bread. That day, her mother had no bread and no smile. She was serious and sad, and that made the girl afraid.
Sunlight filled the small room as the blanket covering the door was pulled to one side. The girl's father stepped up beside her mother and looked down. The girl held her breath, clutching at her blanket with small, strong fingers. She knew something was different. The faces her parents wore told her. But what could upset them? They were the biggest and smartest people she knew. Her father was a singer, a man of the spirits; he knew a lot and told her about things when she asked. Her mother was strong and kind and pretty, a source of comfort when the boys in the village told stories of monsters to scare her. Her mother didn't fear the witches they spoke of, so why was she afraid now?
"Come," her father said. "We must go."
"Where?" the girl asked.
"I do not know," her father said. Beside him, her mother was making a face like she was trying not to cry. It was enough to bring out the young girl's tears.
"Hush," her mother said. "No need for that. Be brave for us."
The girl sniffed back her tears and bit her lip. She could be brave like her mother. To show it, she lifted her arms, and her mother picked her up. The girl's father bent to retrieve the blanket, and the girl grabbed at it greedily. He smiled then, but he didn't look happy.
Stepping over to the entrance, he pulled the blanket aside and walked through. The girl's mother followed, carrying her securely. The girl kept one arm curled around her mother's neck and the other around her blanket as they left the warmth of their home and stepped into the cold winter air.
There were a lot of men outside. Some of them she knew, men from her tribe, but most of them were strangers. They wore funny clothes and had skin the color of the soft fur on a rabbit's belly. They carried metal sticks that they pointed at the people from her village. She saw her friend's mother throwing some corn cakes into a basket. Other women were wrapping clothes in blankets. Men loaded bundles onto fuzzy grey donkeys.
One of the new men came riding up on a horse. He yelled something that the girl didn't understand, and the other pale men began moving toward the villagers.
The girl felt her mother's arms squeeze her tightly. "He says we must leave now," her father said.
Victoria clasped her handbag in front of her, gloved fingers absently working their way back and forth over the top. Behind her, the city of Denver carried on its daily life with fervor. Horses clipped and clopped along the cobblestone streets, carrying riders or drawing carriages and buggies behind them. Around their massive hooves, dogs barked and scurried in motley packs. Mothers hung out of secondstory windows, calling to their children in the streets to wash up and be careful and don't forget to pick up an extra loaf of bread for their visiting cousins. In the distance, the harsh call of a locomotive echoed into the blue sky. Underscoring the other sounds was the steady patter of feet in shoes and feet in boots and feet in nothing at all.
The city had taken her by surprise when she'd first arrived. Arranging the train from New York had been a simple enough affair, and the coach had been comfortable despite James Townsend's warnings. She changed trains twice, once in Cincinnati and once in Kansas City, her luggage cared for by pairs of young bag boys who kept stealing glances at her as they worked. She gave them each a smile and a tip when they finished, their faces telling her that they would have just as easily taken a kiss in place of her money.
When the locomotive had finally pulled into Denver, she had stepped out of the train car and sucked in her breath. In the distance, marching beyond the quaint city skyline like an army of blue giants, a line of mountains glowered at her. Beneath their proud peaks, curving slopes of green and brown ended abruptly in jagged cliffs, sheared and cauterized like an amputee's limbs. They sprawled across the western horizon from end to end, fading into the haze hundreds of miles away. She had never seen anything so frightening or magnificent in her life.