35
The sun filtering through the aspens woke me. Súmáí’s warmth intersected my spine as he lay sleeping on his opposite side. I rolled onto my back, gnawing my lip against searing pain. I studied the rise of his shoulder, which met the rolled-back edge of our blanket. I picked up a thick lock of his hair, my movements so stiff, and draped it across my face. It smelled like dried grass and smoke. I opened my mouth and let strands fall in as I looked up, through hashes of dark and light, at aspen boughs and saw a slide show of yesterday’s events: the bear, the pool, the miners.
I’d helped kill two men. Bad men, granted, but killing nonetheless. The day had moved so fast, I hadn’t had a chance to fully consider them. Now I felt sick. Yet none of this was … what? Real? Sane? How far into the future would I have to go for this to be sane?
We lay in a flat spot. To my left jutted a chest-high boulder. My heart skipped as the physical world came into focus: we were at the bottom of Eternity, one of my favorite runs. Every time I boarded here, I’d swing in from the west and hit this jump. I felt how I’d pop off its lip, flying—one, two, three, four—till gravity dragged me to landing’s whoomf and my arms rose in victory.
A tear meandered down my temple. That’s where I belonged. Where snowboarding off a jump, smoking, doing drugs, ditching school, and dating a dangerous guy constituted life’s greatest risks. When Súmáí woke, I’d learn what he knew about the trees, see if it held a clue to getting Mom back, and get out. I closed my mouth tight on his hair.
He stirred and rolled to face me. He rested his head on his arm. I rolled, grimacing, and attempted to bring my arm up like his but was too sore. I searched his face, saw Gage in its symmetry and in how his brows made a little V when they pressed close. He saw the wet at my temple, frowned, and wiped it with his finger.
I braced because I thought he might try to kiss me. Instead, he wiped my tear on his bottom lip, and whatever drew me to him increased by a power of ten.
As we entered the village, Súmáí’s people glanced at us, but this time they continued what they were doing—eating breakfast, scraping hides, hanging meat. The breeze carried the scent of horses and dung and smoke. Two women were walking into the willows along the creek’s bank, carrying burden baskets like backpacks. Those three-foot-long baskets matched the ones in photos Lindholm had shown us. The Utes, she’d said, made baskets prized and traded for by all tribes. She’d taught us that Utes spent their summers hoarding food for the winter. Most days, men hunted and women collected berries and roots and trapped small game. Constant work. Survival.
We passed Súmáí’s uncle’s tepee. Out front, Túwámúpǘch held the bottom of a deer leg. She ran a knife down it and peeled back the fur, making me swallow hard. Beside her, a baby was laced in a cradleboard and propped against a stump, just a little face watching. That baby was about the cutest thing I’d ever seen, and at the same time the saddest because I realized it belonged to Túwámúpǘch. As I watched Súmáí smile down at his niece or nephew, I felt the vastness of Túwámúpǘch’s sorrow. It might be even greater than mine for Mom. Súmáí’s brother must have died about a year ago, based on this baby’s age. And I was blocking her from marrying Súmáí, maybe finding happiness again.
“Is that a boy or a girl?” I asked.
“Boy,” Súmáí said.
“Was she happy with your brother?”
“Yes.”
We glanced back and caught Túwámúpǘch glaring at us.
Outside Súmáí’s tepee, his mother bent over a small fire with a metal grill balanced on its rock ring. She set an iron skillet on it. As she lifted an inch-wide white square of paper, my breath caught. Grinning at me, she peeled paper off both sides of the square and dropped a slice of butter in the skillet.
The tiny precise papers and the sliver of butter seemed ridiculous in this world. Predetermined, narrow servings. I saw the grid of the Condo. I smelled the barfy cleanser from school and heard the electronic ring of its bell. My life in the future appeared, narrow passages ruled by thick black boundaries laid out by clocks.
She tossed the little papers onto the fire, and they ignited as she set a pre-halved bagel in the sizzling butter.
I cleared my throat. “Súmáí, really? Those are from the lodges.”
He waggled his eyebrows. “I am a great hunter.”
I pointed at his mother’s feet. “And those slippers?”
He nodded, rubbed the back of his head, and shrugged.
I was half-angry, half-laughing, till I remembered Tara’s stitches and black eye. I heard her say, They give you a gun? Though my mouth was watering from hunger, I strode around the tepee and looked across Gold Bowl toward the ridge to Silver Bowl, where Sapphire East’s luxurious log structure would one day perch. I remembered standing right here amid a crowd of skiers, heard their chit-chat, banter, and laughter set against the chairlift’s electric hum.
Súmáí joined me. Yesterday, I’d helped him kill two miners. He’d scalped them.
“You hit my friend,” I said.
He sighed and held out the toasted bagel. I shook my head. He loosed a frustrated breath. “My people are hungry, Sovern.”
“You hit Tara! Knocked her out! Do you remember that? She would have been … riding a big … ” I found the closest Spanish word: “Máquina.”
“I have seen the loud machines with suns that move at night and flatten the snow. A machine like that would help my people.”
I barked a laugh. “She’s my friend!”
“It was dark. Her clothes were big. I thought she was a man.” Súmáí glared at the bagel. “You do not understand—we are at war with the white enemy.”
Are.
“They have stolen our lands.” He calmed his voice. “They have brought sickness, killing many Utes. They force us onto reservations. In our ancestral meeting places, they build agencies that give out bad food and thin blankets. They are cunning. Ouray has met with the whites and signed away our lands. My family does not like Ouray. He does not have this right. He is a coward. He will not fight !”
I flinched at how hard Súmáí spoke that last word. I remembered his lightning speed as he’d shot the miners. Another photograph from Lindholm’s class rose in my memory: Chief Ouray, leader and negotiator for all the Utes; his wife Chipeta; maybe another Ute; and two white guys in old-timey suits. All seated. All posing after signing a treaty in Washington. What year was that?
“Our people have finally fought and slain a cruel white agent. He will not tell lies in the spirit world.”
Events ticked through my mind as I tried to recall history’s chronology.
“Meeker? You mean Meeker?” Meeker had been an Indian agent in northern Colorado. In my world, there was a town named after him.
Súmáí looked surprised. “He is the one.”
Meeker had died with a spear through his mouth, which even the history books said he deserved, but during Súmáí’s time, it had sealed the Utes’ fate. I now knew exactly where we hung in time. The date, like all numbers, returned to me easily from Lindholm’s class over a month ago: 1879. Days where yellow journalists were writing headlines like The Utes Must Go. The final days of Súmáí’s people in these mountains.
“When did this happen?”
Súmáí shrugged. “Ten moons ago.”
“You stayed here through the winter?” Okay, I calculated, 1880 then.
“A warmer place. Down the valley.” He gestured west.
“You won’t move to the reservation?” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Chief Ouray had actually been a shrewd negotiator, had succeeded where other tribes had not, and he’d brought his people many peaceful years they wouldn’t have had otherwise. Now, after the “Meeker Massacre,” the years of the Utes’ patient peacefulness would be meaningless. Ouray had been able to negotiate nothing but a military escort to a reservation
in the plateaus and arroyos of Utah. The Utes had been ordered to gather in Grand Junction for the long march. Banished.
But Súmáí’s people hadn’t gone. That’s what those miners had meant when they’d said, You aren’t supposed to be here.
“My family does not follow Ouray. The Great Spirit gave our ancestors these mountains. We will not leave.”
A dog barked playfully on the tepee’s other side, and children’s excited voices followed, moving through camp. An adult voice spoke, saying something obviously adult. I thought of the people I’d met—Súmáí’s proud father, his uncle, his worrying mother, Túwámúpǘch—and the dance in my honor.
Súmáí watched me—fierce, a warrior—and I knew he’d never feel bad about attacking Tara. I tried to mask how this scared me, how I knew he was destined to fail. Staying here with him would hurt like losing Mom did. I had to learn what he knew about the trees and get out.
“Súmáí, I—”
He held up his hand like a traffic cop. “Do not tell me what will come. Your land steals my hope.” He stared at the bagel’s two halves. Cooking in butter had mottled the bread yellow and dark brown.
I felt like such a jerk. I’d been about to tell him I was leaving, yet he thought I’d been trying to save him with knowledge of the future. I bit my lip and accepted half the bagel. While there might be ridiculous pre-sliced butter and boundaries everywhere, things were cushy in my world. I wouldn’t even have to pay for the food he held. Suddenly life held too many contradictions.
I looked at the sun, loosed a noise like a frustrated animal, and stormed toward the trail leading up to the Always spruce. Get out! Just get out now! I told myself.
“Sovern!”
I stopped. Súmáí arrived at my side. Though I willed myself not to look at him, my eyes betrayed me. His face held so much pain I caught my breath. “Súmáí?”
He smiled a little. “We return to two words.”
I pressed my forehead against his chest, higher than where it met Gage’s chest. Súmáí’s hand came to my back and moved up between my shoulder blades, and it was comforting. Finally, I stepped back.
“The hunting in your world is good.” He smiled sadly at the bagel-half I held.
I grimaced.
“Game here is scarce,” he said.
I pictured Túwámúpǘch’s deer leg and realized that by “hunting,” he didn’t mean just stuff from lodges. “You hunt in my land?”
He nodded.
“That deer leg Túwámúpǘch had—”
He nodded.
I had to think about that. “Will more white men come looking for those two from yesterday?”
Súmáí shrugged. “Let them come.”
“What happened to their scalps?”
“My mother will sew them to my shirt,” he said.
“A shirt? You have a shirt of scalps?”
“I earned my first scalp at fourteen winters. It is how I became a man.”
“Fourteen?” At fourteen, I’d been skate skiing and snowboarding and hating the Condo.
“It is a rite of passage for Ute boys to go alone to a special place. They stay three days, seeking a vision from the spirit world. That vision guides them through life.” He glanced at me in a weird way.
“What did you see?”
“I cannot speak of it,” he said.
“But you scalped someone?”
“A white man came upon me. I was weak from hunger, but I killed him.”
“How many winters are you now?” I estimated he was twenty-three or twenty-four.
“Nineteen.”
“Nineteen? I thought you were older.”
“How many are you?” he said.
“Almost nineteen.”
Súmáí’s smile was wide. “You are old to become a wife, but I guess you’ll do.”
I snorted, scanned Gold Bowl—full of live trees—and understood why I’d been crying as I woke. Whether I stayed or left, we were out of time.
36
Where are the men?” I set down the tin cup of willow-bark tea Súmáí’s mom had brewed to ease my soreness.
“Hunting.”
Clad again in Súmáí’s shirt and breeches, I stretched out my limbs. After breakfast, I’d refused to wear the ordinary dress Súmáí’s mom had offered, choosing his clothes instead. When he’d handed me a pair of sheepskin slippers with a playful smile, I’d rolled my eyes but put them on. The dress from the night before was stored next to Súmáí’s bed—mine to keep—but no way could I bring it back with me. How would I explain it to Dad?
Súmáí’s mom went into the tepee, moving as stiffly as me. She emerged carrying the two scalps from yesterday and a shirt of patchwork hair. Long, short, curly, straight, black, brown, red, blond. Some shiny, some dull. It was eerie. Yesterday, those miners had been alive.
I felt nauseous as I watched her lift a long white needle and thread it. Her fingers’ joints were so big her hands seemed cartoonish. I glanced at her cup of willow bark tea and wondered how much she drank to ease her arthritis.
“Are we going hunting then?” I needed to get back to the Always spruce. On the hike there, I would pick Súmáí’s brain one more time, and then I’d go home.
“You want to hunt?” Súmáí said and glanced at his mother.
“I’m not hanging out here.” I tried to make it sound like I was only avoiding sitting around with the women, which wasn’t hard. “Besides, I need to get my parka and hat from by the tree.”
He frowned and scratched the back of his head, Gage’s habit, and it made the knot in my stomach pull tighter. Why did I have to lie to everyone? Then Súmáí took a deep breath and nodded. He went into the tepee, leaving me and his mother sitting across from each other. She didn’t say anything, just worked, but disapproval rode off her in waves. Súmáí emerged with his bow and quiver slung over his shoulder. He spoke to her. She eyed him, then me, and nodded grudgingly.
“Towéiyak,” I said.
Her frown lessened a little at that.
“We will go on foot,” Súmáí said. “If we have success, we will pull our kill. It is downhill.”
I wouldn’t even let myself consider dragging a dead dear or elk. I dismissed his words, intent on that Always spruce.
As we walked out of camp, straight up the draw on the future road I’d snowboarded down yesterday morning, every last one of my muscles rebelled. I could tell Súmáí shortened his strides for me.
“You remember,” he said.
“Remember?”
“Towéiyak. From when you gave me the hat.”
“Sort of. Your mother reminded me too.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “That is the way of my mother.”
My every step was a chore demanding attention. In about fifteen minutes, though, my muscles eased a bit. “Where will you hunt?” I asked.
“Near the tree where we met.” He pointed toward Shangri-
La. “Sometimes game grazes there.”
“Is that why you were there that day?”
He seemed to sort things and nodded.
“That’s a long walk. Could you travel there by tree?” I bit my lip because I’d used “you” instead of “we.”
He stopped, assessing me. “That is not the way of the trees.”
I decided to press my advantage. “But it would save us so much—”
“The trees do not move that way.”
“You’ve tried?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“Always I travel to other lands.”
I’d gone to Mom on my first two trips, but on the third, I’d found Súmáí. A stranger. No, not a stranger, I corrected myself, remembering my childhood boogieman. What other lands had Súmáí seen? Had he brought me to this land, or had Mom
? Why here? Why now? I sipped a breath: a pattern, an equation existed for this. “How did you get to Sapphire East then?”
“Sapphire East?”
“The lodge that will be over there.” I pointed.
“We call it Big Ridge. The first time, I rode hidden on the machine.” He started walking backward, nodding and grinning, daring me to be offended again by his hurting Tara. A test.
“I hate tests,” I spat in English.
“What?” he said in Spanish.
“Nada,” I said. Nothing. “And the food? How did you carry it?”
“There is a tree near Sapphire East.” He pronounced the name pretty well. “From there I pulled it down to my village.”
“That’s a long way.”
He shrugged. “I made trips for scouting and trips for hunting. I had men from my village come to the tree with horses to carry back the food. It was difficult because the trees do not bring me to other lands in—” He’d obviously said something he hadn’t wanted to.
I stopped walking. “Order? The trees don’t bring you in order?”
He didn’t stop.
Why would he not just tell me this? I forced my glare from his slim powerful body to the surroundings. Be nice, I coached myself, and started walking again.
I’d assumed Súmáí and I had been seeing one another in a linear order. Till yesterday, I hadn’t seen him for a while. Was this because he couldn’t get back? He’d been so desperate-
seeming, so forward when he’d found me lying there after the Mom-bear attack. Had he encountered other Soverns, in other worlds? Had he met the ones I’d seen? Did he know a future Sovern from my own world, beyond the me that was following him now? Had they fallen in love, and now I was here like a frustrating echo? That would explain a lot.
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