I gave Cricket the mount’s signal, and he rested his knees against the ground, held steady, his black mane fluttering in the breeze.
I swung up, my arms full of whortleberries.
Niabi let out a surprised laugh. “By thunder.”
Cricket rose, my hips aligning in the saddle. I patted his withers. “Steady,” I told him and dismounted.
I offered him an apple slice, then held the pail of inky-blue berries out toward Niabi. We ate a few handfuls, the tart flavor bursting, the air full of the crispness of autumn.
“Well, come on,” I said, gesturing Niabi forward. “You try.”
Her posture was unsure, but I glimpsed yearning plain on her face. She wanted to try. Like me, Niabi rustled with curiosity and passion.
I shared a few tips. “Just be confident,” I told her. “If you’re at ease, he’ll be calm too.”
I rubbed Cricket’s fawn-brown jaw. “Easy.”
Niabi gave Cricket the command, and he knelt, his barrel at a slope. She vaulted—and her stomach slammed into his saddle, forehead slapping against the pommel. She was sliding off, moccasins peeking from her plum-pink skirt.
“Can I?” I asked, my hands hovering over her hip.
“For all the sky above, please.” Her voice was muffled, amusement threaded through her tone.
I shoved her into the saddle, her posture adjusting until she was stable. Cricket stood, and Niabi grinned, laugh lines wrinkled beside her eyes—and a longing for friendship clicked open in my chest. I remembered long ago, splayed in the high grass of a downward slope, the tawny color of the wheat the same sheen as my leather saddle—watching clouds hasten on by, my sister on one side, Lark on the other. How many seasons had we lain and watched the sky, how many moments planning our future, my heart thumping my chest, myself too full of wonder?
A while later, after Niabi and I ate turnips and deer jerky, she perused my weapons, her fingers brushing the glossy wooden handle of my scattergun. “I don’t know much of your tribe.” I handed her my father’s 1873 Peacemaker. “Do Osage women learn about guns?”
Niabi rubbed the buffalo horn, spun open the chamber. “Yes, women know how to shoot.” She wrinkled her nose. Knocked her head back and forth, as if working through how to explain. “My husband—” She tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. A faint red line inked down her center part. “Did I tell you I’m married?”
I shook my head.
“We wed last spring,” Niabi said. “It’s something new but my husband: He’s a good man. We are two halves. Moon and sun, night and day. But—” Fondness edged the corner of her mouth. “My husband doesn’t like me wandering among the homesteaders. He worries.”
I handed her some bullets. “So why do you?”
“Let me find the words.” She loaded the bullets into the chamber, one after another. “Much change is forced upon the Osage. Pioneers have been vicious: stealing horses, harassing women, causing havoc. Last week, as my sisters and I foraged rose hips along a ridgeline, several cowboys burst from the thicket and stole three of our horses—before I could even unholster my gun.” She spun the chamber closed, the movements of her fingers tense and jerky, as if terror still knotted into her joints. She looked in my eyes. “Do your people tell you this?”
I’d heard the lawlessness of No Man’s Land spilled over into Native territory, with outlaws and renegades causing all manner of havoc. But there seemed a haze in my perception.
“There’s much I do not know,” I said.
“I’m not just curious about horses.” Niabi frowned at my timberline, the wind lofting and dropping the heavy limbs. “I keep my eyes on the horizon. Watching the changes overcoming our land. Threats surge along the borderline, and I must learn,” Niabi said. “Training my horse, sharpshooting—this is about protection.”
I rubbed at the dirt smudged along my cuticles. I hadn’t realized how monstrously white men plagued their border. I remembered the stories my grandmother told when I was a child. Harrowing accounts of how tribes were dragged from their homelands, of how land was stolen or tricked away. Of trails of tears and unspeakable violence, of a bitter agony thread through generations. But the papers told another story. I didn’t know what was real. The tale went that the Cherokees sold their ranching land for the rush. Decades ago, they’d sold other land to the Osage. Then the Osage moved from Kansas to Oklahoma Territory.
An awareness grew that perhaps I’d glimpsed only a fraction of the truth. As is true with most stories, there seemed a distance between what the storyteller told for entertainment and what was truth. “I heard the Osage bought their land from the Cherokees,” I said. “Did your people want to move?”
“Of course not.” She lifted one of her necklaces, rubbed it between her fingers. “Why would we choose to leave the land of our ancestors?We weep, having left them.” She scratched her nails along the ridge of her pendant. Let it go. “White men always want, they continue to take and take. When my grandmother’s grandmother was just a child, we were forced away from the wide river valley of our homeland. Twenty years ago, when we moved again, a leader named Wah Ti An Kah thought that the forested hills of Osage Nation would be safe. That white men couldn’t put their iron into that ground—and so they wouldn’t force us to move again. They would leave us alone.”
I stared at her, not quite understanding. My heart stretched, a bleak, heavy sadness squirming. They had left their home so they might be undisturbed. And then my people had opened surrounding land for the runs.
Niabi raised my pistol, aimed at the heaps of clay I’d set up as targets. “I always hold my posture until the shot plinks,” she said.
My fingers clutched at my chest, still untangling what Niabi had shared. “Don’t lift your gaze till the smoke clears.”
Niabi exhaled, and her bullet thunked. The clod of red clay splattered, soil rushing earthward. The dust thinned, and Niabi eased. “Like that?”
I nodded, fiddled with my top button. “Thank you for sharing of your people.”
