The Color of Lightning by Paulette Jiles

tripod. Mary held to one of the poles to steady herself for a moment when Gonkon was not looking. Then they began to lay in the others in the crotch of the tripod one after the other so that when they were all up they made a mounting spiral of pole tips. Then they brought the cover: it had been rolled on a pole like a giant ancient manuscript and they unrolled it foot by foot around the tripod and secured it. Mary’s knees shook. She sat down outside the tipi and folded her hands in her lap. Aperian
    Crow’s wife came out of her tipi with a graceful step and Mary said, “Gonkon.”
    Jube looked up with a terrified expression. His mother was go- ing to say “Gonkon, Gonkon,” over and over again until Old Man Komah came and hit her. But his mother clamped her lips shut and pressed her hand against them. Gonkon laughed.
    “Mar-ee.” She handed Mary a wooden bowl full of meat and broth and hominy and waved Jube away. When Mary had eaten, Gonkon brought Jube another bowl, which was all she had in her stores. That and no more. Then the two of them collapsed in sleep. Gonkon brought out two worn blankets that had been used as har- ness pads and threw them over Mary and Jube.
    They took up the trail beside the white sands of the Canadian River, traveling northwest. Before long First Wolf and his scouts came upon a streaming band of buffalo that numbered perhaps three or four hundred. The beasts smelled sweetly of grass and the bulls had grown the long shaking pantaloons and beards of winter. The men ran them down and shot them with bow and arrow, which were more easily handled than the long guns, and the bow and arrow were silent. Men like Aperian Crow and other warriors like Satank and That’s It and Kicking Bird could get off five arrows in the time it took to reload a long rifle. Their arrows were tipped with steel hunting arrowheads, without barbs, long and slim, which could be pulled out easily. The barbed steel arrowheads were for people.
    “Mar-ee.”
    Gonkon handed her a butchering knife and then signed that it was only a loan and Mary signed thank you, or some gesture that meant appreciation. Mary took a great bolus of meat in her hand and cut down through the middle of it and stopped short of halving it by half an inch. Then she spiraled her knife through one half of the chunk of meat until it was a long thin strip, and then the other half, spiraling around and around the inside of each half to the end, and thus it made a ribbon a yard and a half long. This was hung on the scaffolding and then she took up another and another, along- side all the other women, and by nighttime the scaffolding covered
    an acre of the white sands of the Canadian River valley and fires glowed beneath the thin ribbons of flesh. Quavering flames shone through them as if the meat were red paper. Gonkon saw that Mary was given good pieces of tongue and hump and kidney fat.
    It was a kind of great fair held out in the distant plains, a car- nival of buffalo meat, of bones, of people singing in Kiowa of the immense being who had lifted the stone, and of the hole beneath the stone where the buffalo came streaming out in their millions to populate the earth.
    And so they went on into winter and Mary began to hope that she and her children would survive and that they would live to see Britt again and abide once more in their own house down in Young County. She tried to tell Jube that his father would come for them, that his father loved him dearly. Jube nodded and bent to his sil- ver spoons. When Mary could rest she collapsed to the ground and stared out at the endless auburn and biscuit tones, the oxblood- colored earth, the lampblack hues of the leafless trees.
    She had dreams about Kentucky, where she had been born, about the two walnut trees that stood on either side of the well path that led from the back of the house into a countryside rich with water and rain. Old Mrs. Randall speaking to her in admonitory tones out of that white and