Night Wings by Joseph Bruchac

was sleeping. My wrists are no longer fastened together.
    I hold out my hands. “How?” I whisper. Maybe a little too loud.
    Grampa Peter grabs my collar to pull me back close to him. He gives me a little shake and then whispers into my ear, “No Lakota.”
    It is everything I can do to keep from laughing. He’s just told me a silly joke in two words. The word hau , which sounds just like how , is the Lakota Sioux word for “hello.” Here we are in deadly danger, and he is indulging in corny Indian humor.
    Some people who do not know our family well think my grandfather is a little crazy, becausehe has this tendency to laugh at very strange times. Some of his old Marine buddies told my dad that Grampa Peter would even start chuckling and telling rapid-fire jokes when he was in combat in Vietnam and the Vietcong were coming over the wire. But humor is a great thing if you can use it to slow down your pounding heart, to calm your fears, to make you focus in a situation where other people would be lost in panic. To be able to laugh in the face of peril, of absolute evil, is actually a very powerful thing.
    So I play along and say “How?” again, but in Abenaki.
    This time he gives me a straight answer.
    “Houdini,” he whispers.
    He holds out his hand. There’s a box cutter blade in it. Its edge glints in the moonlight. He holds up his left foot and shows me how the heel of his shoe pivots out when you press it a certain way to disclose the secret hollow where he had the blade hidden. Just like his hero Houdini always had lock picks and other little devices concealed on his person, my grandfather was prepared. I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, one of the old traditions among our Abenaki people is that no one can ever bind or tie down a real medicine man. Which is whymy grandfather sometimes says that Houdini could have been an Abenaki.
    Grampa Peter hands me the blade. He doesn’t have to whisper anything when he does that. I know what he is silently saying to me.
    You know what to do with this.
    I nod.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Back
    H ave you ever been walking through the woods and come upon what seems to be a wounded partridge, stumbling away from you with one wing flopping loose, as if it is broken? Naturally you walk toward it. If you’re a kindhearted person, it’s because you want to see if you can help it somehow. If you’re a hunter—and not a particularly bright one, I might add—then maybe you see it as an easy bird to catch for your dinner.
    But just when you are almost ready to grab it, that bird flutters up and staggers a little farther away, maybe dragging its other wing this time. That is when, if you are a smart hunter, you catch on. In fact, if you know anything aboutthe behavior of mother birds, you haven’t even tried to catch it because you know it is trying to lure you away from its brood of little ones, which are hiding in the bushes in the opposite direction from the one that Mama has been trying to get you to go.
    That’s my job. Lure them away. It’s going to take precise timing for them to not catch on to what I’m doing. I’ve been sitting here, just at the edge of the clearing, waiting for the right moment. Not that I haven’t already been real busy. I made good use of that box cutter blade before bringing it back to Grampa Peter.
    Why didn’t the two of us just make a break for it, try to put as much distance as possible between us and Field’s gang? We could have done that, maybe even gotten away before they caught up with us. But there’s a good chance that we would not have made it. And even if we did get away, they might have decided not to chase us but to head to their original destination. And that is something that neither Grampa Peter nor I want to see happen.
    There is another reason why Grampa Peter and I are doing things this way. We both have a feeling that unless we do try to stop them, unless we keep them from Pmola’s treasure, we will neverfind our way home