AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“That’s what they call it. Nobody knows what causes it. But the guys who fly those things all develop it.”
“Maybe I can get used to it,” she said. “I love Raptors,” she added with a sigh. “I think they’re the most beautiful planes on earth.”
He grinned. “They’re not bad. But I like horses.”
“Me, too!”
They rode along for a few minutes in silence. Bartholomew took his time, and he wasn’t particularly nervous. Hopefully, being around Teddie relaxed him, because he didn’t try to bolt with her. All the same, Parker was watchful.
“Will it offend you if I ask you something?” Teddie asked as they were on their way back to the stables.
“Of course not,” he replied with a smile. “What do you want to know?”
“We learned at school that all Native Americans have legends about animals and constellations and stuff. Do the Crow have them?”
He grinned. “We do. My favorite is the Nirumbee.”
“Nirumbee?”
He nodded. “They’re a race of little people, under two feet tall. Some of the tales we have about them are violent and gory, but they’ve also been known to help people. I had a Cherokee friend in the service, and he said they also had a legend about little people that they called the Nunnehi.”
“Do you think they really exist?”
“Some credible people have claimed to see them,” he said. “My friend swore that he heard them singing in the mountains of North Carolina, where he grew up. And here’s what’s interesting. Archaeologists actually found evidence of a race of little people, no taller than three feet high. It made the major news outlets. They were called the “Hobbit” species, after Tolkien’s race from the films,” he said, chuckling.
“Wow.”
“I think all legends have some basis in fact,” he continued. “Like the Thunderbird. It’s a staple of Native American legends, a huge bird that casts giant shadows on the ground. There was a lot of controversy about a photograph, a very old one, of several men holding what looked like a pterodactyl stretched out. I don’t know if it was Photoshopped or legitimate, but it looked authentic to me. I saw it on the Internet years ago.”
“I’ll have to go looking for that!”
“I like legends,” he said softly. “Living in a world that has no make-believe, no fantasy, is cold.”
“I think so, too.” She paused. “Do you speak Crow?”
He nodded. “A lot of us do.”
“Is it hard to learn?”
“Compared to Dutch and Finnish, it’s simple. Compared to Spanish or French, it’s hard.” He glanced at her whimsically. “We have glottal stops and high tones and low tones, double vowels, even a sound like theachin German. It’s difficult. Not so much if you learn it from the ground up as a child.”
“I’d like to study languages in college,” Teddie said.
“In between flying F-22s?” he teased.
She laughed. “In between that. I could go in the Air Force and go to college, couldn’t I?”
“You could.”
“Then I’ll study real hard, so that I can get in.”
“That’s not a bad idea.”
She fingered the reins gingerly. “Do you like my mom?” He hesitated.
She glanced at him and saw his discomfort. “Sorry. I just meant she likes you. I hoped maybe you liked her, too.”
“I do like her,” he said. He sighed. “But you guys are getting over a big loss, a really big loss.”
