Status Updates From Winter in the Blood

She told us of her husband, Standing Bear, a Blackfeet. She was a girl, barely in her teens, when Standing Bear bartered with her father. Her husband gave her father two ponies and three robes. The reason she came so cheap was because her father had already given away four daughters. One of these daughters was Standing Bear's second wife, so she became the third and sat between his older wives and his daughters.

She was Cree and not worth a damn. Not worth going after.
My grandmother, before she quit talking, had told me how Crees never cared for anybody but themselves. Crees drank too much and fought with other Indians in bars, though they had never fought on the battlefield. She told me how Crees were good only for the white men who came to slaughter Indians.

"That's another thing the matter with these Indians." H
nodded gravely. - Lame Bull

The magpie floating light-boned through the afternoon air seemed to stop and jump straight up when Lame Bull's fist landed. Long Knife's head snapped back as he slammed into the pickup, his hat flying clear over the box. It was a sucker punch, straight from the shoulder, delievered with a jump to reach the taller man's nose.

How much of lame bull marrying Teresa was so he could get the land?

I had had my opportunity, a chance to work in the rehabilitation clinic in Tacoma. They liked me because I was smarter than practically anybody they had ever seen. That's what they said and I believed them. It took a nurse who hated Indians to tell me the truth, that they needed a grant to build another wing and I was to be the first of the male Indians they needed to employ in order to get the grant.

He would never say it, though, and after Mose got killed, he never showed it. He stayed away more than ever then, a week or two at a time. Sometimes we would go after him; other times he would show up in the yard, looking ruined and fearful.

"But you yourself said he was never around."
"You must have him mixed up with yourself. He always accomplished what he set out to do."

That late afternoon, several days later, the water level had dropped to less than an inch below the rim of the tub. But it was enough. That one inch of galvanized steel could have been the wall of the Grand Canyon to the tiny yellow ducks.

We had brought the ducks home in a cardboard box. There were five of them, counting Amos. We dug a hole in the ground big enough for the washtub to fit, and deep enough so that its lip would be even with the ground level. Then we filled the tub to the lip so that the ducks could climb in and out as they chose.
But we hadn't counted on the ducks drinking the water and splashing it out as they ruffled their wings.

The gun, an old .30-3o, had once been important to me. Like my father before me, I had killed plenty of deer with it, but I hadn't used it since the day I killed Buster Cutfinger's dog for no reason except that I was drunk and it was moving. That was four years ago.

“I felt no hatred, no love, no guilt, no conscience, nothing but a distance that had grown through the years.”