Starfish_ A Novel - James Crowley [35]
That night they cleaned the rifle and packed a bushel of berries and what remained of the smoked meat. They fastened quivers made of birchbark and filled them with the arrows that their grandfather had showed them how to make. Beatrice collected feathers from the edge of the Great wood and wove them into Ulysses’s long, flowing mane, and when they woke early the next morning they were prepared for their latest excursion.
The children rode out of the meadow high on Ulysses’s back, looking every bit the young wanted warrior outlaws that they now were. They rode through the Great wood and continued up into a strange tangle of trees that they had never seen before. Game was surprisingly scarce, and Lionel began to wonder who or what had scared it all away.
By midday the woods opened, and Lionel questioned how far they planned to travel from the lodge in the meadow. Sometime that afternoon they heard what they thought to be the distant sounds of drums. Beatrice proceeded toward the drums with caution, and soon the woods once again grew thick and the trees began to twist and turn their branches, tying themselves in knots overhead. Then the drumming stopped.
For some reason this scared Lionel more than the sound of them beating. Beatrice pulled Ulysses up and listened.
“What is it?” Lionel whispered.
“I’m not sure,” Beatrice answered. “Something ain’t right.”
The next thing Lionel knew, he was knocked from Ulysses’s back and had landed with a thud on the thick carpet of the forest floor. He rolled over as soon as he hit the ground and saw Beatrice lying next to him with a large, fat boy standing over her.
Beatrice tried to get to her feet, but the boy knocked Beatrice back to the ground and then stood over her, clucking and pawing at the dirt like an overstuffed prairie chicken. The boy had feathers in his hair, and he began to squawk and occasionally jumped sideways, striking Beatrice with the end of a short stick as he did.
Lionel looked around and saw that the boy was not alone. The trees seemed to come alive with children, ranging from Lionel’s age to well over Beatrice’s.
The other children—Lionel counted ten—circled them. one by one they stepped forward, trying to grab ahold of Ulysses’s rawhide reins. Beatrice sprang to her feet, driving the fat boy back and knocking a smaller kid away from Ulysses’s right flank.
Lionel grabbed the reins from Beatrice and backed himself and Ulysses against the trunk of a large tree. Beatrice turned to face the fat boy. He stomped at the ground and continued to shriek and jump from side to side. Beatrice circled him patiently, and the next time he lunged at her, she twisted him sideways and threw him over her leg. The boy hit the ground hard, and in a flash Beatrice had Grandpa’s knife nestled between the folds of his chubby throat.
She looked up at Lionel, who along with Ulysses held off the other boys. “That’s enough,” Beatrice announced.
The children stopped and turned to her. Her braids with their hawk feathers fell to the sides of her face, the knife catching the slightest hint of the late afternoon sun through the trees.
“He won’t do it,” cried the fat one, mistaking Beatrice for a boy. “Get the horse!”
The rest of the children, Lionel included, froze, unsure of what to do. Lionel looked around at the faces of their attackers. They were painted, some of them poorly, and they wore an odd combination of government-issued uniforms and makeshift versions of the traditional clothing of the Blackfeet.
Lionel recognized the school uniforms from the day of the football game. They were from the Heart Butte boarding school, and the fat boy was Barney Little Plume.
“Get off of me,” Barney screamed, wrestling Beatrice with little success. Beatrice held him firmly to the ground, the knife