The keen of a mountain lion echoed back from the lowland, and I heard the rattle of tom-toms.
“She visited my homestead weeks back.” I kept speaking. “I taught her a handless mount.”
A stillness hardened over Wa-ah-zho’s posture. He held my gaze. I didn’t flinch. “That was you?”
“Yes, I taught her the swing mount,” I said. “And how to hold until the smoke clears—when shooting a pistol.”
The Lawman cursed, his pitch grumbly and muffled. Wa-ah-zho frowned at me. Perhaps I’d made our predicament worse—but what other choice was there?
My gaze scattered across the forested hills, the firelight glinting on the umber spikes of a bear claw necklace. “Do you know Niabi?” I asked.
“I know Niabi.” Wa-ah-zho brushed his hand over his face. “She’s my wife.”
“Oh.” I faltered. Well, damnation. I should’ve stopped speaking miles ago.
“I cautioned Niabi to stop visiting pioneers,” Wa-ah-zho said. “It’s treacherous out there.” He called for someone to find Niabi. “With the full moon, she’ll be in the wood gathering herbs.”
Moments passed, long and brutal. Wa-ah-zho considered the Lawman. The Lawman’s expression was barren, arms crossed. For allhigh creation, he could at least apologize. Then—a pound of footfalls. A woman raced up the path, Hudson’s Bay blanket looped across her shoulders, hair liquid behind her.
Niabi halted before me, a wide grin across her face. “Oh, it is you.”
She kissed Wa-ah-zho swiftly on the lips, his expression somewhere between exasperated and amused. Then she grabbed my arm, her gaze snagging on my wound, and dragged me downhill. “You must harvest the elm bark with me.”
“Niabi,” Wa-ah-zho called. “Could you please not race off to the woods with someone we don’t know?”
“I know Minnie.” She walked back, my hand held in hers. She wrinkled her nose at him. “Stop frowning and welcome them for the night.”
Wa-ah-zho sighed and looked skyward.
“She’s the one I told you about.” Niabi released my hand and grabbed his wrist, rubbed her thumb across his skin. I looked away, uncomfortable seeing such an intimate moment. “There is much we can learn from homesteaders, of how to survive.”
Wa-ah-zho scratched the back of his neck, jaw clenched, a tattoo of horizontal and vertical lines visible on his throat. “Dark has fallen. With the full moon this night, many won’t slumber until grandfather sun arises.” He frowned at his wife. Tucked his blanket up beneath his two braids. “But you are welcome, Minnie, to shelter with us this evening and ride on homeward in the daylight.”
I exhaled a puff of air. “That is gracious of you,” I said. “Thank you.” Tension eased from my shoulders—it seemed I wouldn’t be spending the nighttide locked up in a jail cell with the Lawman, but instead enjoying the full moon with Niabi and Wa-ah-zho.
Wa-ah-zho nodded. “You may share tales of the race and the changes overcoming this land.”
Niabi tugged my arm, pulling me downhill. As we sped away, I glanced over my shoulder at the Lawman. He watched me, posture like stone, gaze tracking down my forearm to where my hand linkedwith Niabi’s. “And what about you, cowboy?” I heard Wa-ah-zho say. “Convince me out of hauling you to our jail.”
An expansive timberland spread beyond, the silvered light a’glow across the overstory. Niabi shared how she gathered bark and roots under the autumnal full moons. “My mother and my sisters and I adore the full moon’s glimmer.” She led me into the shadows of the thicket. “Do you have any sisters?”
“One.” We slipped under the canopy, blackjack trunks reaching skyward, beginning starlight easing through the leaves.
“Well, go on, tell me about her.”
And so I did, telling Niabi of childhood escapades with Magnolia. How we’d hide from our tasks and read, Magnolia riveted by the ideas in herPopular Science Monthlyand me with my serialized novels. It ached to speak of her, but perhaps I needed to. Niabi shared some mayhem she’d instigated with her three sisters, when they’d been hauled off to school. “I couldn’t stand being shut up behind walls—it was as if part of me died,” she said. “But, oh, the pranks we played.”
I knew of the boarding schools but hadn’t known they were a spiritual death for the Osage. There was much I didn’t understand.
Niabi crouched at the base of a slippery elm, the green and yellow, red and indigo stripes on her cloak mottled with twilight’s shadows. She clicked open her knife and showed me how to harvest the bark without harming the tree. I knelt, pressed my unbandaged palm against the waving ridges of the elm’s trunk, the bristles rasping my palm, this wide gap of moonlight full of something between haunting and effervescence.
“Niabi.” I frowned, unsure what to say. “I didn’t know—”
I trailed off. She waited. “I didn’t know the horrors of the land rush,” I said. “The ways my people have treated yours.” I looked at my hands. My fingers blanched against the warm color of the bark. “I didn’t know that in finding my own land, I stole from others.”
She crouched beside me, held my gaze. “You know now.”
I wasn’t sure what to do with the truth. The land rushes had brought me such freedom. I thought of Olive, all the run had givenher family. I didn’t know how to untangle such a thing—how I could look upon my land with gratitude, when my opportunity had been built upon upending the lives of others? How could Niabi withstand my friendship, how could she even speak to me?
