Fire Along the Sky Read Free Page B

shout to be heard, Annie turned to the walking woman and cupped her hands around her mouth. Her face was shiny with heat and eagerness to be home.
    “The fast trail or the slow?”
    “You go ahead,” the woman told her. “Tell them I'm coming.”
    She watched until the girl disappeared into the trees and then she sat down abruptly and wrapped her arms around herself to stop the trembling. Overhead an eagle coasted on a hot and rising wind. When it was clear that the eagle had no advice to give her, the walking woman got up and started on the last leg of her journey.
             
    Standing in the forests above the glen tucked into the side of the mountain, she took in the changes all at once. At the far end, just before the cliffs fell away into the valley, where the sun shone hot and long enough for corn and squash and beans, the field lay fallow under a coat of coarse straw that shifted in the wind. That was a surprise in itself, but there was more.
    The older cabin, the one built long ago by her grandfather, was as it had always been. The second, newer cabin was gone (
a fire,
she reminded herself;
they wrote to you about the fire
). In its place something else had been built, not a cabin in the Indian style or a house such as the whites who lived in villages built, but a combination of both. The walls were made of square-hewn logs, and like the older cabin it was long and el-shaped with chimneys at two ends, but this house had a second story. Shutters bracketed each of the glass windows, and above the front door someone had painted the symbol of the Wolf clan of the Kahnyen'kehàka.
    On the porch of this strange cabin-house that she must now call her home, the woman's family was gathered, and they were looking at her, all of them, waiting for some sign that she was real; that she was the daughter they had been waiting for.
    Her father stood straight and strong though the hair that fell over his shoulders was mostly gray; beside him was her stepmother, small and rounder with age, pale with worry. Her hair—still dark—curled around her face in the heat. Next to her, the walking woman's aunt Many-Doves stood, the living image of her own mother, long gone to dust. With her stood the walking woman's uncle Runs-from-Bears and a man who must be Blue-Jay, his oldest son. Blue-Jay had been a boy when she went away, but now he stood taller even than his own father, the tallest man in a hundred miles. There was no sign of the other children of Many-Doves and Runs-from-Bears, not even of Kenenstasi-called-Annie, most certainly because she had been sent down to the village to spread the word.
    The walking woman's own brothers and sister stood at the bottom of the steps. The twins, still children when she went away, were now eighteen years old, old enough to be gone, raising families of their own. Lily was small of stature but with a fierce and burning energy about her, at odds with her watchfulness. Daniel was so much like the grandfather they all had in common that the walking woman believed at first that time had taken to spinning backward.
    Each of the twins had a hand on the shoulders of the boy.
    The walking woman had never seen the boy before, and still she recognized the shape of his head and the set of his eyes, the way he held himself. Her father's son, her half brother, called Gabriel. From the few letters that found her in the west, always months out of date and rough with handling, she knew some of his story.
    She was not surprised when he let out a high yipping cry, a trill from the back of his throat, and leapt forward so that the dogs twitching in their rabbit-dreams rose up in a fury of startled barks. They ran at his heels and with that the others began moving too. As if the boy had opened an invisible gate.
    By the time she let her pack slide to the ground he was there, flinging his arms around her like a tether, a hangman's rope, a lifeline.
    Her hands fluttered and then settled, one on his shoulder and