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“While stalking the deer, I had to move a small bush before me, crawling, and pausing for long intervals as I watched the deer for signs of alarm. Lying flat, I waited to crawl again, doing so across long stretches of prairie. My brother’s body would not tolerate any of this. Even I learned the excruciating patience that was necessary to stalk the deer.”
He drew his legs up before him and locked his arms around them as he gazed pensively into the flames. “Entering my teen years, I was allowed to track bear,” he said. “I am very glad my brother was not with me one day when I was doing so, for surely one or both of us would have perished.”
“What happened?” Joylynn asked, her eyes anxious.
He turned his gaze toward her. “I rounded a point of rock high in the mountains and came face to face with my first grizzly,” he said. “The bear rose, towering above me. In that brief moment of indecision, which only the eagle recognizes in the snake, I shot forward between the massive arms of the bear and plunged my lance into its heart.”
Joylynn gasped and turned pale.
“I dodged the crushing sweeps of its paws, running, inches from death, until the grizzly finally fell,” High Hawk said.
Seeing how impressed she was by this tale, he squared his shoulders and told her another. “Often I rode recklessly as I hunted buffalo with my lance,” he said. “My friends and I drove turkeys from the mountain ravines onto the plains. Riding our ponies, we chased the turkeys until they tired; then we youths swept among the turkeys, snatching them from the ground.”
“How interesting,” Joylynn said. “I . . . I . . . remember my father bringing home wild turkeys for my mother to prepare. Thanksgiving was when they were the most sought.”
“Thanksgiving?” High Hawk asked, raising an eyebrow. “What is this thing . . . Thanksgiving?”
“It was a time for giving thanks,” she explained.
And then, knowing that she wouldn’t be allowed to just sit by as the other women of the village worked, she asked, “What are my duties today?”
“The horse care falls to women,” High Hawk replied. “They care for the animals each day, usually in the morning after their morning meal.”
“What . . . is . . . required of them?” Joylynn asked guardedly, though she was sure she was up to this task. She knew everything about how to care for horses.
“The women take the manure from the corral and dispose of it in the river,” he said, seeing that this comment made Joylynn wince. “Then they go to the coulees to cut grass, which they haul home on their backs and store for fodder. Sometimes the women cut cottonwood bark to feed the horses.”
“And . . . which of those things . . . will I be made to do today?” Joylynn asked.
“All of it,” High Hawk said matter-of-factly.
No.
She couldn’t believe it.
She had never realized an Indian woman’s life was so hard.
But she would not allow herself to look weaker than they. She would show High Hawk and everyone else that she could take whatever he and his mother dished out to her.
“And I assume you expect me to join the women even now?” Joylynn asked, challenging him with her eyes.
“Ho, now,” High Hawk said, amused at how she was trying to disguise her dismay at what was expected of her today. “The women leave as soon as they have fed their husband and children the morning meal. I imagine most of them are already outside in their husbands’ corrals, scooping up manure.”
Although Joylynn had always taken special care of her own horse, never leaving manure standing in Swiftie’s corral, the fact remained that it was only one horse’s droppings. From what she had seen of High Hawk’s corral, there would be a lot of manure to scoop up and carry away.
And that was only the one corral she could see.
“Do I have to clean all of your corrals?” she asked.
“One is all that will be required of you today,” High Hawk said, rising and playfully holding aside the entrance flap for her. “The one behind my tepee.”
“Well, thank you, kind sir,” Joylynn said sarcastically, hating to leave the tepee without changing into clean clothes. She even had the private chore of relieving herself to see to, and wondered where on earth she might go in broad daylight to do that.
She would go into the thick shadows of the forest not far from his corral. She just hoped that the sentries wouldn’t think she was trying to sneak away and come upon her in the middle of her personal chore.
She would never be able to live down the embarrassment!
But knowing how asinine it was to think of being embarrassed by anything while being treated in such an ungodly way, she lifted her chin and walked briskly past High Hawk. Then she realized that she was barefoot.
