But he’d planned his escape well. The bag he’d filled with black pepper from the kitchen and hidden in his pants was out and in his hand as soon as he hit the ground. He’d left the two bad dogs coughing and sneezing as he ran and kept running.
As his closest relative, I was the one he had been running to before Morissey caught him.
You’ll do something, Tommy Goodwaters said. It was not a question. You will help.
I was halfway down the hill and had just climbed over the barbed-wire fence when the dogs got to me. I’d heard them coming, their feet thudding the ground, their eager panting. Nowhere near as quiet as wolves — not that wolves will ever attack a man. So I was ready when the first one leaped and latched its long jaws around my right forearm. Its long canines didn’t get through the football pads and tape I’d wrapped around both arms. The second one, snarling like a wolverine, was having just as hard a time with my equally well-protected left leg that it attacked from the back. They were big dogs, probably about eighty pounds each. But I was two hundred pounds bigger. I lifted up the first one as it held on to my arm like grim death and brought my other forearm down hard across the back of its neck. That broke its neck. The second one let go when I kicked it in the belly hard enough to make a fifty-yard field goal. Its heart stopped when I brought my knee and the full weight of my body down on its chest.
Yeah, they were just dogs. But I showed no mercy. If they’d been eating what Tommy told me — and I had no reason to doubt him — there was no place for such animals to be walking this Earth with humans.
Then I went to the place out behind the cow barn. I found a shovel leaned against the building. Convenient. Looked well used. It didn’t take much searching. It wasn’t just the softer ground, but what I felt in my mind. The call of a person’s murdered spirit when their body has been hidden in such a place as this. A place they don’t belong.
It was more than one spirit calling for help. By the time the night was half over I’d found all of them. All that was left of five Carlisle boys and girls who’d never be seen alive again by grieving relatives. Mostly just bones. Clean enough to have had the flesh boiled off them. Some gnawed. Would have been no way to tell them apart if it hadn’t been for what I found in each of those unmarked graves with them. I don’t know why, but there was a large thick canvass bag for each of them. Each bag had a wooden tag tied to it with the name and, God love me, even the tribe of the child. Those people — if I can call them that — knew who they were dealing with. Five bags of clothing, meager possessions and bones. None of them were Chippewas, but they were all my little brothers and sisters. If I still drew breath after that night was over, their bones and possessions, at least, would go home. When I looked up at the moon, her face seemed red. I felt as if I was in an old, painful story.
I won’t say what I did after that. Just that when the dawn rose I was long gone and all that remained of the house and the buildings were charred timbers. I didn’t think anyone saw me as I left that valley, carrying those five bags. But I was wrong. If I’d seen the newspapers from the nearby town the next day — and not been on my way west, to the Sac & Fox and Osage Agencies in Oklahoma, the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, the lands of the Crows and the Cheyennes in Montana, the Cahuilla of California — I would have read about the tragic death by fire of almost an entire family. Almost.
I blinked away that memory and focused on the two men who paused only briefly at the top of the trail and then headed straight toward me where I was squatting down by the fire pit. As soon as I saw them clearly I didn’t have to question the signal my Helper was giving me. I knew they were trouble.
Funny how much you can think of in the space of an eyeblink. Back in the hospital after getting hit by the shrapnel. The tall, skinny masked doctor bending over me with a scalpel in one hand and some kind of shiny bent metal instrument in the other.
My left hand grabbing the surgeon’s wrist before the scapel touched my skin.
It stays.
The ether. A French accent. You are supposed to be out.
I’m not.
Oui. I see this. My wrist, you are hurting it.
Pardon. But I didn’t let go.
Why?
It says it’s going to be my Helper. It’s talking to me.
They might have just given me more ether, but by then Gus Welch had pushed his way in the tent. He’d heard it all.
He began talking French to the doctor, faster than I could follow. Whatever it was he said, it worked.
The doctor turned back to me, no scalpel this time.
You are Red Indian.
Mais oui.
A smile visible even under the mask. Head nodding. Bien.
We just sew you up then.
Another blink of an eye and I was back watching the two armed men come closer. The tall, lanky one was built a little like that doctor I’d last seen in 1918. No mask, though. I could see that he had one of those Abraham Lincoln faces, all angles and jutting jaw — but with none of that long-gone president’s compassion. He was carrying a Remington .303. The fat one with the thick lips and small eyes, Heavy Foot for sure, had a lever-action Winchester 30–06. I’d heard him jack a shell into the chamber just before they came into view.
Good guns, but not in the hands of good guys.
Both of them were in full uniform. High-crowned hats, black boots, and all. Not the brown doughboy togs in which I had once looked so dapper. Their khaki duds had the words Game Warden sewed over their breast pockets.
They stopped thirty feet away from me.
Charley Bear, the Lincoln impersonator, said in a flat voice, We have a warrant for your arrest for trespassing. Stand up.
I stayed crouching. It was clear to me they didn’t know I owned the land I was on. Not that most people in the area knew. After all, it was registered under my official white name of Charles B. Island. If they were really serving a warrant from a judge, they’d know that. Plus there was one other thing wrong.
Game wardens don’t serve warrants, I said.
They said he was a smart one, Luth, Heavy Foot growled.
Too smart for his own good.
My Helper sent a wave of fire through my whole leg and I rolled sideways just as Luth raised his gun and pulled the trigger. It was pretty good for a snap shot. The hot lead whizzed past most of my face with the exception of the flesh it tore off along my left cheekbone, leaving a two-inch wound like a claw mark from an eagle’s talon.
As I rolled, I hurled sidearm the first of the baseball-sized rocks I’d palmed from the outside of the firepit. Not as fast as when I struck out Jim Thorpe twice back at Indian school. But high and hard enough to hit the strike zone in the center of Luth’s face. Bye-bye front teeth.
Heavy Foot had hesitated before bringing his gun up to his shoulder. By then I’d shifted the second stone to my throwing hand. I came up to one knee and let it fly. It struck square in the soft spot just above the fat man’s belly.
Ooof!
His gun went flying off to the side and he fell back clutching his gut.
Luth had lost his .303 when the first rock struck him. He was curled up, his hands clasped over his face.
I picked up both guns before I did anything else. Shucked out the shells and then, despite the fact that I hated to do it seeing as how guns themselves are innocent of evil intent, I tossed both weapons spinning over the edge of the cliff. By the time they hit the rocks below I had already rolled Heavy Foot over and yanked his belt out of his pants. I wrapped it around his elbows, which I’d pulled behind his back, cinched it tight enough for him to groan in protest.