Night Wings by Joseph Bruchac Page A

again. Because as soon as we set out on that trail yesterday, our journey took a turn that it is going to be hard for you to believe.
    We went back in time.
    Grampa Peter explained that to me. “We’re not just up,” he said, holding up his index finger and then pointing it over his shoulder. “We’re back.”
    It made sense to me. That is why we haven’t seen any airplanes or other hikers. That’s why their cell phones couldn’t get a signal and their GPS units couldn’t make contact with the satellite. Where we are now, there aren’t any. It also explains what I saw just a little ways back when I was making my preparations. After I’d crept away from our sleeping captors and was out of earshot of them down the trail, just before I got to those trees that were the right size, I startled a little herd of some hoofed animals that were sleeping for the night. They took off down the hill, but not before I got a real close look at their broad horns and the white and cream color of their coats. They were caribou—animals that have been extinct in northern New England for over a century.
    To understand what I’m saying or to even begin to get close to believing it, you have to think a little bit like an Indian. Not a modern-day Indian whose head is totally into the European reality that has been piled up on top of this continent like landfill over a wetland, but a Native person who still remembers and believes in the wisdom of our old people. To us, time is not a straight line, and the past is never left behind. Instead, everything is a circle, and things keep happening again and again. Like the turn of the seasons or the movement of the earth around the great sun that makes day and night, day and night in an endless cycle.
    I’m not talking about time travel, like in those corny movies when someone goes back in a machine or a souped-up car and does things that change the present and the future. I’m talking about stepping into a past that is always with us, a past that was then and is also now, where the flow and the balance remain unchanged. You won’t meet yourself as a little kid or see your own great-grandparents, but you will—if you’re Indian—find yourself in the ancient reality, the old earth that your ancestors knew. It’s always been there and it will always be there.
    Those old beings, like Pmola, are at the edge of European reality. They’re just stories to most people. But, as my mom explained to me once,they make sense to those of us who don’t see life in black-and-white terms. If you can’t find Sasquatches, for example, maybe it isn’t because they are just a legend. Maybe it is because they live most of the time in that other reality, the one that flows between past and present. They know the trails that lead back and forth between then and now. And our old Indian people knew those trails too. Sometimes we would only follow them in our dreams. But other times we could walk there on our feet. We could travel in ways most white people don’t think possible.
    I’ve been listening carefully. I can no longer hear my Grampa Peter making his way along the trail opposite this one, the trail that leads upward. I can hear the sounds from the three tents, though.
    I can hear Tip tossing and turning, talking to himself in the midst of the nightmares he’s having. I’m pretty sure I know what they are about. I can hear Darby Field snoring, making as much useless and irritating noise in his sleep as he does when he is awake. Louise, in her little tent, makes a sound as she sleeps, too. But it is more like a big cat purring than a snore. The quietest sleeper is Stazi. He’s the one I am most worried about. He already caught me once, andif anyone knows enough to figure out what I am up to, it’s him.
    The first light is just turning the clouds red and gold, coloring the hills to the west. It’s time. Darby Field has turned over and stopped snoring. He’s starting to wake up. I take my position