Fire Along the Sky Read Free Page A

herself was not allowed to play as a child.
    The walking woman climbed for an hour. When she rounded an outcropping of rock the voice was suddenly clear. The child was talking to herself in lively imitation, the tone high and wavering and round with plummy sounds.
    My dear Lady Isabel, may I pour you tea. How very kind, with sugar please.
    The girl shifted from English to Mohawk, her tone scolding, as harsh as a jay's.
    No sugar! No sugar! O'seronni poison, as bad as rum!
    The girl was such a good mimic of her mother that the walking woman had to press a hand to her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. She paused to wonder at this oddity, that she was capable of laughter, and then the woman turned in the girl's direction.
    She was a little below the trail, wading in one of the streams that ran down the mountain like wet hair down a woman's back. The water pooled between boulders before spilling down twenty steep and rocky feet.
    The little girl had taken off her moccasins to set them neatly aside; blue-black braids were swinging at her waist as she hopped out of the water and in again in some game of her own design. For a moment the woman believed that it was a trick, that the mountain had conjured her own girl-self up out of stone and soil: a vision to answer the question she had asked herself with every step of this journey. An image to remind her that she was right to come. She belonged on this mountain where she was born, with her own people. With the living.
    This thought was still in her mind when a fox stumbled out of the woods and slid down the incline toward the stream. Small and sleek, the red pelt dull with dust, and the worst of it: a grinning mouth that dripped white foam and crimson. It took an unsteady step toward the girl and snapped at the air, once and again, a sound like a dull blade against stone.
    The girl stood perfectly still, one foot raised out of the water like a heron. So young for this particular lesson, but it had come to find her nonetheless; her silence was far too fragile to protect her.
    Another lurching step and another, and a familiar smell came to the woman on a gust of wind. Madness in the blood.
    Her bow came into her hands as if she had called it, the curved wooden shaft cool and smooth and familiar. She notched the arrow and felt the tickle of the hawk feather against her wrist
    The boy's quick fingers tying the knot, the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth in concentration
    and took aim. In that last moment of its life the fox raised its head to look directly at her. A look she knew very well.
    “I bring you the death you seek,” the woman said, and she let the arrow fly.
             
    The little girl was her youngest cousin, born two full summers after the woman left home. She disliked her Mohawk girl-name and asked to be called Annie instead.
    “My mother always calls me Kenenstasi,” she added solemnly, watching out of the corner of her eye to see how well this fabled cousin would understand, or if she would have to be reminded of the way the world was divided into red and white.
    “I will call you Annie,” the woman promised.
    The little girl managed a smile. For the rest of the walk home she was quiet except for a shuddering breath now and then, her mind still filled with the idea of death. Or maybe, the woman reasoned to herself, maybe the girl was quiet because all the questions she would ask had already been answered.
    She asked, “Have they had word of me at Lake in the Clouds?”
    The little girl let out a sound of surprise, someplace between a croak and a hiccup. She nodded. “A letter came a week ago. We've been waiting for you.”
    The walking woman did not ask who wrote the letter; she was only thankful that she would not have to tell her own story. More than anything else she feared having to look her father in the eye and confess her failures.
             
    At the crest of the mountain where the sound of the falls was so loud that she must