Every sound in the forest, every mouse running over a leaf, every breath of the wind-it all made me wonder if they had found us yet. They could be standing on top of the ridge right now, looking down at us, waiting for us to move so they could shoot us.
It’s just a matter of time, I thought. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, just how fucking hopeless it was. You’ve got no food, no water, no weapons, no way out. You’re gonna die here, just like Tom and those other men.
Those other men. They have to be the reason for all this. Somehow, they got hooked up with something bad, and Tom went down with them. And now us.
Fuck that, I thought. We’re not dead yet.
We are not dead yet. Five words. Keep saying them to yourself, over and over.
We are not dead yet.
Vinnie shivered. He tried to say something, but I couldn’t make any sense of it.
“You’ve got to hang on,” I said. “For God’s sake, just hang on, okay?” I tried to huddle up closer to him, to keep him warm.
“Don’t give up,” I said. “Please, Vinnie. We’ll get through this.”
I hung my head down. I was so exhausted, I felt myself sliding into a half-awake dream. I felt pine branches hitting me in the face, felt my legs running, my lungs aching for air.
I saw dead bodies in the ground. I smelled the burned flesh.
Minutes passed.
Hours.
The shadows grew longer all around us. I kept slipping in and out of the dream.
Running. Running away from the men in the ground.
The hand reaching out like a claw.
The smell. God save me, the smell.
Something woke me up with a start. A sudden noise above us. I held my breath and listened.
Nothing.
I looked down at Vinnie. His eyes were open. “Alex,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Is this really happening?”
“Yes,” I said. I was still holding the cloth against the side of his head. The whole thing was stained red. “We’ve got to figure out what to do.”
He took the cloth from me and pushed himself up. Blood dripped down his neck.
“Keep holding that,” I said. “You’ve got to keep the pressure on.”
He winced as he put the cloth back to his face. “I think we’re having ourselves a bad day,” he said.
How he could make a joke like that, I couldn’t even imagine. But it made me feel better. Somehow, the Vinnie I knew was back. It made me feel like we still had a fighting chance.
“This might be a dumb question,” I said, “but why would they leave us out here overnight and then come back the next day? Why didn’t they just kill us yesterday?”
“Alex, that wasn’t Guy and Maskwa shooting at us.”
“They’re the only people who knew we were up here.”
“It couldn’t have been them.”
“Why not?”
“They would have found us by now, for one thing. And they wouldn’t have shot at us from so far away.”
“Why is that?”
“Guy and Maskwa knew we weren’t armed.”
“They knew we’d run away as soon as we saw them.”
“They could have still gotten a lot closer. Anybody else would have had to be a lot more careful.”
I thought about it. “Okay, so who is it?”
He took the cloth off his face, turned it over, then put it back. “God only knows, Alex. Whoever did that…” He pointed in the general direction behind us. I didn’t have to wonder what he was talking about. “Whoever that was, I think that’s who we’re talking about here.”
“If it’s not Guy and Maskwa,” I said, “then where are they? They were supposed to be here today.”
“Maybe they already got to them,” he said. His voice was drained of all emotion. “First them and now us.”
“If that happened, then there’s nothing we can do about it. We’ve got to think about getting ourselves out of this.”
“Time’s not on our side,” he said. “I’ll probably stop bleeding, but we’ve got to find some food. I saw juniper by the stream. And some dandelions, but that’s not gonna do much for us. We’ve got to get to them soon, while we still have some strength left.”
“Do you think they’re at the cabin?”
“Probably. Our only chance is to try to sneak up on them. We should wait until nightfall.”
“What, try to go back there in the dark? They’ll have lights.”
“Exactly,” he said. “That’ll be our only advantage. If it’s like last night, there’ll be enough moonlight for us to see everything we need to. If they have flashlights, their eyes will never get adjusted to the dark.”
“Okay,” I said. “We take our shot at ’em. We do it tonight.”
“Look at that sky,” he said. Through the branches we could see another blazing sunset. It looked just like the sky from the night before, but of course everything was different now. The whole world had tipped upside down.
“Last night,” he said, “I was thinking to myself, that’s Tom’s sky, the ‘Pleasing Sky,’ the sun going down in the west. I thought it was a good omen.”
He closed his eyes and kept them closed for a long time. His breathing grew ragged.
“Vinnie, are you all right?”
“Our grandmother used to tell us these stories,” he said. “These stories about our ancestors, all the things they did, the ceremonies, the medicines. Here’s Tom and me, growing up in this house on the reservation, going to the public school. We didn’t know anything about this stuff. But our grandmother, she made sure we learned our real history. She made us promise we’d remember it and tell it to our own children.”
He stopped for a moment to wipe his eyes with one hand. He kept the other hand held tight against his face. The blood was drying on his fingers.
“You don’t go to war for land, or for power. You go to war to avenge your brother’s death. You gather your warriors, you gather your medicines. You make a war pole, you do your war dance. You sing the war song. I don’t remember how the song goes, but there’s one part that always stuck with me. Something about looking up at the sky and seeing the red, and knowing that someone would die. ‘Blood is the sky.’ That’s the line I remember ‘Blood is the sky.’”
He dipped one finger into the dirt and rubbed a streak across each cheek. “You paint your face with black,” he said. He dipped his finger in the dirt again, leaned over close and put a streak on each of my cheeks, as well.
He took some of his own blood and rubbed another streak on each cheek, above the black. “And red,” he said. He took more blood and rubbed it on my face.
“Then you’re ready,” he said. “You’re ready to go to war.”
Chapter Fifteen
We waited for the sun to go down. The darkness seemed to creep in all around us until we were totally swallowed by it. Under our little overhang with the dead tree covering us, the darkness made me realize how alone we were, how far away we were from anyone who could help us.
We kept close together, trying to stay warm. As I shivered I could feel the last gallon in my tank burning away to nothing. Without food or shelter, I didn’t see how I could live to see another night.
“How are your eyes?” Vinnie finally said.
“What do you mean?”
“Look out at the trees. Can you see them?”
“Not very well.”
“Use the sides of your eyes,” he said. “You have better night vision if you don’t look at things directly. Try it.”
I picked a tree, tried to look away and still be aware of it. “All right, I think I see what you mean.”
“Okay, good. Are you ready to go?”
“Of course.” I said it like I actually believed it.
Standing up was an ordeal. We had just spent the last few hours sitting on the cold ground, leaning against the rocks. It took me a full minute to straighten out my back. Vinnie had to keep his head down even longer than that to keep from passing out. When we were both finally on our feet, there was enough moonlight for us to see each other’s faces. The war stripes on our cheeks were like a cruel joke.