of sweetheart calico, white with little pink roses. When the women come near, circling the stands again, I flicker the cloth out. Just once. It catches the eye of the youngest and she glances back at me. They pass by. They pass by again. I think I’ve failed. I wave the cloth. The oldest daughter, she turns. She looks at me once over her shoulder for the longest time. I flick the cloth. Her eyes are deep and watchful. Then she leans back, laughing to her mother, and she tugs on her sleeve.
In a flash, they’re with me.
They browse my store. I’m invisible at first, but not for long. Once I get near enough I begin to fence them with my trader’s talk — it’s a thing I’m good at, the chatter that encourages a customer’s interest. My goods are all top-quality. My stories have stories. My beadwork is made by relatives and friends whose tales branch off in an ever more complicated set of barriers. I talk to each of the women, make pleasant comments, set up a series of fences and gates. They’re very modest and polite women, shy, stiff maybe. The girls talk just a little and the mother not at all. When they don’t get a joke they lower their lashes and glance at one another with a secret understanding. When they do laugh they cover their lovely calm mouths with their hands. Their eyes light with wonder when I give them each a few tubes of glittering cut beads, some horn buttons, a round-dance tape.
They try to melt away. I keep talking. I ask them if they’ve eaten, tell them I’ve got food, and show them my stash of baked beans, corn, fry bread, molasses cookies. I make them up heaped plates and I play a little music on the car radio. I keep on talking and smiling and telling my jokes until the girls yawn once. I catch them yawning, and so I open my tent, pitched right near, so nice and inviting. I tell them they are welcome to lie down on the soft heap of blankets and sleeping bags. Their dark eyes flare, they look toward their mother, wary, but I fend off their worry and wave them inside, smiling the trader’s smile.
Alone together. Me and her. Their mother listens to me nice and gentle. I let my look linger just a little, closer, until I find her eyes. And when our eyes do meet, we stare, we stare, we cannot stop looking. Hers are so black, full of steep light and wary. Mine are brown, searching, anxious, I am sure. But we hold on and I can only say that for what happens next I have no adequate excuse.
We get into the van while she is still caught by the talk, the look. I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she’s never been told about, a way that wasn’t the way of the girls’ father. Sure, maybe desperate. Maybe even wrong, but she doesn’t know how to resist. Like I say, I get her in my van. I start to play a soft music she acts like she never heard before. She smiles a little, nervous, and although she doesn’t speak, uses no words anyway, I understand her looks and gestures. I put back the seat so it’s pleasant to recline and watch the dusky sky and then I pamper her.