Red Earth White Earth. Will Weaver

said at the same time.

      “Git them a light,” Jewell shouted.

      Guy crawled forward to his father. Tom was right behind. “What are you doing in here?” Martin said.

      “We’re smallest,” Guy said.

      His father stared. Then he said, “Okay. Long as I can see you both, and you come out when I say.”

      Guy and Tom nodded. They crawled forward. In the darkness and dim beam of the light, cattle still bawled and groaned. The wood and metal around Guy thudded and quivered from their kicking.

      “Mary Ann—Mary Ann!” first Guy and then Tom called. There was no answer.

      Guy worked his way forward on his belly until his flashlight shone on boots. Two sideways soles of boots. A cow’s head lay alongside the boots and its eyes reflected green. As the flashlight struck its eyes the cow flailed its head and struggled to get free. Every time the cow kicked, the boots jerked.

      “Pistol, we need the pistol,” Guy called.

      “Pistol,” Tom called back to Martin.

      Then Guy felt the pistol butt tap on his boot. He took the heavy gun in his right hand, steadied it with his left, then aimed it down the beam of his light to a spot between the green eyes of the cow. He closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger. In the small space around him the pistol’s noise crashed like a giant fist on all sides of his head. Afterward he felt the rapid death kick of the cow. In a minute the kicking slowed. When Guy’s hearing returned, the cow’s slow kicking sounded like cows’ hooves running through mud. Blood bubbles popped from the cow’s nose. When the cow finally lay still Guy crawled over its neck and shone the light forward. Bub lay pinned with his head against the cow’s hooves. His face had been kicked until it looked like some small animal run over again and again by cars on the highway until you couldn’t tell what it was. “Jesus,” Tom whispered from beside him.

      Guy turned off the light. He swallowed to keep from puking.

      Then he heard a whimpering. He turned on the light again. From behind Bub’s big body they saw yellow curls and round eyes. They scrambled forward.

      Mary Ann was sandwiched between Bub and heavy timber, two of whose spikes had nailed her right hand to her brother’s back. Guy and Tom braced against the wood and with their feet pushed Bub away. They jerked her hand free of the nails, then together carried her toward daylight.

      6

      Winter Saturdays, Guy and Tom and Mary Ann sledded on the hills above No Medicine Lake. Mary Ann, who wore a double mitten on her right hand, was always with them. Jewell Hartmeir would wait until spring to rebuild the barn so there were only cooking chores for Mary Ann. Guy’s parents often woke him late at night with their voices but they hardly spoke during the day. Tom came one Saturday with two black eyes and a puffed-up lip, none of which he would talk about. So the three of them played outside even in the coldest weather.

      “Stumps there and there and there,” Tom called, his nose dripping clear and shiny in the cold. He pointed to swells in the snow that ran down to the lake. Not far offshore was a fish house. The icehouse belonged to the old Indian, Zhingwaak. It was a small, white-painted shack no more than six feet square. Depending on the sunlight, Zhingwaak’s fish house seemed some days close to shore and other days far away. With bright sunlight on snow, the little house was invisible but for a thin, gray string of smoke wavering from the ice.

      They sledded and did not think about the fish house. Sometimes a dark rectangle suddenly appeared on the lake and only then did they remember it. For once in a morning and once in an afternoon Zhingwaak would swing open the door and step behind the house. Then he went back inside. The black door on the ice closed to white and the fish house again disappeared.

      “He ever get fish there?” Guy said. All the other icehouses were clustered on the sandbars two miles down the lake. There the water was clearer. The farther north you went on the lake, the cloudier the water became. That was because of the big underground spring which fed into the lake from somewhere under the hills that Guy and Tom and Mary slid on.

      Tom shrugged.

      “So why does he stay there?” Guy said.

      “He thinks the big northern pike live closest to the spring.”

      “He ever see one? I mean a really big one?”

      Tom nodded.

      “How big?” Guy said. He turned from the fish house to Tom.

      “Big as a shark,” Tom said.

      “Shit,” Mary Ann said. “Ain’t no sharks up here.”

      “Aren’t any sharks here,” Guy said automatically. “You want to stay in third grade the rest of your life?” He and Tom’s reading lessons had pulled Mary Ann up to third grade, but they still held school for her when they could find a warm place without parents.

      “Ain’t is a word,” Mary Ann said, pushing out her bottom lip.

      “No it ain’t,” Tom said. He grinned.

      “Then how come everybody uses it?” Mary Ann said.

      “Everybody around Flatwater, you mean,” Guy said, still thinking about Zhingwaak and the big pike. “You don’t hear people on TV using ‘ain’t.’ Your heartthrob Dr. Granger, and Julia, you don’t hear them using ain’t. And that’s how they got on television.”

      Mary Ann stared. “Really?”

      “For sure,” Tom said. “It’s like the world is full of little microphones that listen for people to say ‘ain’t’ and ‘ourn’ and ‘hisself’ and stuff like you say. The microphones are hooked up to a machine that keeps track of people. People who talk funny can never get on TV or become movie stars.”

      “Really?” Mary Ann said.

      Guy nodded. “Dr. Granger and Julia, too, they probably never said ‘ain’t’ in their whole lives,” Guy said, still staring across the ice, trying to spot the faint feather of smoke from Zhingwaak’s house.

      “Shit,” Mary Ann said. She kicked at the toboggan. When Guy looked back her eyes had begun to shine with tears. “That means I already could never be like Julia.”

      Guy and Tom glanced at each other.

      “Naw,” said Tom. “It’s like this. The people with the microphones and the machines take into account where you was born. Who your daddy and mom were. If your mom died, like yours did, they write that down too. If you got a slow start being a kid, like you did, they’re not going to be so tough on you.”

      “Take Julia’s or Dr. Granger’s kids,” Guy added, “they got a head start on the rest of us. But one ‘ain’t’ and they fall down a notch and we move up.”

      “Really?” Mary Ann said, beginning to smile.

      “For sure,” Tom said.

      “Get on,” Guy said, sliding the toboggan toward Mary Ann. He was still thinking about Zhingwaak and the big pike and the underground spring.

      In January a warm front lumbered slowly from the south onto the reservation. The knee-deep, fluffy snow settled like white bread whose yeast had failed. Cold weather came again and left a frozen crust on which their toboggan never slid better. Holding on to each other, Guy and Tom and Mary Ann swept down the hill toward No Medicine Lake. They soared shrieking over the ridge where the frozen water met the shore, slammed back onto the snow, then hissed forward across the ice. Sometimes their toboggan came within a snowball’s throw of Zhingwaak’s fish house.

      Once Zhingwaak opened his door and left it open. He was watching them.

      “Maybe we’re bothering him,” Guy said.

      “Naw,” Tom said, “nothing bothers him.”

      Another time when they were sliding, Zhingwaak came