Once Upon a River Page 0,78
She put the rabbit in a potato chip bag, mushed it around in the salt, tied it up with a string, and submerged all but the top of the bag in the water. She held it down with a rock.
“What if I asked to see your hunting license?” he asked. He was standing behind her, smiling. One front tooth lapped over the other.
She ignored him.
“My people used to live in this place, I’m pretty sure.” He clasped his soft, puffy hands in front of his chest. “Would you share your food with me?”
“You just go around asking people for food?” Margo watched four blue jays swoop in and screech in unison.
“When you’re in a strange land, you have to depend on the generosity of the local inhabitants.”
Margo thought about the rabbit and decided there was plenty for two people.
“I’ve been trying to eat Indian food while I’m out here,” he said.
“Why?”
“I’m an Indian, for starters. That’s what I mean that my people came from around here.”
Margo studied him more carefully. Ever since reading Michael’s book, she had been hoping to meet an Indian hunter. She had imagined he would be a strong, wolverine-hearted Indian with a bow and arrow, not some soft-looking guy with a weird way of talking and no weapons.
“That rabbit and those vegetables over there look good.”
“You don’t seem like an Indian,” Margo said, although when she studied him more closely, she saw that he did resemble the guy in the Indian hunter book, though he wore jeans and a sweatshirt instead of buckskin.
He squatted down so close to her she could feel his breath on her neck. “Why on earth is a young woman skinning a rabbit in a picnic park? I’ve seen some weird things since I’ve been in this state.”
“I shot a man’s pecker once,” she said. “Just so you know not to bother me.”
He stood up and moved to look at her from another angle. “Don’t worry about me. I’m a happily married man. Listen, if that meat’s safe, I will give you five dollars and some delicious dried papaya and pineapple in exchange for dinner,” the man said.
She held out her hand. She had never heard of papaya, wondered if it was Indian food.
“How old are you?” He dug in his wallet for a five-dollar bill and handed it to her.
“Twenty-one.”
The setting sun put a gold sheen in the man’s hair. His skin was golden, too, the same color Brian’s had been in summer after he’d worked outside. This Indian was pretty, she thought, much prettier than Sitting Bull, who looked in his photos like a man carved out of stone and not happy about it. And unless this man really intended to report her to the DNR, he posed no danger. When the potato chip bag in the water beside her floated up, she put another rock on it to keep it under. She knew if she left it even for a few minutes, one of the park’s fat, bold raccoons would grab it.
“Why do you chill the meat like that?”
She wished she had asked her grandpa or Brian the same question. Maybe it had something to do with parasites or bacteria. The Indian hunter had also cooled his game before eating it. “Seems like an Indian would know,” she said.
“I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. We didn’t cook rabbits. Closest I came was watching Elmer Fudd.” The man squatted again beside her at the water’s edge. “You aren’t twenty-one. You look seventeen, nineteen tops.”
“So why’d you ask me, if you think you know?”
“It’s hard to see you underneath all that dirt. Shouldn’t your parents be calling you home soon? Or are you out here waiting for some man your parents disapprove of?”
“I don’t like men,” she said.
He laughed and gave up on his squatting, let one knee fall to the ground. Margo didn’t shift her weight, though her legs were growing stiff. The man studied the river, but Margo knew she could study it longer.
“This place used to be called River of Three Herons, from what I can deduce. This part of it anyway,” he said.
“It’s the Stark River,” Margo said. “Named after the explorer Frederick Stark.”
“Well, there were folks here long before Mr. Stark wandered by with his cap and fife and tweed vest,” he said and eyed her. “I’m following the Potawatomi migration route. The whole tribe walked down from the Upper Peninsula, all the way to the Kalamazoo River, four or five hundred miles.”
“Why?”
“Why did they walk