She was so engrossed in her mammoth sketch that she did not hear the footsteps behind her. “If that’s ata-ta´ηka,” Cyrus said, “you’ve got it all wrong.”
Cassie glanced up at him. “It’s a mammoth,” she explained. “Not a buffalo.”
Cyrus squinted. “Mammoth,” he muttered. “Whatever you say.” He waved his book of crosswords in front of her. “You gonna give me back my pencil?”
Cassie flushed. “I didn’t mean to steal it. I couldn’t find any others.”
Cyrus made an indeterminate noise and held out a hand to Cassie.
“Get up,” he sighed. “You’re going to freeze that baby.”
She waved him away. “Let me do the tusks. I’m almost finished.”
She sketched for a moment. “There,” Cassie said, tilting her pad up to Cyrus. He looked at a picture of a sweat lodge that had a trunk and tusks growing out of its flap door. “What do you think?” she asked.
Cyrus rubbed his hand down over his face to hide a smile. “I think it looks like a sweat lodge,” he said. He reached for Cassie’s hand and pulled her to her feet.
“No imagination,” Cassie pronounced.
“It’s not that,” Cyrus said. “How come white people look at a puddle and try to tell us it’s the ocean?”
Cassie fell into step beside him. “Maybe I should watch a sweat,” she suggested, offhand, thinking if she sounded nonchalant Cyrus would be more inclined to agree. Being an anthropologist, she had convinced herself that her interest was purely natural. She would have loved to know what went on inside the frames, which stood as testaments to the young boys who fasted under the tutelage of medicine men in an effort to understand themselves. She had seen the reverence with which Linda Laughing Dog’s oldest son had prepared himself for the ritual. He had come back drained and exhausted, but glowing from the inside as if he now knew how to fit together the pieces that made up his life.
If only it could be that easy.
“Ecu´ηpica´s?ni yelo´,” Cyrus said. “It’s impossible.”
“It would be an intriguing piece of research—”
“No,” Cyrus said.
“I could sit—”
“No.”
Cassie tossed him a smile, and for a moment, Cyrus forgot that she saw prehistoric beasts in the frames of sweat lodges, that she was using every trick in the book to be admitted to the inner circle of a Lakota rite of passage. He considered—not for the first time—how odd it was that Cassie, who had carved her place in his family, had come to them through Will, who had always wanted out.
Shaking his head, Cyrus stretched his arms over his head. He laid the book of crosswords on the frame of the sweat lodge and started to walk over the ridge that swelled farther east of the house. “Le´ci u wo,”
he said. “Come here.” When he reached a small copse of trees that rested at the base of a larger hill, he stopped. “This was where Will built his sweat lodge,” he said.
“Will?” Cassie said, surprised. “I didn’t think he’d be into that sort of thing.”
Cyrus shrugged. “He was young at the time.”
“He never told me,” Cassie said, realizing as the words were spoken that although Will knew the intimate details of her private life, there was a great wealth of information about Will Flying Horse that she did not know. She tried to imagine Will at the same age as Linda Laughing Dog’s son, with his thick black hair long down his back and his muscles just starting to take a man’s shape. “Did it work?”
Cyrus nodded. “Not that he’ll ever admit to it,” he said. “In my grandson’s mind, being one of the People is something you can discard, like an old jacket.” He was standing with his face to the wind, and Cassie watched him cup his hands around the air as if he needed to keep it all from rushing by so quickly.
“Is that why he left?”
Cyrus turned to her, his black eyes sharp and measuring. “Don’t you think that’s something Will ought to tell you?”
“I think it’s something Will would go out of his waynotto tell me,”
she said carefully.
Cyrus nodded, admitting the truth of Cassie’s statement. “You know that Will’s mother waswasicuηwi´nyan, like you,” he said. “You know that Will worked on the tribal police force before he moved.” He took a step forward, willing to tell Cassie his grandson’s secrets but unable to look her in the eye while doing it. “The tribal police are like any other small police force, I guess. They do the usual—breaking up domestic spats, taking home drunks, keeping the kids from drinking beer down at the lake. And they pretty much turn their heads if it makes sense—you know, they don’t want to get one of their own in trouble, so they’re likely to give a warning instead of a fine.
