The
deep winter moon lifts over the Pine Ridge Reservation just after
sundown. The west wind sings to itself as it scours the rez badlands,
cliffs, escarpments, chutes, as it bends over Quiverhill, Ghost Canyon,
Bear in the Lodge Creek. Coyotes twist their barbed-wire cries over the
night.
One
man, hunched against the wind, ignores the moon, the coyotes, walks
west along the old dump road, a gravel track near the badlands
escarpment. Joshua Fast Elk, angry, grieving, dark head bent, dark eyes
fixed on the ground, doesn’t see the moon, hear the wind, care about it.
His younger brother, Melford, his only family, has just died. Nineteen.
Pneumonia. No one saved him. Melford was worth saving.
Josh
knew Mel was sick, but Josh thought it was just a cold, went to work
thirty miles away in Kadoka and didn’t get back to their village,
Wambli, until late. Josh didn’t know Mel left the house, passed out in
the old Gethsemane Cemetery in town where he’d gone alone, sad because
his girl, Kate Quiver, broke off with him.
