The Color of Lightning by Paulette Jiles Page B

tried to force down one of the fingers but it wouldn’t fold. He spoke for the fingers in a piercing irritated voice in garbled Kiowa: Yii! Yii! Thae hohn noh hon dai! and then fell to wrestling and dancing with his fingers so that Nocteawah laughed and laughed, threw his head back and shouted with laugh- ter and so saved face. He gave Jube two good knives and took the earrings and the next day rode with them sparkling and tossing in his ears. Ahô, ahô.

    Chapter 9 ‌
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    i t h h e r k n i f e Mary could now help Gonkon inside the lodge. She could trim stew meat and snap off the
    points of porcupine quills. She was better at the heavy work with the skins. Jube set to work with an antelope skull and his own new knife and made his mother two bone combs with very fine teeth. They stayed near the broken red ridges where Punta de Agua Creek came into the Canadian. The ridges bled red sand into the river, ridges edged with brush and stunted cedar. In the valleys, scattered groups of buffalo were still moving south in the autumn cold. The band of Kiowa stayed there for two weeks. The buffalo carcasses seemed to lie in hills and heaps of hills. Mary cut through the heavy hide from neck to vent and along each leg, stripped out the good liver and entrails and kidneys. Getting the head off was like hewing down a small tree. The meat was cut into round pieces that could be spiraled out into jerky. Gonkon told Cherry to tell her mother that someday they might be so hungry they would come back here to boil up the bones and the feet.
    The work was very hard but now Mary had all she wanted to eat and she was stronger and if she was careful she could hide the fact that she sometimes lost her balance and that her vision was blurry.
    The man who had smashed her head with a rock after he had raped her often passed her by without looking at her. He had a sun tattoo on his chin as if he spoke to this deity daily, and maybe he did. She pretended not to see him. She made him invisible.
    A group of men rode toward them one day and stopped a dis- tance from the encampment. The crier came through the tipis with that jaunty and important way of walking that criers always have and shouted that they were Kiowa-Apache. They came to visit and smoke and after a day or so they and five or six men rode off to the Alibates flint quarries to see what they could find. Everyone was far away from the soldiers and the Indian agent and all the irrita- tion and frustration that came from dealing with those people, and so they would enjoy themselves. Jube stood and watched them ride off. He wanted to go with them very much. To ride in that careless company of young men. Old Man Komah walked past him and then stopped and touched Jube’s shoulder.
    “Someday you can go with them,” he said. “But you have to get your dream first. You don’t have any protection now. You got to get your dream person.”
    Jube stood in the dry grasses as they went past, and saw that every one of them had some invisible phantom riding with him, a transparent being that shone in transient sparkles around their heads, over their scalp locks. A protector and guide. Jube deeply wanted one of those beings to come to him and tell him, I will be with you always.

    a m o n g th e k i o wa- apa c h e was a young white captive. Jube saw him sitting on his horse among the other warriors when they returned from the Alibates with pieces of flint striped and spotted in many colors like layered candy. The boy was burned brown by the sun but he was somehow pale beneath this and very thin. His body had no fat on it, and his long bones were prominent and his knee- caps were like cylinders. His stomach and abdomen were flat. His fair hair hung in two braids to his waist, and he wore the stiffened
    bangs of the Kiowa-Apache, and heavy earrings. He spoke their language easily as if he had no other and moved among the young men of that tribe as one of them. They laughed and rode past one another to