Chapter 7

A year changes things.

Miya was walking — had been walking since September, which nobody had asked her permission for, and now there was no containing her. She moved through the lodge and the camp with the absolute confidence of someone who had recently discovered locomotion and intended to use it fully, and Grey Wolf had taken to sleeping lighter because she had learned to lift the lodge flap and he had found her outside twice in the dark following sounds that interested her.

She said twenty words now, in a mixture of Shoshone and English that satisfied her completely regardless of whether it satisfied anyone else. She called Mary Ellen Mama which she had arrived at on her own, and she called Grey Wolf a version of his Shoshone name that she had compressed into something of her own devising, and she called Tibo Boy which was not his name but which he had accepted with the resignation of someone who understood arguing with Miya was not a productive use of time.

She called Hupia Pia — grandmother — which had stopped Hupia mid-sentence the first time she said it, and Hupia had looked at the child for a long moment and then picked her up and carried her to the fire and that was that.

It was an evening in late November, the second winter, the fire low and the camp quiet around them. Miya was down. The wind was working at the lodge walls but couldn’t get in. Mary Ellen was letting her hair down for the night, her fingers moving through it, when she became aware that Grey Wolf had stopped what he was doing and was watching her.

She looked up.

He was looking at her the way he sometimes looked — with the full attention he gave things that mattered — and there was something in his face she hadn’t seen before, or hadn’t seen directed at her quite like this. She waited.