grateful. It is all I can do not to gallop ahead, to seek Naomi by myself, but I know how foolish that would be, how futile. And I endure the snakes.
“Someday we will all look like you,” Washakie says to me one day, almost a week since we left the Tobitapa. He has been morose and has not spoken to me all morning, though he insists I ride at his side. His sudden comment startles me.
“What do I look like?” I ask, not understanding his meaning.
“Like an Indian dressed as a white man.”
After a moment he continues. “The blood of the Indian and the blood of the white people will flow together. One people. I have seen it.” He does not sound happy about it. He sounds resigned, and I don’t know what to say.
I tell him about the turtle, about living on both the land and the water, like Naomi told me to do. He smiles, but he shakes his head.
“We will have to become entirely new creatures. Then we will all be lost people . . . like my mother.”
NAOMI
Beeya is excited. All the women are. We’ve quickened our step, and everyone is smiling and chattering. The men move ahead, scanning the wide valley and pointing as they argue. The chief—Beeya calls him Pocatello—has the final word, and the people spill down behind him as he chooses a spot where the ground is flat and the creek runs through it. This is not a temporary encampment; we have arrived.
The day is spent erecting wickiups and staking out territory. We are the first, but we are not the only. Another band comes in from the north midday. Another from the west not long after. Each stakes out a position in the valley, and by the end of the day there are easily a thousand lodges and twice that many horses and dogs. And they keep coming.
At nightfall, the celebrations begin. It is like the shrieking from the night I carried Wolfe into camp, but this is not mourning, and it goes on for hours. The leaders of each band make up the inner ring around their scalps, which are strung from small poles. The warriors dance around the leaders, and the women and children take the outside. Around and around, dancing and singing songs I have never heard and hope to never hear again. Beeya does not dance, but she enjoys herself, swaying and yelping softly, sitting at my side in the grass beyond the wide circle where all the activities take place.
There are far more horses than people, and when the morning comes, the races begin. The men race all day long, betting on the outcomes and bartering when they lose. Beeya and I watch as Magwich loses five of his horses and wins five more from someone else, only to lose them again. His mood is black, and Beeya keeps me away from the wickiup much of the day. She has dressed me like a doll. Feathers hang from my braids, and beads hang from my ears. When Beeya came to me with a rock, a fishhook, and a chunk of wood the size of a cork, tugging at my ears, I let her have her way. I have no fight in me. The pain was sharp, but it didn’t last. I almost missed it when it fled.
The women move among the camps and congregate around the clearing, visiting and displaying their wares: beaded clothes and moccasins, painted pots and feathered headpieces, armbands, belts, and cuffs. Some women cluster and string beads onto long strands of what appears to be hair from a horse’s mane, keeping their hands busy as they chatter. No language barrier exists among them; they are the same nation, if not the same tribe.
Some of the women wear cloth instead of skins, simple tunics and long skirts sashed at the waists and decorated in the style of their people, but I do not blend in. I am stared at with wide eyes and open mouths, but Beeya likes the attention. She tugs at my arm and makes me sit, spreading a skin in front of me along with little pots of paint. She pats the skin and says my name, “Nayohmee,” and pats it again. Then she pulls a woman forward through the crowd, pointing from the woman’s face to the skin in front of me.
The woman is someone of importance or esteem, because the other women part immediately. The woman stares down