Silence is Golden

Chapter 1

The Michelin all-weather radials gave a final-sounding crunch as Carole's Peugeot settled into the snow-drifted ditch. Snowflakes as big as feathers floated relentlessly down through the graying dusk, sparkled across the downcast beam of her one undamaged headlight, and, it seemed to Carole Sotterthwaite, landed with a soft plop.

The silence seemed to stretch for nearly the eternity of miles she had driven during the last two days, silence so deep that the hiss of steam form Peugeot's ruptured radiator, the small staccato pops of the engine cooling were only feeble accompaniment to the intense stillness. Carole mused that not even the desert hills surrounding Tel-el Farah, where she had shot scenes last Spring for an archeology documentary, had encompassed such a vast silence. Carole switched off the headlight, cautiously tried wiggling her toes, stretched her arms.

At least I'm not hurt. In the darkening stillness, her thoughts seemed almost to echo from the snow-cloaked pines across the road. Her father had given her a "Tourist Guide to Motoring in America," just the day before her parents both died. Carole pushed back the thought as a fresh wave of sorrow washed through her. First things first. The Tourist Guide had explicit instructions about surviving winter storms: Stay with your car. Carry a survival kit. Keep warm. The blanket her mother had given her, proud green-and-black McKay tartan of her mother's Scotch lineage, was on Peugeot's back seat. She had a torch in the ... "glove compartment," the Tourist Guide had advised her in it's Glossary of American Terms. She thought about checking the damage to her new car, about looking to see what had happened to the horse which had so suddenly materialized on this road through apparent wilderness.

She had flares in her toolbox under the seat; they made small globes of sputtering red light along the road in the quickly-falling snow. The horse lay already blanketed by white, its neck twisted beyond life. The Peugeot's frond end was smashed, pushed back beyond the radiator. The last farmhouse she remembered on this two-lane highway to Duluth was at least thirty kilometers behind her. Nothing to do but wait, she decided.

September 19. The tourist guidebook had promised brilliant displays of autumn leaves along Lake Superior's North Shore, not a blizzard of summer snow on the road from Fargo! Carole snuggled into the cocoon of warmth in the tartan blanket which now ensconced her on the front seat of her wounded Peugeot, sipped lukewarm tea poured from her mercifully undamaged Thermos, and keened her ears to the silent wilderness surrounding her. Somewhere in the woods, a branch snapped from the unaccustomed weight of first snow. So quiet I can hear a snowflake land, Carole mused as she listened to the enveloping whispers of the still-falling snow. She tucked the blanket more snugly around her feet, and thought about her trip to this particular snow-filled ditch in the Minnesota north woods.

"Your parents had planned this trip for you for a long time, you know." David Abernathy had sat with Carole in her father's study the morning after the funerals. Carole looked around the familiar room of the Devonshire Abbey House, watching July sunlight play through the ancient leaded panes of the east window, dancing across the gilded book-spines on the far wall. The comfortable pungency of the Reverend Doctor William Sotterthwaite's pipe smoke still seemed to hang in the air. Almost as if he's still here, Carole thought. Almost as if my mother's sitting across from him, almost as if they're still talking, laughing, weaving one of the brilliant tapestries of shared wit that had been her father's philosophy books.

Carole had sat quietly in the deep leather chair that head been "hers" for as long as she could remember. David had been waiting for her as she came back form her early-morning walk; one of the wide-brimmed hats she almost always wore outside hung from the stag's antlers on the wall behind her. "That can be your special privilege," her father had told her when a six year old Carole had burst into his study filled with excitement about a butterfly she had seen emerging form its chrysalis.

Carole Sotterthwaite had grown into a slender, athletic young woman. Her jet-black curls shone faintly auburn in the sunlight, her creamy skin had undertones of golden tan. Her dark brown eyes were slightly almond-shaped -- "Probably Genghis Khan himself sneaked across the Channel," her mother had gently teased her.

"Carole, you haven't heard a word I've said." David's voice had brought her back to the study abruptly, to the aching emptiness of her parents' unexpected death.

"Excuse me, David."

"I was saying to you that you're parents had planned to give you this trip for a long time, long before you and I decided to make it our honeymoon. You know how your mother felt about your having a chance to see the States before you had to make up your mind about your dual citizenship."

Her mother's Scottish independence, Carole had thought. Her father had been honored with a yearlong teaching Chair at the University of Minnesota. She had been born in Minneapolis, a much-loved only child. She had been brought back to England a two-month old baby with dual citizenship. "Keep your options open. You don't have to device until your twenty-first birthday," her mother had told her. "We'll make sure you have a chance to see the States before you make up your mind."

Her twenty-first birthday came next April. "Carole, I know you're grieving for your parents rather deeply right now," David was saying to her. "You and I both agree that our wedding should be a time of joy, not sorrow. Taking this trip will give you a chance to mourn and to heal, to find yourself. When you get back, we can get married, maybe honeymoon in Greece."

When you get back ... what was he saying? Carole glanced at her fiancé with a startled question in her eyes.

"I was going to tell you last week, I'd just heard. Then your parents were in that accident, and I didn't want to bother you with anything else. But, we've got to talk about it."

"What do we have to talk about?" Carole looked at her fiancé carefully. David was an aristocratic young man of thirty-one, blond, blue-eyed, well bred. The Abernathy’s had been friends of her family for as long as she could remember, except perhaps his spinster aunt Cornelia, who seemed to Carole to be sharply critical of her. David had been almost like an idolized older cousin to Carole in her childhood; they had been engaged for years. "What's wrong, David?"

"It's good news, actually. Just at a rather awkward time. I've been offered a fellowship at Oxford this year. You know how much that could mean to my career."

"And ... ?"

"Your new Peugeot's already being delivered through a dealer in Los Angeles. It's booked back here from New York on January 15. You've done more driving on the Continent than I have; you're an expert driver on either side of the road. You've had your immunizations, your passport and visas are in order, your tickets are paid for, and your reservations have been made. And Carole, you know how excited your parents were about giving you this trip. Don't disappoint them now." David had been making an appeal to her, Carole thought. "You know how much I'd like to be with you. You also know how much this Fellowship will mean to my career."

David was right about the Fellowship, Carole thought. He was a bright young scholar, but didn't have the incisive brilliance that her father ... had. She bit her lip. David was still talking.

" ... give you a chance to really understand the States. We'll miss each other, but you'll be fine. You did well enough earlier this year, clear across the Eastern Hemisphere with the B.B.C. film crew."

Something had happened between her and her fiancé during her internship, Carole thought. He had seemed proud when she graduated from the University early, had said he shared her honor of being chosen for the internship. But, something had changed, something she couldn't quite pin down.

On September third, David had kissed Carole gently at Heathrow. "Don't worry," he told her in the hubbub of the international terminal. "Your parents' ... your solicitor, now, has everything under control. I'll stop by the Abbey House from time to time, keep an eye on things for you. You won't need to worry." He touched her chin gently. "Good-bye, Carole."

His words of farewell echoed in the subdued booming of the jet's engines, at odd moments during her long flight to Los Angeles.

Chapter 2

Carole's Peugeot was lovely: deep brown real leather upholstery and exactly the sky-blue color she had imagined. "A custom job, ma'am," the elderly owner of the dealership told her. He assured her that he had checked everything out thoroughly, and offered to go along on a short ride "so you can get used to driving on the right side of the road, ma'am."

Los Angeles' notorious freeways weren't too different from the Autobahn, Carole decided as she drove back into the dealership. "You're an excellent driver, ma'am, you'll have a good trip." The dealer told her he'd spent two years of "the War in England, and I've always liked the British. There's a full set of maps in the glove compartment, so once you get out of this spaghetti bowl, you can't get lost in this great country! Welcome to America." He gave her a friendly salute as she left.

Carole spent a week playing tourist in Southern California: Hollywood, Disneyland, Sea World, the San Diego Zoo, and a trip to Tijuana, where she bought a lovely Mexican-silver bracelet inlaid with turquoise.

Professor Sotterthwaite had kept in touch with some of his former students. Carole had found his address book among his papers; her father had told her before the accident that he would give her a list of old family friends she might want to call. She hesitated, then called the number of Professor Lionel Warren at the Salk Institute in San Diego.

"Carole Sotterthwaite! Of course, your father had written that you might call. I've heard about what happened, the accident--we're terribly sorry. My wife and I would love to have you for dinner this evening, do you have other plans?"

Professor Warren and his wife were lovely warm people, and dinner stretched into an evening filled with laughter and fond memories of her parents. Perhaps David is right, Carole thought. Time and distance will heal the pain. As she prepared to leave, the Professor's wife pressed a gift-wrapped package into Carole's hand. "Your parents loved you more than anything else in this world, Carole. Remember that. In this box is just a small thing my husband and I thought you ought to have. You can open it at your hotel. Don't forget to call us if you need anything, you can call collect. You'll have a good trip!" The older woman hugged Carole warmly.

Carole carefully unwrapped the box, which contained a leather pouch, beautifully decorated with beadwork and obviously an antique. Inside the pouch, nestled in pungent herbs--sage, she thought--was a pipe bowl of ancient stone and an intricately carved wooden pipe stem, embellished with a delicate pattern worked in flattened, dyed porcupine quills. She recognized it as a "woman's pipe" from her father's books. The stone was meticulously carved into the form of a turtle. As the waves of Mission Bay lapping on the beach outside her hotel lulled her to sleep, Carole drowsily wondered why a former student at the University of Minnesota had given Professor Sotterthwaite's daughter such a valuable antique.

Carole was grateful for the Peugeot's air conditioning as she drove across the desert to Phoenix. She had been advised, "leave early, so you miss the worst of the heat," and was already on the road when sunrise was barely a faint wash of pink over the mountains to the east of San Diego. She had stopped more than once to take pictures of boulder-strewn mountains heaved toward the sky in golden dawn light, of the desert stretched toward eternity gleaming in the early-morning sun, of cactus nestled in ancient lava flows. As she drove onward, the earth and sun-filled sky shimmered in waves of afternoon heat; the buildings of downtown Phoenix seemed at first to be a mirage. "2:45 - - - 110E - - - 2:46 - - - 110E - - - " a bank sign flashed at her as she drove past. She chuckled at the Americans' refusal to adopt the International Metric Standards, thinking that 110 degrees Fahrenheit sounded a lot hotter than 43E Celsius.

The heat hit her like the breath of a smelting furnace when she stopped for petrol ... "gas." The grandfatherly Hispanic who pumped gas didn't even seem to be sweating. "Sí, señorita, you have about a three and half hour drive to the Grand Cañon. You have reservations, no?"

"Yes." Honeymoon reservations changed to a reservation for one, she thought sadly.

"Mira, chiquita." The elderly man smiled kindly at her. There is a good restaurante across the road, it is air-conditioned. You could have a good dinner, rest from your driving, and still get to the Grand Cañon village for your room reservation. When you leave, be sure to stay on the Maricopa Freeway; the number will change but you won't get lost if you follow the signs. Have a good visit to America, linda señorita."

The desert air had cooled perceptibly when Carole left the restaurant. The richly spiced Mexican food had been delicious, and the cool dimness of the dining a welcome respite from the sun. Thank you, old man, she thought. Thank you for the suggestion, and thank you for calling me "beautiful." The elderly Mexican was still pumping gas as Carole headed back toward the freeway; he smiled and raised his hand in salute as she drove past.

The sun was low in the sky as Carole went through Flagstaff; she stopped in the high desert outside the city to film one of the most spectacular sunsets she had ever seen. Stars were strewn across the sky like ten-carat diamonds sprinkled on black velvet as she crossed into the Kaibab forest. They seem so close I could almost reach out and gather them, Carole thought.

"Carole Sotterthwaite?" The desk clerk at the Bright Angel Lodge handed her a key. She thought only briefly about her postponed honeymoon as she rinsed off desert dust in the shower, closed her eyes to a persistent afterimage of the endless miles she had driven that day.

Dawn worked its way swiftly into the shadows of the Grand Canyon as Carole breakfasted in the rustic hotel dining room. She was planning to spend the day hiking in the canyon, and was already dressed in jeans, warm jacket over a light cotton blouse, and the desert walking boots which had served her so well in Tel-el Farah. She had been walking across the lobby toward her room to get her hat, her cameras and her canteen, when she heard her name called from the desk.

"Carole Sotterthwaite?" The young woman working behind the counter this morning smiled at her. "I thought that's who you are. Hank, that's who was working here last night, forgot to give this to you when you came in." She apologized, "Hank's new here." She handed Carole an airmail envelope with a British stamp, addressed to her in David's distinctive handwriting.

Chapter 3

Carole was surprised at how her hand shook as she reached for the envelope; hoped that the young woman behind the desk wouldn't hear her heart pounding. Hat and cameras unfetched in her room, she walked out of the Bright Angel Lodge.

There was a bench near the rim of the Grand Canyon. Carole sat there in the early morning sun, the wind ruffling unnoticed through her curls. She turned the envelope over in trembling hands, puzzling at the taped-up flaps--maybe Customs had opened it, she thought--then slit the end with her room-key. Her brow furrowed as she took four typewritten pages from the envelope; David had complained jovially that typewriting her love letters from Asia seemed "impersonal."

"Dear Carole," the letter began. The young woman bit her lip and breathed deeply to calm her pounding heart. David's letters to her had always begun with "Dearest Moppet."

"Please forgive me for writing you at the Bright Angel Lodge, but this was the earliest address of which I could be certain." Carole looked at the postmark on the envelope. It had been mailed the day after she left London!

"I feel particularly badly about your reading this on what we had both hoped would be the happiest night of your life. ..." A chipmunk unnoticed scampered at Carole's feet, begging for a handout. "... but I realize that it would be best to tell you this before you come back to England. I tried to tell you before you left, but I did not have the heart to add to your pain.

"By the time that you read this, Lizette and I will have been married. Of course you remember Lizette, my second cousin from Suffolk and a beautiful Englishwoman of the best breeding ..." The words on the page blurred into illegibility, and hot tears splashed onto them.

"Coward! You lying coward!" Carole spat the words into the morning. The chipmunk ran up a tree chattering at her. Carole crumpled up the letter, three pages unread, and was ready to hurl it into the abyss of the Grand Canyon when her eyes focused on the "NO LITTERING" sign. She stuffed the balled-up letter into the pocket of her jacket, and stood staring into the uncovered eons of the canyon.

As the sun rose in the brilliantly clear air, occasional strollers along the canyon rim thickened into a crowd of tourists. The timelessness of the vista stretched before her gradually filtered into Carole's mind, and she finally turned to walk back to the hotel. "But I can't stay here." She must have said it aloud, a garishly dressed American tourist glanced curiously at her.

A half an hour later, Carole had cancelled her week's paid reservations, and was packed and driving east, toward Cameron, Tuba City, "all points eastward," she chuckled bitterly. The smooth purring of the Peugeot's motor, the humming of her tires on the road, the vast rich ochres of the high desert under its turquoise bowl of sky were soothing, an immense panorama within which her own disappointment, her own recent losses seemed smaller in proportion.

Carole drove east on Highway 160, an almost fragile-seeming ribbon of modernity across ancient Navajo lands. Occasionally, she saw a hogan, a small round traditional house in the distance, or the minute specks of a boy and his family's sheep against the horizon. The traffic on the road was light: an occasional pickup truck, a few cars.

The day turned into evening, and the desert met with the Rocky Mountains. "Welcome to Cortez," a sign told her. And then another, "Motel - VACANCY." Carole pulled into the drive. She was soaking in an impersonal pink motel bathtub when she finally started considering what she was going to do next. Her parents had kept in touch with friends in Minnesota, in Minneapolis and in Duluth, why not visit them? She had nearly three months before the Peugeot was booked back to England, and her own ticket had been purchased with a one-year open-reservation return. Her dual citizenship meant that she needn't worry about the expiration of her British tourist visa. Clair had a continent to explore, and enough traveler’s checks to cover film, gas, food and hotels as long as they weren't the Ritz. The young Englishwoman towel-dried her curly hair, quickly dressed, and ran out to into the crisp Rocky Mountain air to get her maps and Tourist Guide.

Carole spent three days driving through the Rockies to Denver, three days of stopping by the side of the road whenever she pleased to film the heart-stopping scenery, to breathe the thin clean pine-scented air, three days of marveling at the fierce and gentle wonder of the mountains. She had skied in the Alps, of course, and had even briefly visited the Himalayas during her B.B.C. internship, but somehow the Rockies coupled awe-inspiring majesty with a feeling of intimate kinship. She drove out of Denver across the plains toward North Platte with the sense of parting from a friend.

The American Interstate highways across the Great Plains had their own rhythm. They seemed to Carole almost a world of their own, perpetually flowing back and forth across golden expanses of ripening grain and vast cattle ranches. Denver to North Platte, North Platte to Lincoln, Lincoln to Omaha ... After the first hundred miles, Carole saw familiar faces in the truck stop restaurants, passed and was later passed by cars she recognized. The Rambler sedan she had just passed slowing for the Rest Stop exit belonged to an elderly couple. She remembered hearing them talking as they sat at the next table in a restaurant two hundred miles back, overhearing that they were going to their grandson's Bar Mitzvah in Chicago. She remembered hearing the driver of the cattle truck that passed her, telling other truckers at the counter that he hoped that his next run would be back home to his family in "Sain' Louie."

Carole passed the Boys Town exit, and thought about the Boys Town Christmas seals on American Christmas cards her father had gotten during her childhood. She stopped for gas just outside of Omaha, and stood for a few minutes watching a great orange ball of a sun sinking through the dust of the Great Plains toward the horizon.

As she came out of the washroom, Carole saw a familiar-looking, battered green station wagon with Minnesota license plates clatter and heave its way toward the Service Plaza. The vehicle seemed to gather a last bit of strength to struggle up the driveway, then quit altogether half way to the parking area, black smoke pouring out from under the bonnet ... "hood." A tall Scandinavian-looking woman got out, and quickly pulled her little girl out after her. Carole remembered seeing them in a rest-stop washroom, the woman gently combing the child's blonde hair. "Don't worry, Missy," she heard her say, "we can go back to the farm and help Grandma and Grandpa for awhile."

Missy's mother had opened the hood of her car, and seemed to be looking at the motor with a kind of despair, consulting with one of the men from the service plaza. Words drifted through the dusk to Carole as she stood, transfixed, still near the washroom door. "Fifty dollars! I know that old clunker doesn't have another mile in her, but just the tires are worth more than fifty dollars! Bus tickets cost more than fifty dollars."

"Take it or leave it, miss. I could charge you to have it towed out of here, you know." The man slammed the hoot shut and started walking back toward the pool of light by the gas pumps.

Carole hesitated. She was going to Minnesota. The stranger had seemed kind and gentle when she combed her child's hair, and she looked honest. The blonde woman and her daughter were still standing, looking helplessly, at their station wagon.

"Excuse me." Carole spoke first. "Were you going to Minnesota?"

"Just east of Warren. My folks have a farm there. My name's Kirsten Larsen, and this is my daughter Missy." Missy held out her hand politely.

Carole shook the child's hand gravely. "I'm Carole Sotterthwaite." She took a deep breath. "I couldn't help overhearing what the service-man said about your car. Perhaps I could give you a lift."

They reached the Larsen farm before dawn. Carole, dozing as Kirsten drove, woke when the Peugeot headed down a gravel road toward the farmstead. Light was already streaming from the kitchen window. Carole was urged to stay for breakfast--the smell of homemade was wafting from the kitchen as she helped Kirsten carry her battered luggage into the farmhouse. "Rest before you go," Mrs. Larsen had told Carole after a hearty farm breakfast. "I know it's a long drive from Omaha, and probably neither one of you girls slept much."

When Carole woke in the tidy spare bedroom, it was late in the morning. "It's not often we have a visitor, particularly a neighbor to Sweden." She had stayed for "a little lunch"--Carole thought she heard the table creaking under its load of food.

"You're welcome to stay another day or two. It's nearly a six hour drive to Duluth." Mr. Larsen added, "There's a smell of snow in the air." Carole considered their offer. The balmy warmth of the morning had been replaced by an autumn crispness in the hour spent over lunch and coffee, and she could see clouds above the eastern horizon.

"Well, if you're sure you won't stay another few days, here's a snack for the road." Mrs. Larsen loaded a massive wicker hamper into the back seat of the Peugeot. "You're a lovely girl, you know you're welcome here any time. Be sure to write." The whole family waved to Carole as she drove out of the farmyard.

Carole glanced at her watch. It was nearly one o'clock. She felt rested, renewed by the warmth of the Larsen family. I should be in Duluth by seven, she thought.

By one-thirty, she was beginning to wish she had listened to the old farmer. Slate-gray clouds filled the sky, and it was getting cold. She turned the heater in the car up.

"This road goes straight to Highway one," the Larsen’s had told her. "Go east on Highway one, then the road is better if you go south on fifty-nine--that's in Thief River Falls. Keep going to Highway two. That will take you straight into Duluth."

By two o'clock, the snow began to fall, a thick veil of wet snowflakes that stuck to everything. Carole peered through a white screen of dancing snowflakes, trying to read signs covered with snow. Had she already passed Thief River Falls? She stopped at the side of the road, got her jacket, boots and woolen hat out of the trunk, and put them on. She studied her map. That town by the river, ten miles back--that must have been it--but I didn't see a sign. Highway one has a "T" intersection farther on, I can't miss that one, Carole thought. If the weather doesn't clear up, I can find a motel in Bemidji tonight. Carole drove eastward, into the storm.

Chapter 4

The wet snow accumulated on the road, and Carole had to slow to 45, then to 30 to keep her Peugeot on the slippery road, in spite of the Michelin all-weather radials. It was almost five o'clock when she reached the corner T in the road. She had been traveling through pine woods for perhaps ten miles; as she turned south she saw the road curved through low hills covered with pines and aspen.

Dusk came quickly in the storm; she switched on the lights. The densely falling snow sparkled like a science-fiction kaleidoscope in the headlight beams. Carole peered into the maelstrom: the road was a barely distinguishable ribbon of trackless white, with shadows of ditches dropping on both sides.

Carole blinked--it seemed like there was a horse silhouetted against the snow on the road ahead of her. She honked her horn, and it turned to face her. She braked carefully and honked again--the horse was running toward her like a maddened bull. Carole braked harder, but the Peugeot skidded out of control and slithered toward the ditch as horse and car collided.

Carole shivered slightly, and clicked on her torch to check the time. 10:30. She had been waiting in the ditch for nearly five hours. Highway 1 was a State Highway--surely someone would come.

She ate a chicken sandwich, made with still aromatic fresh bread, from the "snack" hamper Mrs. Larsen had given her. Carole smiled to herself. I should have listened but at least I won't starve! She scraped her frosted breath from the car windshield again, looking into the still, white night. It seemed as though the snow wasn't falling as heavily, at least. Carole switched on the car radio, turned the dial across FM and AM static, and finally heard a scratchy Yankee voice fading in and out of the static. "Silence is golden, golden ..." Carole turned the radio off again, and huddled into her blankets.

11:15. Kirsten had left half a pack of Marlboros in the car. Although Carole didn't often smoke, she lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, watching the glowing red ember in the darkness. The snow stopped falling; she scraped the frost off the car window again and watched a lone star peek through a break in the clouds.

It was nearly midnight when she saw the lights. First, a distant flicker against the snow from around the curve of the road, perhaps two miles away. Then, a steady pattern, two lights from the top of a distant vehicle, scanning the woods, going very slowly. Carole watched, hardly daring to hope. The vehicle came closer.

She turned on her headlight, honked her horn, and waved her torch out the window. A pickup truck stopped on the road by her, a person in a parka jumped down from the box and shined a spotlight toward her. "Aniin, niiji," she heard a young man's voice call to her.

Another person in a parka got out of the cab. An older woman's voice this time, with an accent she had never heard. "Are you OK?"

"I hit a horse and my car went into the ditch." Carole's voice sounded shaky and her English accent echoed back at her from the woods. "The front end of my car is rather badly smashed."

The boy called to her, "What about the..."--a pause--"horse?"

"I'm afraid its neck is broken. I'm awfully sorry, I don't know whose horse it was. Maybe you'll know. It's over there under the snow." Carole got out of the Peugeot and pointed with her arm.

"Are you alright?"

"I don't think I'm hurt."

The parka'ed figure with the woman's voice stopped near Carole. "Come on, it's warm in the pickup." She helped Carole, whose legs were suddenly shaky, into the cab. Carole smelled coffee, and was handed a warm cup. "Warm up awhile, you must have been down in that ditch for a long time. We'll get your car out for you."

The motor on the pickup truck was kept running, and the heater poured warmth over Carole. She sipped the hot coffee, and watched in glimpses lit by the spotlights as --inexplicably--the four people dragged the dead horse over to the pickup truck, and lifted and shoved it onto the back. In the brief flashes of light piercing the night, the huge horse looked oddly mis-shaped, unaccountably strange. She felt the springs of the truck sag, then settle lower under the weight of the dead animal in the back. A heavy chain was run to the bumper of the Peugeot, and hooked around the twisted front bumper. Over the blast of the heater and the low roaring of the motor, Carole thought she heard words of an unknown language.

The woman got back in the cab. "We're going to try to pull your car out now. Did you finish your coffee? OK, then, hold on, we'll have to jerk it out."

The pickup truck accelerated amazingly quickly, Carole thought, on the slippery highway. The chain snapped taut with a "clang," and Carole was almost thrown forward toward the dash. The tires of the pickup whined against the snow; they moved forward about six feet before they stopped.

"Again." The woman had opened the door and shouted. "We'll have to jerk it a couple more times," she told Carole.

The Peugeot was out of the ditch. Carole sat alone in the cab of the pickup again, and watched the dimly lit silhouettes of the people examining her car, then apparently talking. The woman came back to the truck.

"Where were you going?"

"Duluth."

"Was something urgent, that you were driving in this storm?"

"No, I didn't expect snow in September."

"You're welcome to spend the night with us. We can tow your car home, and you can decide what you want to do in the morning."

Carole could feel deep warmth in the voice of this woman whose face she had not yet seen. "Thank you," she said quietly.

It seemed to Carole as though they had driven another fifteen miles, slowly through the snowy night, towing her Peugeot. The boy rode in the cab with Carole; the woman drove. Someone steered the Peugeot, another rode in the back with the dead horse. To Carole, the woman's silence somehow seemed more companionable than most conversations, and she was content to sit quietly as they drove. A yard light shone over a house near the road, then another.

"Would you like to make a phone call tonight?"

Carole thought, no one was expecting her, no one was worrying. "No, thank you."

They passed the houses, and the yard lights disappeared in the darkness behind them. "You must have been waiting a long time in that ditch. Your tracks were filled with snow."

"Since just after dark."

"Ay!" The woman turned onto a gravel road, and drove north into what looked to Carole like dense forest. "I should tell you, my name is Rose Sunrise."

Chapter 5

Rose turned slightly toward Carole in the darkness of the pickup cab. "This is the ancestral land of the Bear Dodem--the White people call it Lac Rouge Indian Reservation. We're just about home, now."

The gravel road curved, and Carole saw the lighted windows of a small house in the clearing. "My name is Carole Sotterthwaite," she said softly.

Rose drove the pickup around a curved driveway, and stopped so that Carole's Peugeot was parked near the door. "Welcome, Carole."

Carole sat at the kitchen table of Rose's house, drinking some deliciously warming herbal tea, eating homemade bread and some kind of soup. The light of the kitchen showed Rose to be a dark, still-lovely middle aged woman, Carole thought--but she had helped lift that horse! One of the boys had brought her suitcase in for her and hauled in the hamper. The cold wouldn't hurt her cameras, Carole decided. The young boy shyly handed Carole her car keys, and told her the car was locked.

Rose showed her the bathroom and handed her a clean towel. "You've probably been through too much today to want to talk much?" Carole nodded; she was getting drowsy in the warmth of the house. Carole was shown a bed with the most beautiful patchwork quilt she had ever seen, and, she thought she could hear the voice of her mother from her childhood, "before you could say 'Jack Robinson,'" she slept.

The sun streamed in the window. Carole could hear the sounds of the household around her, voices talking and laughing, the motor of a car in the yard. She smelled coffee, baked bread, and the deep brown aroma of some kind of roasting meat. Carole got up and looked around the room where she had slept. Two beds neatly made with vibrant quilts, a small hammock hung from the walls over one of them. Her suitcase stood beside her bed. Carole looked out the window at the sunlight sparkling on the snow, at the forest surrounding her, at the azure sky. She dressed and made the bed, pausing to admire the vibrant interplay of colors on the quilt. She brushed her hair, and opened one of the two doors in the room--the closet. She closed it, and walked into the main room of the house.

Rose and a young woman sat at the kitchen table, and a toddler stood near a bright braided rug and looked at her with big eyes. A tall man had his back to her, pouring himself a cup of coffee at the stove. Rose pointed with her eyes at the bathroom door; Carole walked quickly into the bathroom and shut the door.

Five minutes later, washed and with light makeup, Carole entered the kitchen-living room again. At the kitchen table, drinking coffee, sat ... Carole took a sharp breath ... the handsomest man she had ever seen.

His skin glowed a golden brown, and the plaid flannel shirt he wore rippled over his muscles as he illustrated what he was saying with his arms and hands. His hair was raven-black, lightly frosted with gray at the temples, glistening with rainbow highlights. The air around him seemed to crackle with his electricity. He ... Carole looked down, embarrassed, when he looked toward her with deep dark eyes and caught her staring at him. The man smiled at her; Carole felt a delicious warmth spreading through her.

"So, great hunter! Come have a cup of coffee and sit down with us." The man's voice was deep and resonant; he sounded warm and friendly.

"The cups are in the cupboard." Rose pointed with her lips and a slight nod of her head, and winked, Carole felt with understanding, at her.

Carole hoped nobody noticed her shaking hands as she poured her coffee. She sat on the only empty chair at the table, the one just across the corner from the man. She could feel his warmth smoldering through the air toward her, and steadied herself.

"Next time, use a rifle," the man told her.

"Pardon me?"

"Do you remember the ..." again that pause "... horse you hit yesterday?"

Carole nodded mutely.

"Did you honk your horn at it?"

"Yes, but ..."

Rose told her. "That was a bull-moose, my girl, not a horse."

"Oh." Carole had never seen a moose before.

"Sometimes a bull-moose will think a car horn is the voice of another male challenging him to fight. That's why he charged at you. The moose didn't win, but," Rose looked at her sympathetically, "neither did your car."

"A lot of men hunt for a lifetime, and never get a moose," the man said. "You come to Lac Rouge, and in just a few hours you have one. But," he sounded kind now, "it doesn't take three weeks to get a rifle ready for your next hunt."

Carole took a sip of her coffee. "And, you don't have to tow it out of ditches and through storms," she mused. "Thank you," she said to Rose. "Is there a Peugeot shop near here?"

Rose answered with a word in what seemed to be her native language, indicating the man with a slight gesture of her eyes, "has been looking for parts this morning. The nearest Peugeot dealer is in Minneapolis, about 260 miles, 420 kilometers, from here."

Carole thought, it's less than that from London to Paris!

"You can order parts in Bemidji." The devastatingly handsome man with the unpronounceable name was talking to her. "Maybe three weeks, maybe longer, that's what they said at 'Bunyan Auto. We can fix your car for you, but it may take some time. Would you like your car 'by the book,' or so that runs OK and looks OK?"

"You are welcome to stay as long as you like, Carole," Rose added.

Thoughts spun like a whirlpool in the young Englishwoman's mind. Her brand-new Peugeot, sleek sky-blue machine ... what did the man mean by 'OK'? She thought about an old pickup truck she had driven behind for several miles on the Navajo Reservation, running smoothly at 45 miles per hour, but so patched it had been impossible for her to tell what color it had once been, or even which company had made it. But, what if Peugeot parts had to be sent by sea from France to this remote place? She simply sell her once-beautiful new car--but who would buy it? If the Peugeot ran, at least, she could drive it to New York and ship it home to be fixed properly. Maybe that was best. "OK is good enough," she said. "Do you know yet how much it will cost?"

"You can pay for the parts we need to buy. We might have some parts that will fit around her. As for anything else, you don't need to think about it. My mother-in-law"--the man indicated Rose--"likes you and enjoys your company."

Mother-in-law ... he's married! Carole's heart fell like a curling stone shattering too-thin ice, and sank through the floor.

Rose was talking to the man. "Ah-bi-noo-jee," she used a different word this time, "you're going to Bemidji today, then?"

"I think so."

"'Indians' have to pay deposit to order parts there." Rose did not say this to Carole, but Carole thought she understood. She went back into the bedroom to get her handbag.

The young woman, who had been sitting so quietly that Carole had almost forgotten her, was dressing her toddler in boots, hat and jacket when Carole came back into the room. The man still sat at the table, finishing his coffee. Carole hesitantly sat down again, and handed the man a hundred dollar bill. "Will this be enough?"

"Ahau`! I will bring you your change."

Carole tried to think quickly, although her nearness to the man made her tremble in spite of herself. "Maybe you could get some petrol for yourself, and whatever Rose needs."

"Petrol. Ahau`." He added, "Later this afternoon we could move your Peugeot to my garage. It would be easier to work on, there." Carole shyly handed him the keys, and in spite of herself, felt a surge of warmth flood her as their fingers brushed together.

The young dark-haired 'Indian' woman had already put on her own jacket, and was going outside with her child. The man quickly drank the last of his coffee, put the cup in the sink, and went to the door. He turned to Carole. "See you, then, Sha-ga-nosh-equens."

Carole sat at the kitchen table with Rose. "So, you have a new name, Sha-ga-nosh-equens. That means 'little Englishwoman.' Are you?"

Carole was confused, feeling as if she only caught surface glimpses of what was going on around her, among these indigenous people. The morning had been a blur of more people, a delicious lunch of food she could not identify, of children who seemingly appeared from nowhere to help her unload the rest of her things from the Peugeot. Even when these kind people were talking English, it seemed like another language."

Rose noticed her confusion. "Don't worry about it, my girl. Sometimes"--she used an unintelligible word again, the one she had called that devastating man--"tells jokes you will not understand right away."

"Your," Carole paused, "son-in-law. Would you tell me his name more slowly?"

Rose chuckled, and spoke the name more slowly, but Carole could not catch the sounds. "He was given a Christian name, Françoise, by the Missionaries, but he is proud of his Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway identity and never uses it. Some people call him 'Zuus-way,' though."

"Zow-sway." An image of comic-book illustrations, "Pow! Smack!" came unbidden into her mind. What that man did to her heart--but he was married! Carole sighed.

"Would you like to take a look at your moose?

"My moose? ... Oh."

"It's not far. You might want your jacket."

The weather had remembered that it was still supposed to be summer, Carole thought, as they walked across Rose's yard. The snow had melted to islands of white in the shade. The air was almost alive, sparkling clean, a nearly intoxicating ambrosia of pine trees in the woods, loamy earth, a hint of wood smoke. Carole had oddly foolish wearing her accustomed wide-brimmed had; the sun caressed her skin and hair with warmth, sparkled through the leaves of the trees in gem-colors of emerald and peridot, ruby and amber and topaz. Birds and squirrels moved with quick assurance through the woods. Rose motioned for her to look up: there was a pair of bald eagles soaring through the top of the azure sky.

The moose seemed to be hanging in the trees just beyond a shed at the edge of the yard. Hanging, actually, from a rope tied around its neck, looped over a massive branch, and tied at the other end to a pickup truck loaded with short sections of logs. In the daylight, Carole was surprised that she had mistaken it for a horse. Covered with dark brown hair, the moose was bigger than an enormous draft horse. Its legs were long and slender, and on its head lolling above the taut ropes, was a set of flat antlers nearly eight feet across.

"What were you going to do with your moose?"

"Zow-sway said that you hunt them?"

"You ate roast moose today."

It had been delicious, Carole remembered. "Can I give the moose to you?"

"I would share him with the others who were hunting with me last night: Red, Little Joe, and," Rose chuckled, "Zuus-way." She paused. "This moose needs to be skinned."

Carole swallowed, then nodded. "I can help."

Rose looked at Carole, dressed in beige linen slacks, a pale turquoise silk shirt and an Egyptian cotton cream-colored windbreaker. "I have some old clothes that you can wear."

Carole re-crossed the yard in the jeans, cotton-flannel shirt, nylon windbreaker and running shoes that Rose had dug out of a cardboard box in the closet. She watched as Rose backed up the pickup truck until the moose rested on the ground. Someone had already gutted it and stuffed the cavity with grass. "We had to put him away from the dogs until you decided what to do," she explained, and handed Carole a sharp butcher knife. "Watch and learn."

It took most of the afternoon for the two women to skin the enormous animal and cut it into pieces that they stacked in the shed, next to the rolled hide and cardboard boxes that someone had filled earlier with the organ-meats. "Tonight is going to be cool enough," Rose explained. "Tomorrow, I can package and freeze what we don't give away. My niece would like the hide, if that's alright with you."

Carole had placed first in several swimming meets at University, and had carried more than seventy pounds of photographic equipment for many miles during her internship. But, Rose picked up hindquarters that Carole could not budge, and lifted them easily onto the shelves in the shed. Carole looked down at her borrowed clothes: they were patterned in shades of red and oxblood. She could feel a streak of dried blood on her face, where she had absentmindedly pushed her hair out of the way. Rose looked at her and smiled. "You did a good job, my girl. There is a basin in the tub to soak your clothes, and you can take a hot bath."

As Rose and Carole crossed the yard, Carole saw two teenage boys attaching the Peugeot to a pickup truck. Rose stopped to talk to them, but Carole, who had never as much as plucked a chicken before that day, felt a rush of aftershock at her blood-spattered clothes, a delayed reaction to butchering a moose. She rushed into the house, into the bedroom, and grabbed clean clothes and shampoo from her suitcase.

As she opened the bedroom door to go through the larger room, she saw Zuus-way standing in the middle of that room, looking right at her. "Aniin, sha-ga-nosh-equens!"

The electrifying presence of that man standing alone in the room shot through Carole, tearing her into a tornado of conflicting emotions. She stood rooted to a spot by the doorway for a moment, looking at him in round-eyed shock. Then, with a small moan light a frightened rabbit, she bolted into the bathroom and locked the door.

Chapter 6

After a week in Rose's household, Carole had begun to feel comfortable with the gentle rhythm of life among these traditional Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway. She had learned to pronounce their indigenous name, Ah-neesh-ee-nah-bay-ot-chib-way, and thought she somewhat understand why they objected to what they called "that White man's stereotype, 'Indian'." She had been surprised to learn that Rose was 67 years old, and had begun to think of her almost as a grandmother of her own, the "Grammar" she had often wished for as a child.

Carole and Irene were becoming friends, also. Irene had laughed when Carole told her she thought the young woman was "Zow-sway's wife," then explained that her husband was in the Air Force, stationed overseas, and that she and the toddler, a precocious little girl named "Waa-bi-gwens -- Little Flower" were "staying with Grandma until Big Joe's tour of duty is up."

Carole had started to sense the "interconnectedness of life," as Rose explained to her, and had been able to help cut up the front shoulder of the moose which Rose kept for the family. She had been fascinated by Rose's description of the unfettered life of the moose and her stories of how the animals gave "We, the People, that's what Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway means" the gift of their meat; she was starting to sense a profound beauty in her hosts' way of life.

Carole's borrowed moose-butchering clothes had washed out as good as new; Rose had given her a soap powder to soak them in overnight, and told her, "they fit you nicely, keep them" as she showed her how to use the old Maytag wringer-washer. Carole added her road-soiled clothes to her laundry, grateful for Rose's instructions on how to fold her pants as they went through the wringer, so as not to break the zippers.

She had hung her clothes out on the line in the yard in a morning saturated with vibrant autumn sunlight. When turning out the pockets of her jacket, she found the crumpled letter she had received from David--she could scarcely believe it--less than two weeks earlier. She held the soggy ball of onionskin and airmail envelope in her hand for a moment, noticing that the typewritten characters were still clear. She did not want to read three and a half pages of self-justification and blame, she decided; she wadded the ball more tightly and tossed it into the woods. "The hell with you, David! I'm glad Lizette is the one stuck with you! You deserve each other!" Carole had half-laughingly shouted in the direction of the pitched-away letter.

Rose took Carole to see the sugarbush where the family made maple syrup and maple sugar every spring. She had helped stack firewood for the winter, and had gone "fall-fishing," as the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway called it, with Rose. Carole had found where she was on her map of Minnesota, and from the map she knew that Lac Rouge was a big lake. That knowledge hadn't prepared her for the lake itself, stretching from the wooded, rocky shoreline nearly to the horizon. The water was sapphire-blue, sparkling from a billion facets in the clear autumn sun.

Carole had enjoyed setting the gill nets from a small outboard boat in the warm afternoon sun, but pulling the nets the following morning had moved her deeply. The big lake had been glassy-smooth, occasional shreds of mist hovering near the surface of the water in the gray pre-dawn light. The nets were pulled from the water with the outboard motor shut off; as they pulled the nets into the boat, the motion also moved the boat along the line of nets. The air was cool but not frosty, and breathing was inhaling a potent tonic for the spirit. The fish caught in the nets were still alive, and they shone like fire opals in molten silver as they were pulled from the water in that pre-dawn light. As Carole and Rose worked their way along the line of nets in the still, early morning, the sky was transformed by the still-unseen sun into luminescent pink, and then into a vast golden-glowing dome, counterpointed by the silhouettes of great blue herons against the eastern sky, by the wheeling cries of sea gulls, by the stately figures of pelicans floating behind the boat hoping for a handout. The mirrored surface of the water echoed the blazing symphony of the sky, and the sky resounded to water, until it seemed as though the two women were working in the midst of a vast crescendo of living, singing light. The morning song of the lake climaxed when the great golden ball of the sun climbed above the horizon, sending rivers of molten fire in torrents across the water, turning the wispy patches of mist into golden streamers, igniting the heavens in the glory of a new day. "For a moment I could feel God himself in the sunrise," Carole told Rose later that morning.

"We all feel it," Rose answered. The two women were disentangling fish from the gill nets, then hanging the long nets to dry on cedar racks at one side of the yard. "My husband's grandfather was born during a sunrise like that, and such a moment is his namesake, a song of Grandmother Earth and the Midé, and of we, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway who have been one with this place since the beginning of human time." Rose started removing fish from the last net, quickly slipping the nylon mesh free from the gills and tossing the fish in a handy box. "It may be harder to see the harmony and beauty if you are suffering from hunger in the bitter cold, Carole, or," Rose said almost to herself, "if you have to pull nets in a fall storm, and the lake takes your child, but," she looked at Carole, "it all has meaning, and each moment is in its own way a gift."

Later in the morning, Carole had watched Rose deftly filleting the mound of fish: her knife flashed quickly four times in the son, and another set of fillets flipped into the dishpan, another set of guts into the box for the dogs. She wondered if Rose had lost a child to the lake, but did not want to ask.

Carole had not seen Zuus-way since she had run, panicked, into the bathroom the day she had helped skin the moose. Later that evening, Rose had given her $57, "your change, and Zuus-way feels badly that he frightened you." Carole felt "badly," too. She had lain, sleepless, for many hours in--she had begun to think of it as "her"--bed, seeing his high-cheeked face, his smile, the lively bottomless pools that his eyes seemed. She had tossed restlessly, hearing the soft sleep sounds of Rose of Irene and her daughter, watching the stars twinkle beyond the trees, watching the waxing moon soar through the night, and once sleeplessly watching the first dawn light wash against the eastern sky. She had turned the burning question every way she could in her mind. Her morals were too high to look twice at a married man, no matter what. Even if his simple presence in a room turned her blood to fire and her knees to water.

But--what did he mean by "mother-in-law?" Carole studied "Kinship Structure" in an anthropology class during her junior year at University. At the time, the charts and diagrams, the dry mathematical formulae of formal kinship analysis, had seemed pointless, useless abstractions. Unusual for Carole, she had merely learned enough to pass the exam with high marks, then promptly forgotten it all. But during the last week, during her nightly torment, technical terms chased each other through her head, if Z was to FS as ... fictive, avuncular ... did the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway use Iroquoian or Siouan kinship terminology ... and she couldn't possibly decide if a person could possibly be a son-in-law without having a wife! Carole awoke in the mornings feeling rested, but each night the aching longings and the circuitous questions returned. There must be a keystone to this torment of a jigsaw puzzle, she had thought sleepily the night before.

The morning of September 28 was gray and drizzly. "We need the rain," Rose said, putting a pan of biscuits into the oven and stirring a skillet of venison gravy. Waa-bi-gwens toddled into the kitchen, still tousled by sleep, chattering happily about "bikit an gavee," then--Carole turned quickly from the bowl of bread she was kneading to look at her, about "unka saway."

The child had sharp ears, Carole thought, as a minute later Zuus-way's venerable green pickup truck purred into the yard. Rose smiled at her, and then winked in a mischievous way that Carole couldn't have imagined a grandmother could wink. "Shall I tell him you need bread to put in your oven, Carole?"

Under her deepening tan, Carole blushed a brilliant red. As she had become a more comfortable part of this household, the other women talked more freely around her, and some of their conversation included a hilarious--to them--interplay of double entendre. Carole had begun to appreciate their humor, regretted that her clumsiness with the English words--but Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway thought patterns--kept her from playing their talking games, and blushed furiously every time they teased her, usually about Zuus-way. Was she that obvious about the feelings she tried to keep locked in her heard, or did she perhaps talk in her sleep? Their teasing was gentle, friendly, and between--yes, she had begun to think of them as "family," but...

Zuus-way entered the room to see her with her hands covered flour, her face blushed a glowing neon red.

Chapter 7

To Carole, Zuus-way seemed almost ... subdued. True, she admitted to herself as she concentrated on kneading the bowl in bread in front of her, and watched the man only from the corners of her eyes, his warmth and electricity still made the air touching him dance with excitement, until he almost glowed, true that he moved with a powerful and fluid grace that made even the most gifted athletes she had ever seen seem clumsy blobs by comparison, true that the very atoms in the walls of the house seemed to realign themselves to harmonize with his personality--but he seemed subdued.

Carole had even tried to suppress her rising, relentless attraction to this man with the unpronounceable name, during the long nights of the previous week, with racism, much as it repelled her, much as she detested herself for trying. "Woman, he is an Indian," she tried to tell herself in forced tones of anger during the night, even as her heart sang, glorying in every syllable, "he is Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway." She tried to conjure up the stereotyped and bigoted images that every European and American child was exposed to, but all she could see was the gentle kindness of the people under whose roof she lay awake, their dignity and their beauty. She had tried to imagine scenarios of herself, with an Indian man, socializing with her English friends, even the searing aristocratic gaze of David's Aunt Cornelia, but what they might think made absolutely no difference. All that she could make herself see during those restless nights was the unbounded glory of this man as she really did see him.

If he was married, she would go as soon as her car was fixed, telling him no more than the gradually fading scarlet of her face probably already told him; she hadn't said anything to anybody. She would remember his warmth, his shining beauty and the magnificent warmth of his spirit, and in the remembering the English sky would brighten and the birds sing more harmoniously, she would ... knead the bread. Carole kneaded the bread vigorously. She turned the bowl and pushed her knuckles through the already-elastic dough, nearly through the bowl and into the counter. Carole kneaded with a rhythmic desperation, as though she could somehow knead the tumultuous singing of her soul into silence at the same time.

Waa-bi-gwens ran toward Zuus-way when he opened the door; he had held the little girl for a few minutes and listened to her chatter, with sincere interest, it seemed to Carole as she kneaded. He put the child back on the floor, and she toddled toward her mother.

Zuus-way walked toward the stove, took a cup out of the draining-rack by the sink, and poured himself a cup of "black-medicine-water," she had been told the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway word meant literally. He replaced the large white-flecked dark blue enamel coffeepot on the back of the combination gas-and-woodburning kitchen stove, where on cool days it stayed warm and got steadily stronger. Zuus-way, the man she had never seen move without purpose, who never floundered or wasted motion, walked to the table and set the coffee-filled cup down. He walked back to drain-rack, picked up a spoon, and set it down. He rummaged through the silver and picked up a second spoon. He stood about six feet from where Carole was standing kneading bread as though her life depended on it. Zuus-way looked at the spoon he held in his hand, as though that small piece of stainless steel could reveal to him the answer of a perplexing question. Carole could smell the clean-washed aroma of the man, underscored by the myrrh of his vibrant masculinity. She turned the bread bowl again and pushed her hand into the gleamingly elastic ... sensual ... bread dough.

Zuus-way turned his head toward her. "Hello, Carole." His eyes were pools of warmth, tenderness, concern, even love for her.

Carole's voice shook, her heart quaked. "Hello, Zuus-way." He smiled briefly at her, and her blood felt like the crimson fire of a newly risen sun on the lake. Zuus-way walked back to the table, sat down, and began absently stirring his plain black coffee as he talked to Rose in a quiet voice.

Carole looked at her bread dough. If she kneaded it any more, she realized, the biscuits and loaves would probably bounce all the way from here to Minneapolis. She covered the bowl, placed it in a warm spot near the stove, and cleaned her hands. She poured herself a cup of coffee, and walked, carefully and on shaking legs, to the table.

"Zuus-way thought that you might like to see how your car is getting fixed," Rose said to her, after she sat down. "He's going over there now. I'd like to see, too--I'll walk over there with youse if you'd like." Carole nodded, unable to trust her voice.

It had stopped drizzling, but the sky remained a leaden gray. They walked along the path that Carole remembered as leading to the sugar bush, through trees still glistening with moisture. Somehow walking in the woods is strangely calming, Carole thought as the three of them turned down another path she had not noticed before.

They walked past extensive gardens, mostly dormant since the first frost, although rutabagas, lettuce and cabbage still stood as proud rows of green. She saw a young apple orchard at the far side of the garden, and then they turned into the woods again on another path.

In the clearing stood Zuus-way's garage, as well as several other buildings. There was a circular log house, roofed and with large windows in place, but, Zuus-way told Carole, "it's not finished inside, yet." The house stood on a knoll overlooking the big lake.

The inside of Zuus-way's garage was warm, heated by a wood-burning stove made from a barrel in the corner. Carole's Peugeot was in the middle of the poured concrete floor, resting on large blocks of wood. An elderly man was looking at the motor. "My uncle," Zuus-way said. "He spent four years in France during the War, and he understands how the French think. He's been helping me out on your car."

Carole and Rose watched the two men looking at the motor, talking. "The parts they needed came in two days ago, that's what he said," Rose told her. Carole marveled. She couldn't see the front of the car, but the right fender had been crumpled by her collision with the moose. It looked seamlessly new.

"Don't need that one." The old man pulled a large piece of machine from under the bonnet of her car, and tossed it in a pile of scrap iron by the wall. "That one either." Another part followed. Carole looked worried, then saw Rose's smile. "Trust them," she said in a soft voice.

The two men stepped away from their car, talking with their hands, talking in a mixture of Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and English. The old man smiled at Carole. "Bonjour."

Maybe he thinks I'm French! She answered in the same language. The old man laughed, then told her in nearly flawless French that 'boo-shoo' was a Creole word from the fur trade, that it had been a real pleasure working on such a beautiful piece of machinery as her Peugeot, that she owned him no more than the moose meat he had already been given, that he had once been in Suffolk on R & R during the war and had spent a very pleasant evening with the Reverend Giles Sotterthwaite, was she related?"

"He was my grandfather!" Carole's interjection made barely an eddy on the old man's stream of conversation, who went on to tell her that he hoped one day to visit herself and Zuus-way and tell her some of the stories her grandfather had told him, that her car should be better than new in an hour or so, and, then in English, that he had better get back to work.

Carole didn't know what to say, so she just said "thank you." She was still wondering abut what the old man had told her as Zuus-way invited her and Rose to his "unfinished house" for some coffee and cake.

Nearly unfurnished, maybe, but beautifully finished, Carole thought as she looked about the single spacious room. The walls of the building were cedar-logs. The bark had been removed, and the logs planed on two sides so that they fitted seamlessly without chinking into walls, but were left round on the inside and outside of the house. Like satin corduroy, Carole thought. The floor was polished ash-wood; the ceiling vaulted toward wedge-shaped panels of skylight on the south side and a cozy-looking loft on the north. The house was about fifty feet across, Carole estimated. Floor-to-ceiling cabinetry and bookshelves filled four of the--Carole counted them--sixteen sides; large windows in eight of the walls gave the house a feeling of airiness, bright inside even on this overcast day. Carole and Rose sat at a beautifully crafted wood table near a window with a superb view of the big lake.

Zuus-way was busy making fresh coffee in the kitchen, which was both separate from the expanse of the main room, and integrated into the circle of the house. The center of the room was dominated by a fireplace of beaten copper, stone and glass, constructed so that the flames burning cozily within looked almost like an open fire. The bookshelves were already lined with books. A desk was set in another alcove-like space between two of the walls with cupboards and shelves; above the desk there was a window. Through one of the south side windows, Carole thought she saw fruited tomato plants--and an orchid in bloom--on a terrace, then realized that she was looking into a greenhouse. The house was only partly furnished: the desk, a table and three chairs, and a large double bed covered with a bearskin rug were the only furniture, but it did not seem empty. Even unfurnished, Zuus-way's house gave Carole a sense of being surrounded by warmth, security, serenity, and strength.

"It's a beautiful house," she told Rose.

"Zuus-way designed and built it himself. He cut the trees, sawed the logs, even made the window-frames and the furniture. He's been working on it nearly a year."

Zuus-way brought three cups and a steaming coffeepot to the table, then a delicious-looking "apple-hazelnut-maple sugar coffee cake, my own recipe," he explained almost shyly. He poured a cup of coffee and handed it to Carole, and was pouring a second cup.

"The bread!" Rose stood quickly. "I forgot to tell Irene I left a loaf in the oven." She turned to Carole. "Your car will be ready to drive home in another hour, maybe less. I'll run home, it's not far on the short path. You're safe here, my girl." She quickly put on her jacket, and ran with surprising speed across the clearing.

Zuus-way poured a second cup of coffee, and looked reassuringly at Carole. Her heart danced at the nearness of the man, but--Carole was surprised--she did feel secure, amazingly peaceful, unafraid... alone with this man in his unfurnished house. Zuus-way started talking to her gently, quietly, telling her about his orchard, the design of his house, his ideas of improving life for his people, "but you've been here over a week, and haven't seen the rest of the Reservation yet. You might like to look around, later."

Carole nodded. Zuus-way kept talking, kindly and gently to her, gradually encouraging her to talk about herself, her life in England, and her family. Her heart throbbed in counterpoint to their conversation, her blood glowed with warmth at the nearness of the man sitting across the table from her, but at the same time Carole found herself enjoying sitting and quietly conversing, sharing the view of the drizzle joining platinum-gray sky to slate-gray lake, encompassed by the circle of the house.

Zuus-way poured second cups of coffee, then third. He produced a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, and offered Carole one. They smoked tobacco together in a silence that was somehow more of an intimate conversation than any words could have been, and Carole felt her unaccustomed shyness gradually fading. Then Zuus-way spoke, "Carole, are you feeling better, now?"

"Yes." Carole was surprised: an hour's quiet conversation with this surprising man had brought her to realizing depths of strength in herself that she had never realized she had. "Thank you, Zuus-way."

"I'm glad. Carole, I found something that belongs to you." She could feel his concern washing over her, an undercurrent of love and support. He walked over to the desk, and brought something back. "I found this out in the woods... the ink on the envelope was washed away, so I read most of it before I realized it was yours. I dried it out for you." He sounded almost bashful. "I apologize for intruding on your privacy." He handed her the envelope containing David's letter, slightly crinkled but folded neatly.

"I don't mind that you read it." Truly, she didn't. Her feelings for David were a pale shadow, almost a farce of what could be, she thought.

"Carole, did you read it to the end?"

"No, what's done is done. I'm better off without him." She found she could say this as a simple statement of truth, without anger or pain.

"You might want to read the last two pages. There's something in there that you should know." He glanced at the still-leaden sky, the way some men check their watches, Carole thought. "I'll go see what Uncle Rusty's doing to your car. There's more coffee, cake, smokes ... I'll be back." His smile flooded Carole's heart with warmth.

Alone in the house of a man whose name she still could not pronounce, Carole watched a lone gull circling above the lake for a few minutes, then unfolded the crinkled pages of the letter.

Chapter 8

Zuus-way had left the pages of crinkled onionskin ordered so that page 3 was on top. Carole signed deeply, and began reading:

"... with Suzanne while you were off cavorting around the world last spring. I knew that you had illusions about "women’s' liberation," but hoped that six months of playing at Men's work in the uncivilized world would bring you to your senses. I told Suzanne that all I could give her would be an affair for the time being; I would retain my commitment to you if you had settled down and come to your senses about a woman's place in the world, when you came back. I was still testing you: were you really the woman who would be best suited to be my wife, the wife of an aristocrat, or were you only the "daughter," and I say that with reservations, of a scholar who helped me a great deal with my academic career ... of a family whose noble blood had been greatly diluted since their foolish loss of the Sotterthwaite Estate during the War of the Roses?

I treated you honestly, Carole, particularly considering the ambiguous present station of your family. I want you to remember that. I was also thinking of your own good: would you be happier as a spinster career woman, "fulfilled" by trying pitifully to do some petty thing in the Man's World? Or, would you be happier, full of your sweet infatuation, as the titled wife of a man whose passions could only be fulfilled by a more experienced and passionate woman? I tried to make the best decision for you, and still had it under consideration when your parents so unexpectedly died.

Carole set the closely typewritten sheets on the table, and stared out the window. She took a cigarette from the pack that Zuus-way had left, lit it, and watched a heron standing in the shallows of the lake, half-hidden by the reeds near the shore. She poured a cup of coffee and sipped at it. The writing did not sound like the David Abernathy she had known since childhood... she took the first page of the letter from the sheaf, and compared the type characters from the part that she had read by the Grand Canyon with the page she was reading--it was undoubtedly the same. She thought she recognized the typewriter as the old Royal portable that had belonged to David's Aunt Cornelia for as long as she had known her; remembered the slight nick on the "e" and the faintly uneven spacing of the "f." Although David had chided her for her typed letters from Asia, "a handwritten letter is so much more intimate," he had said--but it would not be uncharacteristic for him type to save the extra few pence airmail postage a longer letter would require.

Carole finished the cigarette, and stubbed it out in an elegantly handmade copper ashtray that sang to her that the artist was Zuus-way. She sighed--there must be a reason that he had thought it important she read the letter to the end. She picked up the onionskin and began reading again:

I will tell you, clearly and succinctly: I found out quite quickly that Aunt Cornelia was more accurate in her assessment of your breeding, than even she had thought. You do recall her astute observation that your somewhat homely, odd foreign physical appearance could not have come from--was your mother really that naive--a medieval Tartar! Cornelia had always believed that you were a bastard child. She was not the only one who believed that the sly gypsy your father so innocently befriended, who held the post as your family's gardener until a year after your birth, had finally succeeded where your father has failed as a Man; that it was this scurrilous rascal who made your mother with child after fifteen barren years. If your father legitimized the consequences of his cuckold, that was quite well enough his business. My aunt was concerned about the possibility of your inheriting--you know as well as I do the entailment of the Abbey House and the other pitiful holdings--but at the time I believed that your advantages as a wife outweighed the possible encumbrances of such a petty estate.

As you will recall, after your parents' death, I had occasion to spend a great deal of time at Abbey House, such was your disproportionate and hysterical grief. It was so that I found a paper that more than vindicates my Aunt's opinion of you. You are not a shiftless gypsy's bastard, Carole, you are a foundling, perhaps a bastard of even less savory ancestry. Adopted, in a word.

Carole's hands shook slightly, and she sighed deeply as she turned to the final page of the letter.

Well! You understand as well as I do that I could not bring common blood, particularly of such impure mixture as you quite apparently are, into the Abernathy line. As Aunt Cornelia herself put it, "The Devil alone knows what low people her parents might have been." I am certain that you also realize that, in no circumstances whatsoever would the entailment on the Sotterthwaite family properties, however puny these are, allow inheritance by anyone not properly of the Sotterthwaite line. You know the terms of the ancient entailments as well as I do. You are now known for what you have always been, a commoner of insubstantial means.

Upon your return to England, you will have found that the Abbey House and furnishings, the land and Sotterthwaite Trust, and whatever else not included in the decedent's immediate personal effects has quite properly been granted to the LEGITIMATE heirs. I have further relieved you of the necessity of disposing of those items that would not be suitable to a person of your presently obvious common class. In consultation with my solicitor, it has been determined that a settlement of ,500 per annum would be indeed generous.

I retain a certain fondness for you, and would not like to see you unprovided for, as I am certain that you would decline still further without such provision. I am thus prepared to offer you a position, perhaps as a parlor-maid at one of my estates. I view of your over-riding infatuation and I can most reasonably continue to assume total inexperience, and in light of the disfavor which completely depriving you of my quite renowned expertise in this area would comprise, I am also prepared to offer you occasional discreet liaison. Although obviously I could not possibly legitimize any ensuing issue, such would be of quite superior breeding and thus by their native ability you would be insulated from a completely impecunious old age. Blood always tells.

I anticipate your return.

Sir David Abernathy, Ph.D.

Carole set the sheets of paper on the polished surface of the table, and gazed out at the lake, curtained by the drizzle into an apparent infinity. She shook her head as though to clear it. "He's mad! Mad as a hatter!"

Carole had always had an inner sense of her own self-worth. She excelled in sports, in school, and had completed her internship with high commendations. Although she had occasionally felt pangs of inconsolable loneliness as a child, she was deeply loved, and knew it, by her parents ... adopted parents. She poured a cup of coffee, and after a moment's hesitation, lit a cigarette. "So, I'm adopted," she said to herself quietly, "and somehow I'm not surprised."

Her parents--and they were still her parents in her heart--had a profound love for her. Her birth parents? Perhaps dead, Carole thought, perhaps crippled by poverty and wanting me to have better. She glanced again at David's letter, folded it back into the envelope. "David," she told the letter, "perhaps what un-nerved you was that I might see you clearly. Your father has his bouts of melancholia, Cornelia is more than eccentric, and you--thank you for helping me see you closely before it was too late. The true aristocrats of England tolerate you as an arrogant 'poor relation,' and the good human beings you reject as being 'lower class' laugh at you and your pretensions. So, you can take your so-called generous offer and stuff it up your oh-so-certifiably blue-blooded, purebred anatomy! Parlor-maid and convenient dalliance indeed! And I'll tell you that to your face when I come back to England--if I come back to England!" Carole took a deep breath. "Be it on your head! My father told me, 'Title doth not a noble man make.' Fare well, mad pretender."

Carole finished smoking her cigarette, then got up and put the letter in the fireplace at the center of Zuus-way's house. She watched as the thin airmail paper smoldered and burst into flame, and tried to will her pain up the chimney with the smoke, dissipating harmlessly over the vastness of the north country. She was sitting at the table crying when Zuus-way returned.

"Do you have that stiff British upper lip back now, Carole?" Carole nodded. Zuus-way had talked gently to her, they had talked together, and finally laughed together at the arrogance of David's letter, while the afternoon turned to deepening dusk. "So, you're adopted."

"You know, oddly enough, it seems like I've always known, somehow, and it's never mattered. My parents--and they were my parents--wanted me and loved me. I think that's what's important."

"Unh-hun! Do you wonder who your birth parents are?"

"I'm a little bit curious, maybe. If they're not dead, they must have had a good reason to give me up. It must be a terribly difficult decision, for a woman to give up a child."

"Mmmm. You aren't worried about their social class, then?"

"We are all human beings."

The dusk shaded into darkness. Carole and Zuus-way sat in the night, talking quietly. Carole was acutely conscious of the man across the table from her, aware of his warmth, could smell the heady perfume of his masculinity blended with a hint of motor oil--from her car, she thought.

"So ... your house in England is gone?"

"I don't know. I've got a good education, good references as a cinematographer. I certainly won't need to be a parlor-maid!"

"When were you going back?"

"My ticket is an open booking. It's good until the end of January. I thought I might travel in the States a bit more, look around, think about what to do."

"I told Rose this morning I'd had word that you might lose your house in England, and that I needed to tell you about what I'd heard. She told me that she's glad you're with her, that you always have a home in her house."

"Thank you, Zuus-way. She's a wonderful woman."

"So are you, Carole, you're a beautiful woman, a beautiful person. You deserve much better in life than that ... that what that letter offered."

Carole thought she heard tenderness trembling in the man's voice. Her heart shook. "Thank you."

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Carole felt an intense yearning to be closer to the man who sat across from her, but at the same time felt shy. She sighed.

"Would you like to go look at your car?"

No, I want to spend the night with you, Carole thought. I'm trembling with longing, I want to yield to your passion, to give you my body and my heart. I want to spend the rest of my life with you! But I still don't know if you're already taken. Carole spoke. "O.K."

Zuus-way guided her to the garage with a flashlight, and switched on the garage lights. The Peugeot was parked on the floor, gleaming with fresh polish. "It's beautiful."

Zuus-way highlighted the front end with the flashlight. "It's not quite the same as it was." The car now sported an elegant grille, rather than the streamlined down-swept lines from the Peugeot factory, but to Carole it seemed as though it harmonized even better with the rest of the car than the original design had. "We had to improvise on some parts. Here, take a look at the engine."

The motor looked different, less cluttered. "It looks almost alive," Carole said.

"Rusty is a good mechanic."

The Peugeot ran better than it ever had, quietly and smoothly, but with the dynamic energy of a racecar. "He thinks it might get better gas mileage."

Zuus-way drove a few miles on the highway, then turned around. To Carole, the car rode like it was soaring. "Did he put on wings?"

Zuus-way chuckled. "You'll have to pay attention to the speedometer." He turned into a gravel road, and in a few minutes they were parked in Rose's yard. "I left my pickup here. Rose might be worried about you." He walked with Carole to the door. "Would you like to take a ride tomorrow?"

"Very much."

"I'll come after you in the morning." Zuus-way touched her gently on the cheek, and his light touch left a trail of fire on her skin, a surge of warmth within her. "No, Carole, I'm not married. I've been single for five years. See you tomorrow, you beautiful, bashful woman." He turned away, walked a step, stopped. "Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway people have always known that the woman is the one who chooses."

Carole stood and watched until the lights of the pickup truck disappeared, until the chill of the night air had cooled the burning glow of her skin.

Chapter 9

Rose was cutting apart old clothes; Irene was ironing the pieces flat. "We're making a blanket," the young woman explained. "We weren't sure if you'd be home tonight." She grinned. "But, there's some supper in the oven. You ought to get mad more often--your bread really rose!"

Carole filled a plate with roast mallard, wild rice stuffing, potatoes and gravy, home-canned green beans, wild cranberry sauce, and a chunk of the bread she had kneaded, now baked a golden brown. Rose handed her a cup of spicy-smelling herb tea. Carole ate while the other two women worked and talked and laughed. Waa-bi-gwens was sleeping on the couch.

Carole rinsed her empty plate in the sink, and asked Rose what she could do to help them. "You don't need to."

"Zuus-way told me what you said. Thank you."

"You always have a home here. You look tired, my girl."

Carole realized how drained the events of the day had left her, and lay in bed only a moment listening to the other two women working before she slept. She half-woke when Irene and Waa-bi-gwens came to bed. "Carole," Irene whispered. "Zuus-way's a good man. Go for it!"

Zuus-way came after Carole in the morning as promised. Carole had admired the Peugeot again in the early daylight. "I ought to pay Rusty. It really is 'better than new.'"

"He won't take any money. He says he's honored to work on Reverend Sotterthwaite's granddaughter's car." Carole bit her lip. Zuus-way told her, "He's still your grandfather."

"He died when I was four. I barely remember him."

"Death is a natural part of life. Unless we are born, unless we die, we cannot also live. But life is also an endless cycle. Your grandfather lives on in what your father gave you, in what you will give your children and grandchildren. His body and his bones became a part of the earth in England, and that earth nourishes life, that which is living now and that yet to be. Perhaps you will see him in the next world. We could take the pickup truck today, some of the roads are rough."

Carole nodded. They had gone along the highway to the West; Zuus-way showed her where she had been in the ditch. He had driven into a seeming maze of gravel roads from the highway, showing Carole pine plantations, aspen groves, and broad expanses that had been cleared.

"Clear-cut," he said. At one time, this place was full of pines: white pines 230 feet tall, jack pine, norway pine ... Popple--aspen--grows when the pines have been cut." They drove past a small lake, set among yellow-leafed aspen like a sapphire in beaten gold, into a brush area. "This used to be a cedar swamp, where the trees grew so thickly it was dark at mid-day. It was the winter home of the deer." He looked at Carole. "Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway do not clear-cut."

Zuus-way came out on another highway. "That's the road to Bemidji, south," he said. "You can also get here from Rose's house just by driving east on the main road." He turned north. Carole saw scattered houses, and a few battered-looking house trailers. They turned east onto another two-lane highway, past a modern-looking hospital surrounded by barbed-wire fencing, then a large white church. "The Catholic mission," he said. "Trading post ... Bureau of Indian Affairs offices ... police station ... school ... " He pointed with his eyes and his lips as they passed. Carole saw the big lake shimmering to the north of the small town.

Zuus-way turned off the main road toward the lake, down a road looping past nearly identical-looking houses and an apartment building. "Government housing." The road circled back to the main highway, and Zuus-way continued driving east. Several more miles, past nice-looking houses, dilapidated houses, an abandoned house, then another small town. "That's the saw-mill. ... the community center--most of the cars parked there today belong to people getting government handouts of surplus food."

The crossed a small river, dammed to make a lake. "The fishery," Zuus-way explained as they passed a modern-looking building. Several miles further east, the highway wound through some tall pines. "This land used to be covered with pines," Zuus-way said, "but now, if you look carefully, you can see the clear-cut behind the trees." Zuus-way's tone was conversational, but he seemed to Carole to be almost aloof. She wondered what he had meant by "a woman chooses." Was he criticizing her for her 'choice' of David? Telling her that he was interested? As they drove, Carole glanced at him more than once, wondering.

Zuus-way turned at an intersection, and drove several miles on a secondary tarmac road. He turned off near a river, parked, and handed Carole a sandwich made with the delicious donut-shaped biscuits she had learned were "fry-bread," and some kind of chopped meat. "It's more of your moose," he said, and handed her a thermos and two cups.

She poured their coffee, and Zuus-way asked her, "What did you see?"

Carole told him the places he had pointed out, described them.

"Ah. You are a good student. What else did you see?"

Carole described the four churches, two gas stations, the abandoned Lac Rouge restaurant, two small country stores, and a boarded-up "Indian Arts & Crafts" shop. She told him about the pawnshop, the volunteer fire department, and the "Roads Garage." She remembered the large building which Zuus-way had passed without comment--the one with two signs: one describing it as the "Lac Rouge Humanities and Natatorium" and other proclaiming it as the "Tribal Casino."

"And?"

Carole thought. She told Zuus-way about the bright blue bingo hall, about the complex labeled "Tribal Housing," about the new cars they had met on the road, and about the old and battered cars. She recounted the children she had seen playing in the yards and along the road, some of them wearing no jackets on the cool day. She talked about the dogs, gathered almost in conversation; about the yards with several new cars, boats and pickup trucks parked in them, about the yards with no cars, and about the yards cluttered with junked cars... about the neatly mowed lawns and the houses with bare empty dirt yards, about the ones filled with trash and piled empty beer cans. She told him about the man staggering drunkenly along the road, and the teenagers walking toward the trading post; about the three graveyards, one with small "houses" over some of the graves.

"And?"

Carole tried to visualize the trip they had taken. She told Zuus-way about the pines close to the highway, and the expanses of brush, aspen and bare clear-cut places clearly visible only from the back roads ... about piles of trees cut for no apparent reason, piled in windrows.

She told him about the sparkling lakes, about the birds she had seen in the woods, about the power lines strung along the highway, about the children riding an "dune-buggy" in the ditch, about the bread truck parked at a store and the six trucks full of logs they and seen on the road.

"And?"

Carole was stumped.

"Then, what did you not see? Besides alligators."

What was supposed to be there that wasn't? "The trees that had been cut down?"

"Go on."

Carole thought about what she had seen of Zuus-way's house, his yard. "Gardens? Barns? Houses people have built themselves?"

"And?" He was smiling at her now, enjoying the ... game? Carole wondered.

"Traffic lights? Factories? Small businesses and shops? A bakery, a chemist, a clothing store? Busses, trolleys, trains, airplanes? Horses, cattle, and other livestock? Fences? "Deer, moose, beavers, bears, eagles .. passenger pigeons? ... lions, tigers, and elephants!"

Zuus-way laughed. "OK! But we used to have panthers, lynxes, bobcats, caribou, badgers and buffalo. And there are still a few wolves, fishers and wolverines living in the deep woods. Shall I give you a hint? What were the people that you saw saying?"

"You know I couldn't hear them."

"But you could see them."

"Oh." Carole thought, and tried to remember them clearly. "They walked almost as if there was a weight on their shoulders; many of them seemed sad in some way. There were no groups of people gathered laughing and talking, like I've seen in Europe, the Middle East and Asia."

"So?"

"A few people were dressed well and there were some expensive-looking cars parked by what you called the B.I.A. There were a few fancy houses, and those were the only ones that had fenced yards. But most of the people here, are they poor?"

Zuus-way did not answer her question directly. "In the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway way," he said, "whatever we had was shared. We had gardens, we made boats and most of the small lakes had mahnomen--you'd probably call it 'wild rice'--in them. We had many sugar bushes. There was plenty of game. We built our houses to fit our spirits and our families. There was no government-surplus "commodity" food, no welfare. No police station--and the jail is a part of the police station."

Carole thought about the large white building she had seen on the south side of the road in the town of La'rouge, its surrounding walls topped with coils of razor wire. "Oh."

"The small Traditional community where Rose's house, my house, and a few other houses are, is a dream which a few of us are slowly building. What you have seen today is also a part of the Lac Rouge reservation, an inescapable part of the present for my people, and so it is a part of me. You may want to see it clearly."

They had finished eating, and drank a second cup of coffee in companionable silence. Zuus-way started his pickup truck. "Would you like to visit my sister?"

The road cured around Lac Rouge, heading north and then back east. They passed through another small town. As they drove beyond the town, it seemed to Carole that this stretch of land along the northern lakeshore was different, somehow, although here, too, there were government-built houses with old cars in the yards. The trees seemed larger, and few of them seemed as they drove past, to be almost living, speaking beings. The spirit of the place was palpable. Zuus-way's sister's house was down a gravel road: a small tarpaper shack nestled in the woods on the south shore of a second vast lake. Lac Rouge du Nord--Carole remembered seeing it on her map. Zuus-way stopped the truck in the yard, the simply sat and waited. A large black dog came around the corner of the shack, sniffed at the tires of the truck and then lifted his leg and marked each tire in turn. Carole noticed the brown cornstalks of a garden, and a white-painted homemade boat. A woman opened the door of the shack, called something in Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, and motioned for them to come in.

The inside of the shack was neat and clean: pine-board floor scrubbed nearly white, plastic pails of water stacked in a corner, a bed covered with a patchwork quilt, a stove made out of a metal barrel, a wooden table with two benches. The woman sat on one bench, and motioned to them both to sit on the other.

Carole looked at the bench. It was only about three feet long; she did not know if she could sit with her body touching Zuus-way and keep from glowing a thousand colors of brilliant red; if she would be able to think! The coffee she had been drinking all morning provided her with a legitimate reason for at least a delay.

"Thank you. But, excuse me, could I use your bathroom?"

The woman pointed with her lips at the back door. Zuus-way said, "There's an outhouse out there."

As Carole was walking back from the outhouse to the shack, she heard the woman's voice, "An Englishwoman? An English woman? She heard Zuus-way answer in Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway. Carole purposefully bumped into a metal ash can near the door before re-entering the shack. A wooden folding-chair had been set up near the bench where Zuus-way sat. The woman motioned Carole to it with her eyes, and offered her a cup of "real Indian tea."

"Mee gwitch." Irene had taught her the word for 'thank you.'

Brother and sister continued their conversation in the Reservation language that had English words but was--definitely! Carole thought--not English. Zuus-way's sister seemed to be considerably older than he was, at least 40, Carole estimated. She did not seem unfriendly, but at the same time she did not extend to Carole the open warmth that Rose gave her.

"There's soup." Zuus-way's sister--Carole had not yet been told her name--indicated an enamel kettle on the barrel stove. Zuus-way filled a bowl, took a piece of bread from a bowl covered with a piece of cloth, got a spoon from the sideboard, and invited Carole to do the same.

Eyes looked at Carole from the bowl of soup: white-cooked eyes staring blankly from the severed heads of some creature. She swallowed nervously. "Good old fashioned Indian soup, sucker-heads," the woman told her. Carole copied the others' way of eating the soup. The flavor, she decided, was unusual but good. She did not eat the eyes.

Chapter 10

"I'm glad that you came along today, Carole," Zuus-way said as he stopped the pickup truck in Rose's yard. The daylight was gradually ebbing from gray to darker gray. He touched Carole gently, almost shyly, brushing his fingertips against her shoulder. "I may be gone in the morning, but I'll be home in the afternoon."

Carole walked to the house. The short path of his light touch against her shoulder trembled, sending quivers of warmth through her.

"Tay-yah! That bashful girl is home again!" Irene seemed to be talking to the wringer washing machine in the corner. "And, I know she wants him." Irene's eyes twinkled as she caricatured the reservation Métis' slightly different accent, "Her bloomers would stick to ceiling, and that's just from wishing!"

Carole blushed and looked around the room. Irene was sitting at the kitchen table, with a saucer of tiny beads in front of her. She smiled at Carole, genuinely friendly but slightly mischievous. "Grandma's gone to visit her sister in Rice Lake, and Waa-bi-gwens went with her. She'll be back sometime tomorrow, that's what she said."

Carole looked at the beadwork that lay on the table. Irene had finished a dangly earring made with tiny beads and porcupine quills, and was working on its mate. A small wooden handloom held two short pieces of beadwork, an intricate pattern of roses and leaves. "They're beautiful, Irene."

"I'm making them for you. I thought I'd be home alone tonight."

Carole blushed more deeply.

"Nah-bah-dah-bun, Niiji. Have a chair. Pop and sandwiches are in the 'fridge. Use my beads if you like, I'll show you how."

After Carole had finished a sandwich and popped open a can of Pepsi, she started looking through the shoebox filled with hanks of beads that Irene handed her. She studied the colors, thinking about vibrant harmony of colors in the quilts she had seen, watching Irene fishing the earring.

"What are you going to make, Carole?"

"I don't know yet."

"I think I'll make another pair of earrings. You can watch if you don't know how."

Carole's thread tangled, tied itself into knots, and looped itself around the short lumpy tube of beads that was meant to be the top of the earring. "When you make one, it looks so easy!"

"It will come out even if you use beads that are exactly the same size."

Carole gradually tamed her thread, and began to enjoy the meticulous craft. The young women talked as they beaded, and gradually the conversation came to Zuus-way. "He said, 'the woman chooses.' I don't understand," Carole said.

"Before Waa-bi-gwens was born, I lived near the Base with Big Joe. In California, in Germany--I saw a lot. Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway women know who we are, we're free human beings, we own ourselves. Anthropologists would say we have a 'matriarchal society,' but as my cousin Zuus-way says, it's 'in balance, in harmony.' We do choose our man, we always have. It's sensible--women are the ones who have children. It surprised me when I realized that most White women don't know who they are, almost like they're afraid to be themselves. That's why Big Joe and I agreed that Waa-bi-gwens should spend her two or three of her formative years here, especially since he's on maneuvers. Her dad comes home every leave he gets, and she's growing up with her people--that way, she'll know who she is."

"Were you a virgin when you married Big Joe? Wouldn't he lose respect for you?"

"Gaa-win. No, Grandma watched me pretty close ... and she approves of Big Joe. When she knew it was serious between us, she started looking the other way. In the old way, if you stay with each other past sunrise, it's as good as being married--and a lot more fun than a diamond ring, I think." Irene's eyes sparkled. A traditional Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway man knows this, and respects you. Maybe some of the acculturated ones don't." She looked meaningfully at Carole. "Zuus-way's a traditional Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway man, one of the best."

"But you got married in a church, didn't you?"

"We got a license from the courthouse, and Zuus-way signed for us. The County didn't accept that for years, but they've started to. We got the papers because of the Air Force."

The conversation turned to the Air Force. Big Joe was stationed "somewhere in the Middle East--they don't tell us where exactly." Carole told Irene about filming the digs in Israel, and the women talked about what it was like there. Then, they talked some more about Zuus-way.

Carole took a deep breath. "Irene, I didn't see a chemist anyplace we went today, and I think Zuus-way took me all over the Reservation."

"A chemist? There's a chemistry department at the University in Bemidji."

"Uh." Carole blushed bright red. "What I meant was, uh ..." she took another deep breath, "a store to buy, uh, pro ... uh... prophylactics."

"A drugstore. You don't really need them with Zuus-we, he's always been careful and I'm sure he doesn't have AIDS or anything like that. He's been waiting for someone like you; he hasn't been with any women in over a year, I'm pretty sure. And, I've seen him looking at you, Carole, like he's hoping you're just full of babies. He really loves you--I've never seen him act like he is now. But, if you feel better using prophylactics at first, mmm, there isn't any place to buy them on the Reservation. They give them away at the hospital, but if I went up there and got some for you, somebody would start some gossip, trying to make trouble for Big Joe and me. And, you probably don't want to be asking at the Hospital yourself. There's a drugstore in Clearbrook, you could probably buy some there. ... My cousin Susie will let me borrow her car. I'll take you in the morning."

"I've got a car. The way Zuus-way's Uncle Rusty fixed it up, it's beautiful."

"I know. It's an expensive car with English license plates. Susie won't mind loaning me hers. I don't have to tell her what you need to get."

"You and your grandmother, so many people around here, have done so much for me already."

"It's in the family."

Irene had finished beading one of the strips of loom-work to a barrette, and started on the other one. Carole was still working on the earring, and held it out to look at it. "It looks nice, Carole. The colors you used look ace together." Carole added another porcupine quill.

"I don't know how many children your grandmother has."

"She had three. Her oldest son, he's the one who died with my grandpa on the Big Lake. Twenty-one years ago tomorrow. Grandma likes to go see her sister this time of year. He married a woman from Granite Falls, Michelle Black Horse was her maiden name. She was a Dakota Métis, mostly White... but she was a good woman, and I think it did something to her when her husband died. She was pregnant when it happened, and they already had an older daughter. Carole, that's her younger daughter, was born in Minneapolis. Grandma wanted them to stay here with her, but Michelle thought that might be hard on Grandma. I don't know what happened in Minneapolis--the last time anybody around here saw them was almost fifteen years ago. Michelle, that's my Auntie, came to visit then, and said she was going out west someplace, maybe Montana. She might have gotten married again.

"People said losing her husband really did something to her, and then she got worse after Carole was born, sometimes walking around like she was looking for somebody. Carole seemed pretty lonely, too, even when she was only five. Maybe it was because of the way the Big Lake took my uncle and my grandpa. They'd set nets, then a big storm came up that night. 'Leave the nets, we can get more,' that's what Grandma said, but Grandpa thought the freeze-up was coming early that year. There was already ice on the edges of the lake, and they took the boat out anyway. They never found them. That's what Grandma said.

"Then, there's my ma. My dad's from White Earth, and they have a house over there. Grandma raised me, that's the old way, and I've got two younger brothers in White Earth. I go up there to visit sometimes. Zuus-way's mother was from White Earth, too--that's how we're related: his mother was my father's cousin, second cousin, really. She died when he was just a little guy. You're a lucky woman, Carole--Zuus-way's one of the best guys around. When I was younger, I used to wish I wasn't related to him, ho-wah! but I'm happy with Big Joe, he's even nicer, for me, anyway, because being the wife of a man like Zuus-way... he's got some heavy responsibilities keeping this community going."

Irene stopped talking to get another can of Pepsi from the refrigerator. "Want one, Carole?"

"Mee gwitch. I don't know if I'll ever get anybody's relatives straight! There seem to be so many of them."

"Each of us must have thousands of relatives. There are old people who know a lot of our peoples' genealogy, but I don't think anybody knows it all anymore. A lot of people, even some from here, I know I'm related to them, but I don't know exactly how. Then, there are the people who were adopted out--there was a lot of that until just a few years ago, and sometimes those people come around here, looking for their roots, trying to find out who they are. Some of them are pretty pitiful. The adoption agencies and their White families don't tell them anything. They're lost people; they have a tough time making it in the White world because they get defined as 'Indians,' and some of them act like a Hollywood movie, trying to be a Real Indian. They don't know what it means to be Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway ..."

Carole beaded quietly, but thoughts tumbled through her head. "Adopted people are pitiful?" she asked.

"Gaa-win gego! No, of course not. There are different kinds of adoption, and some of the people raised by Whites, in what amounts to being molded into the White stereotype of Indians--some of those people, I really feel sad for them. Big Joe, his folks died but he was raised by his," she grinned at Carole, "you'd say 'second cousin once removed.' He knows who he is, he knows who his relatives are, and he isn't trying to be anybody else's ideas of who he should be. There's nothing 'pitiful' about him." Irene tied the thread on the second barrette, which she had just finished beading. "Let me comb your hair for you, Carole."

Carole looked at her reflection in the small hand-mirror Irene handed her. Her permanent had started to grow out in the month--not quite a month, yet! she thought--that she had been in the States. Her hair was combed back into the barrettes, and the long earrings dangled nearly to her shoulders. Irene had given Carole a blouse "to match the earrings," a delicately patterned turquoise calico highlighted by satin ribbons appliquéd across the shoulders.

Carole's accustomed wide-brimmed hats had sat on the shelf at the top of Rose's closet after her first day on the Reservation; her sunscreen languished unused in the bottom of her cosmetic bag. Carole enjoyed the newfound pleasure of the wind stroking her hair, the warm sunlight caressing her clean-scrubbed skin in the often cool autumn air. As she gazed at her reflection in the hand-mirror, Carole was surprised to see how deeply the sun had touched her with a warm golden tan.

"I must have been making that shirt for you," Irene said delightedly. "Ho-wah! You look Ace." Irene studied the young Englishwoman. "You could almost 'pass' for one of us!"

The morning sun glistened off the autumn leaves as Irene and Carole drove to Clearbrook. Past the Reservation boundary, Carole saw some farms set in a mosaic of woods and fields, cattle and a few horses, dry cornfields, the deep brown of fresh-plowed earth, the surprising green of the winter-wheat fields.

Irene drove the borrowed car expertly. "A good Indian car," she told Carole, summarizing the old Chevy sedan of nearly indeterminate color; the car had Lac Rouge license plates. As they drove across the farmland, another car with Reservation plates passed going in the other direction; the people who filled that car nearly to bursting waved and glanced curiously at Carole. "They'll be wondering who's the new 'Shi-nabbe' in town," Irene told Carole happily. Carole had worn the earrings and barrettes, but wondered if simple jewelry could change the way she looked by much.

Irene parked in front of the drugstore in the small town. "The Chemist, ma'am," she said. "I can wait for you in the car."

Carole walked nervously into the store, walked through the aisles hoping that she would not have to go to the older male pharmacist to ask for the "condoms" Irene had told her to ask for. Ah! There was a discreet display toward the back of the store. Carole selected a brand at random, and walked slowly back toward the front of the store, wondering if she should buy something else so her sole purchase wouldn't seem so obvious. Carole contemplated the veterinary supplies, the cosmetics, the vitamins, the knick-knacks, and then thought about Irene waiting in the car. At the least the cashier is a woman, she thought, and went to pay for her single purchase. The gray-haired woman put the package of condoms in a small paper bag. "Have a nice day, now," she said, giving Carole a friendly, conspiratorial wink.

As she walked back to the car, Carole noticed a restaurant on the corner. "I'll buy us lunch," she told Irene. The restaurant was new and spacious, filled with light from big windows giving a view of the street. Several of the tables were filled with farmers drinking coffee and discussing harvest-time crop prices, the weather, and the upcoming hunting season. Carole heard snatches of their conversation as she followed Irene to a table toward the back of the restaurant.

The young women talked and watched the easygoing pace of Clearbrook's main street as they ate their hamburgers and fries. A plump young blonde woman got out of a new pickup truck, and walked into the grocery store across the street carrying her baby. A pickup truck full of baled hay went by. A towheaded young boy rode his bicycle down the sidewalk; Carole watched the sun gleaming through his flying hair. A maroon State Highway Patrol car cruised down the street, then turned around at the end of the block and came back toward the restaurant. They parked next to Irene's borrowed car, Carole noticed, as she watched the two men enter the restaurant and look around.

The policemen chose an empty table near where Carole and Irene were sitting, and ordered coffee. Carole looked down at her now-empty plate; she could feel the blue eyes of the older patrolman staring at her. Irene quickly drank the rest of her coffee. "Let's go," she said.

Irene turned onto the county road that led back to the Reservation. "This is still Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway land," she told Carole. "All the way to Thief River Falls. We never sold it, and anyway it was never paid for."

Rose had not yet returned from Rice Lake, Irene observed as they drove into the yard. "See, there aren't any new tracks in the gravel. She'll be back sometime today, though. We'll probably go to Bemidji tomorrow."

Carole bathed, washed her hair, and wondered what to wear. It's odd what a person knows before they see it, she thought as she unpacked lacy French silk panties and bra; she had bought them two months earlier in anticipation of her honeymoon, and had tucked them into a corner of her suitcase the day before she left Devonshire. Carole dressed carefully, tingling with anticipation as she put on the silky black lingerie, then the cream-colored linen slacks and rose-colored silk blouse she had finally decided on. She folded plainer clean underwear, jeans, a wool shirt, her sports shoes wrapped in a plastic bag, and after a moment's hesitation, the shirt Irene had given her, into an overnight bag she planned to leave in the car.

I'm so thankful it's going to be with Zuus-way, she thought. She combed her hair, examined her reflection wearing the beaded barrettes and earrings, and decided their brilliant colors did not fit with the more subdued rose color of her blouse. She put the beadwork jewelry in her purse, combed her hair again, and tried a small pair of gold earrings. Although the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway women she knew did not wear cosmetics, she applied a touch of lip-gloss, and the barest hint of perfume. She slipped her feet into beige loafers--gravel roads and high heels just did not go together, she thought with amusement.

"You look lovely!" Irene's eyes were shining with excitement as Carole entered the kitchen; they laughed together as Carole did a model's step and turn. "Have a cup of coffee with me before you go. I'm so glad for youse--I just know you two were made for each other!"

The two young women drank their coffee quietly. Carole vacillated between nervousness and tingling anticipation, her cheeks were flushed with excitement and her dark brown eyes were sparkling. She checked her purse again: yes, the small paper bag was still there. So was the turquoise and silver bracelet she had bought in Mexico. "I want to give this to you, Irene. I don't know if I would have the courage to do what my heart tells me is right, what I want to do, without you, Irene."

Irene slipped the bracelet on her wrist and admired it. "Mee gwitch. Sure, you would have. You're just being bashful. Now go on, my woman-cousin, he's waiting for you." The way that Irene said "woman," Carole felt strong, tall and proud, radiantly beautiful.

The engine of her Peugeot purred with power. Carole drove to Zuus-way's house.

Chapter 11

Zuus-way's pickup track was parked in his yard, but he did not answer his door. Carole twisted the strap of her purse nervously, and started to feel scared. Then he heard his voice call from behind the barn. "Aniin, Carole!" He was trembling as he walked around the corner of the outbuilding, carrying a hammer and pliers, and a roll of fencing wire. He was dressed in blue jeans and a blue plaid flannel shirt, taller than ever in cowboy boots. A beaded leather pouch hung from his belt. Carole could feel her whole body responding to his vibrant masculinity, watching him walk toward his house, toward her.

He smiled at her; his sparkling dark brown eyes met Carole's and her heart glowed. "We'll have a dairy cow next sprig," he told her, flicking his eyes toward the roll of wire he carried. "Take a walk with me? You haven't seen the rest of our place, yet."

Zuus-way did not touch her as he spent the afternoon showing Carole the barn, empty but "almost ready for horses, and a little cow." He showed her his wood-shop, the wind-generator he was building, the small orchard. He talked in a conversational tone to her about the garden, showed her the yet-uninhabited chicken coop, the full root cellar, the solar-electric panels on the south roof of the house. He explained the heat-storage system of the solar greenhouse, and Carole looked in wonder at the two orchid plants blooming above the tomatoes and salad vegetables.

As they walked and talked, Carole could feel a rising interplay of feeling between them. She was sincerely interested, fascinated, by the careful artisanship and ingenious engineering that Zuus-way had put into his buildings; deeply impressed by his conviction and his wisdom as he explained his dreams for "the People." At the same time, his voice was caressing her, stroking the erect nipples of her breasts into mounds of fire, tantalizing her, awakening her into an intense awareness of her womanhood.

His explanations of the care and feeding of a "little Jersey" dairy cow, the circuitry of his solar-electric systems were, Carole realized, also a passionate love-song. In the nuances of his deep resonant voice, in the electricity of the crystalline air between them, in harmony with the sparkling sun that warmed them and the gentle earth they walked on, he was singing to her, wooing her, keening her to an intense awareness of everything around her and within her.

The walked, side by side, but not yet touching physically, to a grassy hillock overlooking the Big Lake. Zuus-way took a small wooden flute from his beaded leather pouch, and spoke quietly, "this is not really a traditional Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway instrument, but I like the sound of it. I live both the old and the new, and try to find a balance." As the cool breeze stirred her hair, as the late afternoon sum shimmered on the water and danced among the translucent red and gold leaves, as the earth and the sky embraced them, Zuus-way began to play the flute. The tones of the instrument were clear and harmonious; the song seemed to Carole to be both ancient and newly born, to be one with eternity but wafting on nascent moments. The song soared on the air, embraced her, chronicled his love for her. Birds in the woods accompanied the melody of the man. The song began as a small green bud, burst into full flower. "I have dreamed of you," the music told her heart. "You are here, and I am yours to choose." Carole's heart answered, her spirit answered, the core of her very being answered, "Yes! Yes! I am here and I choose you, I love you! Yes!"

Zuus-way's song continued, tender, passionate. Zuus-way told her with flute song that he gave her that which he had dreamed, built for them together. Her promised her that which was his to give her forever. Then, the flute sang for both the man and the woman, celebrating the birth of their love, the miracle that man and woman were two yet one, each of complimentary nature and in harmony a greater being. The song brought forth their dreams, told of their children to be born and raised, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren; embraced them in the eternal circle of life. The song celebrated to Carole her one-ness with the man standing near her, their one-ness together with all the harmony of life of Grandmother Earth, the love that would fill their lives, the love that could be theirs beyond their deaths and into the mystery of the world beyond death. "This is the dream," the song told Carole. "This is the mystery, the beauty, the reality. This is the gift we will share forever, this is love."

The sky blazed with the brilliant colors of the sunset, and echoed in that sunset were the sunrises of the eternity around them, part of them. And, the song completed its circle. "I have dreamed of you," Zuus-way sang to Carole with his flute. "I am here and I am yours for the choosing."

Then, the flute rested, returned to the leather pouch. An eagle soared through the evening sky and circled them. The man and the woman stood side by side, in the cool evening, waiting. As Carole stood by the aboriginal man in the deepening dusk, on the earth of his peoples' homeland, she knew the certainty of her heart. "Shall we go to our house," she said to him.

"We go, then, together." Carole and Zuus-way walked to their round log house, entering through the southern door. He turned on the lights, and walked to the fireplace at the center of the room.

The hearth was empty; he had removed the ashes from the grate and the stonework beneath it. There was a basket containing birchbark, a box of kindling and another box of wood near the fireplace. He began laying birchbark on the grate, and motioned for Carole to help him. Together they placed the kindling, then larger pieces of wood. He handed Carole a kitchen match, and she lit the fire.

Chapter 12

The fire curled along the edges of the birchbark, then blazed comfortably. Zuus-way placed some herbs on the copper top of the fireplace, and the smoke of a sweet woodsy incense perfumed the air. He suggested to Carole that she sit on the bear-rug that he had placed near the fire, and went into the kitchen.

He brought wooden bowls of venison, fish, partridge, potatoes, baked beans, two wooden plates, a smaller bowl of maple sugar, a pot of steaming herbal tea; birchbark bowls of wild rice, cornbread, squash, and blueberries. They filled their plates with this feast, and Zuus-way handed Carole a carved wooden spoon and a miniature birchbark plate. The man and the woman put a small portion of each kind of food on the birchbark plate. Zuus-way added a pinch of tobacco from a small beaded pouch, then handed the pouch to Carole so she could do the same. He then placed the birchbark plate in the fire, saying a few words in his language.

"Ahau! Wi-se-nen--let's eat!" he told Carole. The feast was delicious. Carole was intensely aware of everything around her: the circle of the house encompassing them in warmth with the living fire at the center, the tastes, aromas and textures of the food they ate together, and of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway land around them of which the food was a part, of the intensity of the love between herself and Zuus-way, of the feelings deep within her body, of her heating anticipation of the night to come. A full moon had risen: the silvery light danced on the water of the lake and the moonbeams through an eastern window harmonized with the warm glow of the house' slights and the flickering of the fire.

They sat near each other on the bearskin rug, drinking their tea after their meal, sharing a sense of serene but vibrant intimacy highlighted by their conversation. At the same time, the air between and around them was electric with sensual anticipation. Zuus-way filled a small stone-bowled pipe. "Tobacco and kinni-kinnik," he explained to Carole. He lit the pipe, and then offered it with respectful familiarity to the spirits of his harmonious reality. He smoked for a few moments, then with a slight gesture indicated that Carole was invited but not obligated to smoke the pipe with him.

Carole had talked one evening with Rose about the meaning of the pipe, and she trusted Zuus-way. She accepted the pipe he offered her. As she smoked with her man, she once again became aware of her deep and personal connection with the vast harmonies of the universe, this time even more intensely than she had been during the sunrise on the Big Lake. She felt her spirit in intimate contact with Zuus-way's; she felt him with her as she glimpsed the mysteries of Being. She began to understand what Rose meant when she said that "Our religion is not written."

The pipe had been smoked. Zuus-way looked at Carole, and what he said with his eyes, tenderly, lovingly, passionately, was beyond words. Then, he spoke. "Carole," he said, his voice filled with emotion, "The seed of a child is ripe within you tonight. Your woman-scent is replete with your fertility, like the perfume of a flower or the autumn scent of a doe. Without protection, we will have a baby. I would like that very much, to have children, to raise them, with you. But, I also understand that many things have happened for you in a very short time. You may not be ready, yet--and the woman is the one whose body carries the baby, nourishes the child. I hope to be with you for the rest of my life. There is plenty of time to wait if that is what you would like to do. I do not have any disease, and neither do you, so it is up to you whether or not to use those, uh, 'pajoggin suits' you brought with you." Zuus-way then picked up the dishes from their meal, and carrying them into the kitchen, left Carole to see her own feelings clearly.

Carole had never had a blood transfusion, had never used hard drugs, she was a virgin, so I don't have AIDS, she thought. She believed what Irene had told her, what Zuus-way told her, that he had no disease to give her. She could feel the storms of anticipated passion within her, but she had been thinking about having children with Zuus-way even before she had talked to Irene about getting the condoms. Living in the same household as Waa-bi-gwens had intensified her yearning for children of her own; watching the child with her mother and grandmother had given her some insight into the value and appreciation of children in traditional Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway society.

Carole had known within herself, even before her trip to Clearbrook to buy condoms, that she wanted to have children with Zuus-way; the purchase had been a statement of her intention to make live with him more than anything else, she decided. Was tonight too early, would a child nine months from now be too soon? Zuus-way had told her his feelings, and that he respected her own. 'The woman's right to choose,' he had said. She glanced toward the man--he was still in the kitchen, giving her privacy to make her own decision without his preference influencing her. He had warned her, in his way, that her body, like a doe in heat, had an imperative of its own. In her mind, in her heart, was she ready to make an irrevocable commitment to a child to be born, to the father, to this land? She understood the reasons, as she was looking within herself to reaffirm her decision, why Zuus-way had shown her the Reservation in the way that he had, helping her to see for herself that the life of his people in this small fragment of their once-vast nation was not an easy one. Was she ready to bring a child into this life, to commit herself to it? With Zuus-way, yes! She knew that she had decided nearly as soon as she had met him, and was now, with his affirmation, certain that her choice was right. She looked toward the kitchen again. Zuus-way was walking back toward the center of the house, walking toward her.

Zuus-way took her hand, rubbed her palm gently with his thumb. Waves of ecstasy surged through her, and she felt moist trembling anticipation deep within her body. They looked into each other’s eyes, and for Carole there was nothing else in the world but this moment, the passion yearning within her, the trembling anticipation of the two of them together. He glanced meaningfully toward her purse, "Are you sure that you don't want the condoms?" he asked.

"Yes! Yes, Zuus-way. I love you. I am yours forever. I am ready for our children." Her voice trembled with passion. "Yes, Zuus-way, yes!"

"Then I am certain, too, woman." He kissed her tenderly, gently, and Carole felt her bones tremble, melt with desire. "I love you, Carole," he said quietly, and she could see the profound feeling in the infinite depths of his eyes.

They stood by the bed, and the velvet darkness of the house was lit by the dance of flickering golden firelight and the cool serene streams of silver moonlight. Zuus-way kissed her again, and Carole could feel the tempestuous heat of his passion, tempered by his gentleness, his deep live and his understanding of her own inexperience. Slowly, he undressed her, caressing her, cherishing her, waking every atom of her body to her own passion beneath his powerful fingers. He unhooked her lacy black silk bra, and with loving fingers stroked her breasts into pulsating mounds of fire. He bent down and kissed a nipple gently, and Carole felt waves of tumult wash through her, surging in harmony to the love she felt for the man, leaving a phosphorescent wake of burning desire. Her hands trembled with the palpable electricity between them as she unbuttoned his shirt ... unfastened his jeans.

Naked, they lay on the bed together, he caressing her and then she at first shyly touching them, then stroking him with fierce passionate joy. The heady perfume of his sweet masculinity blended with the clean sunshine scent of the sheets, the incense of the birch and pine-wood, and the herbs of his kinni-kinnik. The moonlight and firelight embraced them in the soft darkness of the night, and the subtle music of the wind in the trees, the sounds of the hearth-fire, the gently lapping waves of the lake and the night-sounds of the living forest surrounded them with a quiet symphony. With joyful curiosity, Carole's fingers gently explored the powerful thrust of Zuus-way's manhood, and as he trembled in anticipation beneath her hands, her first tentative touches were transformed into fierce desire.

He dipped his fingers into the tumultuous moistness between her legs, and with an artist's touch heightened her desire, their passionate love weaving a profound bond between them, until her craving for union with his man pounded within her with the wild urgency of a thunderstorm. "Now, Zuus-way, now! I love you... make love to me ... Zuus-way!"

He entered her with a gentle power, slowly, tenderly, pressing against her hymen with persuasive rhythm, until it was she who, with an upward thrust of her hips, ripped her maidenhead against the potency of his manhood, the momentary pain transformed by desire into a counterpoint of harmony, a flash of lightening in the all-encompassing intensity of their coupling. He remained nearly motionless within her, the fervent potential of his virility subtly caressing her heated depths, and then in a harmony of ardor and desire, they moved together to the brinks of climax, plateaus of ecstasy, and then spiraled upward again, soaring in passion which ignited every fiber of body and soul, bonding them in profound intimacy, linking them in incandescent pleasure with the male and female essence of every atom in the universe, burning with ecstasy. The moon had reached the zenith when they could restrain themselves no longer, and the euphoric mysteries of climax met them, pulsing the vibrancy of life, the floods of their bodies joining as their spirits melded in incandescent transparency; their hearts and souls touched, and Carole was certain that Zuus-way was one with her in the certainty of new life, their child begun within her.

They lay together in the limpid afterglow, snuggled together in the clean sheets and soft furs of Zuus-way's bed as the hearth-fire burned to embers and the fire between them quietened into a profound tenderness, the deep satiation of the moment and the confidence that they would share a lifetime of such passion. Before she drifted off into deeply fulfilled sleep, Carole remembered a Maya vase she had seen in a museum, pottery celebrating the coupling of man and woman, and drowsily thought that she now understood the sacredness of that piece of art, cuddling closer to Zuus-way. "I love you, Carole," he said sleepily, and hugged her to him.

As the first light of dawn reflected across the lake, Carole wakened and kissed the still-slumbering man next to her. Smiling, he awoke, and as the wisps of cloud high in the late September sky turned pink and then golden, as the sun rose across the lake, they made love again, gently, passionately, in joyful exploration of the love that they knew would grow for a lifetime.

Chapter 13

Zuus-way and Carole showered together, laughing as they soaped each other's backs, tenderly spraying each other with warm water, glorying in their bodies as revealed by the early-morning. They dried each other with thick fluffy towels from Zuus-way's cedar-lined linen cabinet, and stood together, caressing with rising passion, in front of the big mirrors Zuus-way had installed above the sink. Carole marveled at Zuus-way's manhood erect against her side, and impulsively bent down to kiss the tip peeking from his tautly stretched hood of foreskin; he trembled in response and she felt her newly awakened womanhood re-flooded with surging moisture, the heat of her desire yearning toward him.

Zuus-way lifted Carole onto the counter, and she drew him gently toward her with her legs wrapped lightly around his slender buttocks, until the silk-smooth head of his phallus rested, throbbing eagerly, against the hot moistness of her portal. Zuus-way stood there, touching her with sensitive longing promise of passion, caressing her body with strong bronzed hands, leaving searing lip-prints of kisses from her ear-lobe, down her neck, to her breasts. Carole groaned in ecstasy, "Oooh, Zuus-way," and he sealed her lips with a delicate kiss. "Shh. You'll wake the baby."

Carole's heart swelled with love for Zuus-way and for their newly-conceived child nestled within the depths of her womb; she arched with unmitigated pleasure toward his fingers as he painted streams of desire along her spine, across her breasts, and down her belly. He leaned toward her to kiss her neck, and she turned her head to accommodate him, glimpsing him in the mirrors. She watched him with rising fervor, and the reflections of their eyes met.

For long moments, they remained still, the tip of his turgid manhood bathed with the hot, sweet juices of her love, craving union but savoring their rising anticipation. They made love with their eyes, cherishing, adoring, treasuring their intimacy ...

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13