Chapter 7

I know that there's always been sort of a myth of the beautiful Indian maiden among the stinking savages. It was common knowledge from black and white old-time TV that all the Indian girls were pretty, and there'd even been subtle hints that they were teasing temptresses.

The cold hard facts of the morning-after had only come when, in high school, I was actually exposed to very old photographs of said Indian maidens; they were barkers to the last.

The girl approaching us was making great strides toward restoring my original enthusiasm for Indian maidens and their pulchritude.

My best guess of her age was sixteen years old, maybe. Her face didn't favor the others, no real familial resemblance to it. It was actually remarkably pretty. Even under buckskin her breasts looked substantial and they were doing what almost all sixteen-year-old breasts do, standing right out.

Her feet pointed straight ahead as she walked toward us and the fact that her buckskin dress was made from the skin of only one, or at the most two bucks, let me see that her legs, all the way up dangerously close to her noble red savage cooter, were well shaped and frankly, beautiful.

Her hips were only slightly rounded and I wished like hell for a look at that ass she'd started swinging a little more prominently since she'd noticed I was watching. She was also a good six inches taller than any of the others, or that was my first impression anyway.

The headman wasn't paying her any attention; he was gawking at the visqueen she was bringing. I felt relieved by this and thought I'd need to rein in my staring. I didn't want to let my budding diplomatic relationship with the noble savages go down the tubes from lusting after their children.

Alas, the visqueen was here and the show was over. At least I got my long awaited look at her ass after she turned around and went back to help with the bear's last rites. She had a cute one too, more than cute really. Her buns stood up as proudly as her breasts had seemed to and the cats in that buckskin sack looked like they were in a fight to the death.

Oops, the noble red savage headman of this project had caught me lusting this time, but thankfully he'd didn't seem upset. In fact, the look on his face could be considered one of conjecture - if, and only if - you can bring yourself to accuse a noble red savage of having a profit motive.

Thinking fast for once, hoping to get whatever that thought had been out of his mind, I pointed to myself and said my name, slowly and precisely and then pointed to him and raised my eyebrows hoping he'd get the hint.

He did, but I was still fucked on this deal. When he tried, he didn't have any trouble at all saying Bill. I, on the other hand, couldn't even make a start on what must have been six syllables of his name. I did notice that at least two of the syllables seemed to require a swallowing sound.

After three attempts, I shortened his name to Sky. He smiled widely, nodding his head, pointing to me again, and repeating, Bill. I pointed to him and said Sky again, and we were done. In fact, he seemed thrilled. Probably because he realized I was too stupid to ever get it right and no doubt he was glad to be done with the whole name exchanging drill.

We got down to the serious business of the visqueen then. He was examining the shreds carefully, pulling and tugging and looking closely at the dried deer blood on them. Then he turned his face to me with an obvious question in his expression.

Seeing a chance to further my diplomatic coup, I held up one finger and then turned back toward my camp, asking him to follow me by crooking the extended finger. He understood at once and picked up his bow, then as I walked back to my truck, he followed.

Poor Sky, it was culture shock all over again when he saw the U-Haul, my camper, and my pickup. It was so foreign to him that after a few seconds he tried to ignore it and look only at me.

Opening the U-Haul, I took out the box that held the balance of the eight-foot three-inch by two hundred foot roll of visqueen and grabbed the roll of masking tape I'd used to wrap my former deer meat in.

Closing and locking the U-Haul's doors with the combination lock, I went to the small tarp I'd used to keep the deer off the ground while I'd tried my skinning experiment, rolled it up, and then we left with the tarp, visqueen and masking tape.

Back at the ranch, or the bear as it were, my arrival caused all activity to stop and I spread the tarp out on the ground near the bear, as close to the body as I could get it. Thankfully we'd made it before the skinning really started, and I saw that they were being very careful with all the delights of the bear's internal organs.

I pulled the roll of visqueen out of the box, unrolled about thirty inches, and cut it off the roll with my sheath knife. Together they all made a sound like a gasp when I unfolded the visqueen and they saw how big a sheet it made.

In only a few minutes I had it cut into three roughly equal squares and I put the bear's liver on one of them, wrapped the visqueen around it carefully, and closed the package with masking tape.

They were flabbergasted, totally stunned. My next trick, slowly peeling back the masking tape to reopen the package was blatant magic in their eyes, and shutting it back a few seconds later was almost too much for them.

It was no trouble now for me to get help rolling the bear over onto the canvas tarp and I could almost see the light shining when they put the dried blood they saw already on the tarp into the equation and realized that it would be much easier to keep pine needles and other detritus out of the meat by skinning it on the tarp.

Now that they had the idea, they were back at the bear with their flint shard knives in seconds, and his hide practically flew off. Anticipating the next development, I cut off a longer length of the rolled visqueen, probably three and a half feet, and had it waiting for the first quarter of the bear they got loose.

In an astounding leap of intuition, the oldest female - the obvious commander of the cleaning and skinning operation - took the forequarter, placed it in the center of this larger piece of visqueen, wrapped it securely, and then held it in place looking expectantly toward me for the magic tape.

After doing my duty, I showed the woman how to peel off a starting place on the masking tape roll and then how to tear it to length. She caught on at once and so I showed her how to deal with the heavenly visqueen. We went slowly through the process of unrolling it first and then, after borrowing her flint shard, I demonstrated how to slice off another portion, making this one about the same width as the last.

The folding, or unfolding rather, was more difficult but she finally caught on. She rewarded my faith in her next by folding it back up like it had been when it came off the roll. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was setting Rega up for high status for life. Of course Rega wasn't her whole name, and maybe not even part of it, but it was the best I could do - and she seemed thrilled with it.

Rega took command of the wrapping ceremony from then on. When the meat was all wrapped, she declined to waste visqueen on wrapping the skin and no doubt it was better that way anyhow. They rolled the skin up like I assume they'd always done and tied it with a couple of rawhide thongs.