Shadow Moon

Woman Without Nose opened the deerskin flap a half inch at a time, then peered out into the rain. The camp was asleep and dark and looked impossibly muddy. She saw no dogs and knew the people were keeping their dogs inside. It was Shadow Moon weather, a time when dogs and people disappeared in the night.

The great campfire in the center had been snuffed out by the steady downpour and there was not much that could be seen in the village, but she could feel what everyone felt; she felt eyes; she felt watched. Her skin warmed with anticipation, and she closed the flap as slowly as she had opened it.

Crawling over bear, fox, and rabbit skin rugs, she went to where her son slept. She touched his bear-greased hair at the crown of his head. He was almost five now.

Shadow Moon was coming tonight. She knew it, the entire village knew it. The rain had been coming down hard and steady for three days and nights. They called it The Rain of Shadow Moon and the people would stay in their lodges tonight, sitting in the dark singing prayers in low voices just above a whisper. It was considered best not to see Shadow Moon when he came to the village. The ones that saw him were said to disappear with the dogs. Woman Without Nose had known no one to disappear, but she wanted the people to go on believing it because it was what Shadow Moon wanted.

She added small pieces of wood to the fire and was careful not to make it too big. If the people saw light, they would throw rocks through the night and curse her in the morning. She slipped under her blankets and lay still with her eyes open.

He came inside ghostlike and dripping wet. The smell of the pine forest was strong on him. She watched him remove the pack from his back. Then his deer skins and knee-high moccasins. He stood in the firelight naked and clean, his feet without mud. At that moment, she was Blue Jay’s Song, the name he had given her. She threw him a blanket to wrap himself as he sat cross-legged at the fire.

He looked older, even old, and she wanted to believe it was the firelight playing tricks, but she knew better. He had a stern face, a white man’s face that had seen many winters. His chestnut hair was long and turning gray, almost white. He brought deer and rabbit skins out of the pack and left them near the fire. Then he handed her a string of venison jerky, and something carved in wood, a horse, a toy for the boy who wasn't his son.

One day he would take them both away from this village and away from the scorn delt to the half-white child whose father had been a horse soldier and whose mother was evil-looking and hard to look at.

The man sitting at the fire had been a horse soldier too and told her about riding into the village with the other blue-coats and how he had done nothing to stop the massacre. He simply sat on his horse and watched as vomit came into his mouth.

This was the day Elton Jefferson had stopped being a soldier and had stopped thinking of himself as a white man. When the others had ridden off, he found her lying on the dirt beside what might have been her grandfather. She had a bullet hole in her face. Her buckskin dress had been torn down the middle and it was obvious what had happened to her earlier before the bullet.

He found she was still alive and was amazed. He had taken her to the nearest village, this village, a village that would never truly be hers. He didn’t think she would live through the night, much less, the winter.

But he came back the following year, and every year after, and had watched the boy grow. “Next year, we leave,” he said with his hands. He made the motions of the mountains, and the rivers, and Blue Jay’s Song nodded her head and smiled.

He dressed and left then, as he always did, being careful of his tracks in the mud. When he was gone, Woman Without Nose sat listening to the rain and watched her son sleeping next to her. She knew he would soon learn to ride, and they would go North high into the Lost Mountains with the man she called, Pao Sante which meant Great Uncle in her language. They would live beside a stream filled with trout in a house built of pine wood, a home with a stone fireplace, a place where she would be known as Blue Jay’s Song.