The Honey Trap
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 2
Joseph Lame Bull had been chief of the River Crow band for eleven years, long enough to have buried three elders who told him he was too young for the job and long enough to have stopped arguing with them in his head. He ran the council the way his father had taught him — let everyone speak, decide what you already know, make them think they decided it with you.
Tonight the council met in the community building on the edge of Crow Agency, a low concrete block structure that smelled like coffee and floor wax and the particular combination of patience and frustration that characterized every meeting that had ever happened inside it. Seven council members. His daughter in a chair against the wall, which was not protocol, which nobody mentioned because she was the chief’s daughter and because she had brought the coffee.
Wallace Rides Horse was talking about the water invoice.
“Twenty-two hundred a month,” Wallace said. “For water that comes off our own ancestral land. Water that ran here before any Branson was born.”
“The courts disagree with your history lesson,” said Thomas Many Guns, who was seventy and had sat on the council since before Wallace had teeth.
“The courts were built by the same people who built the invoice.”
“Nonetheless.”
Joseph listened to them work through it. He had already decided what he was going to do. He had decided the morning he got word that Robert Branson was dead and the ranch had passed to the son. He had met David Branson twice, briefly, at the feed store and once at a stock auction in Billings. A quiet man. Watchful. Not his father.
The question was how to approach him before the lawyers got involved and positions hardened into documents.
“We need someone to make contact,” Joseph said. The room settled. “Informal. Before any official negotiation. Someone who can read the man and come back with a picture of what we’re dealing with.”
“Send Thomas,” Wallace said. “He knows every rancher in the county.”
“Thomas negotiated the 2003 grazing agreement,” Joseph said. “Robert Branson was on the other side of that table. The son will know.”
“Then who?”
Joseph did not look at his daughter. He had learned this from his wife before she passed — if you look at someone when you propose them it weakens the proposal, makes it seem personal rather than practical.
“Alachooshe knows horses,” he said. “She knows land. She’s been to Montana State, she’s studied water law. And she doesn’t look like a threat.”
The last sentence sat in the room.
Wallace looked at her. “You’d be comfortable with that? Riding onto a white rancher’s land alone?”
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