He bent his head slightly against the stench. Father had apparently not bathed since the Rainfall Moon, which was the last time he had ventured into these now enemy lands, ruled by the Mud Water People. They left Father alone, but he would be captured and tortured, so came and went by his wits. He was nervous, afraid that he would fail again, fail for the seventeenth time to bend that great bow in winter, on the anniversary of the Demon’s visit.

“Father’s voice was breaking, his long lost mind beginning to find reflection in his strained words, “Stands-with-demons, I have missed you, have longed for your return. I see you have outwitted the Mud Waters again. They were just here; the skulking ones brought me pemmican in return for a blessing, though they held their noses. My leg, the old demon-wound, kept me from the river and my cleansings.”

He looked at Father, old, broken, bent and soot-stained, once the tallest of The People.

“I will take you to the Bloody Way now, to the washing stones. The Good River is too deep and swift just now. But I won’t have you stinking like a white man.”

Father’s empty, wondering eyes seemed to catch fire, his mouth curling into a snarl, as he spoke in a wounded fashion, “What do you know of white men!?”

His heart ached to tell it. “They have come in their many winged houses—not demons from the sky, nor fur traders from Winter or metal hunters from Summer, rather mean little men floating out of the Sunrise Water, starved, dirty, like driftwood that does not burn, washed up on the Salty Sands that ring Our World.”

Father, moaned, low and painfully, “He was the shadow that comes first, the cloud that announces the storm.”

Father looked at him with his sightless eyes, ruined from gazing into the sun, awaiting an answer to his prayers.

“Have you ever wondered as to him not stinking like a white man? If so, what of it? You should be plenty wise by now.”

“He came clothed in the flesh of the Whiteman as a warning to us. He came though, according to the way of the Redman, as the Magic Boy’s guardian, for he came from Thunderer, the purging spirit who pronounces the Sky above of Mother Earth. Based on the dream of Lung-shot, the Magic Boy is an earthly incarnation of He-who-makes-rivers. Lung-shot told me, just before he passed, that He-who-makes-rivers returned him to us to warn of the whites. He made me promise to journey to Magic Boy Town as soon as I have bent the bow, in order to seek a blessing.”

He was already lifting Father, who protested, “You must not risk this. The Mud Waters will be returning soon. You must preserve yourself. You are the visionary of The People.”

“Father, I will not have you stinking like a white man!”

Father chuckled and let himself be carried over to the Bloody Way, the river that feeds the Good River at this juncture, having drained this portion of the Dark and Bloody Ground, land of rolling hills and salt licks that remained a hunting and warring ground for all—being claimed by no tribe, according to some forgotten truth.

They could be seen for many bow shots, and he would surely be hunted and slain on this spot. He no longer cared, having come to despair of ever bending the Bow Unbent. The air was clean of smoke, the sky clear of clouds, and the water an icy blue, like the sky turned to liquid. He sat Father on the flat rock and scanned the riverbanks and backlands for his enemies. Father, seemingly animated, went vigorously about stripping himself and bathing. Stands-with-demons took Father’s buckskins, soaked, them, and rung them clean between his hands. There were no women about, and hence no soap, but they could make an attempt at cleanliness.

The old man had been paying attention it seemed, reading his thoughts. “Mostly now, I use driftwood, hoping that it floats down from Magic Boy Town. I no longer have the strength to cut wood. I gather deadfall like a blind old woman now.”

Father sat naked and steaming in the cold winter morning, and regarded him with a clear, unseeing, ever-knowing eye, the Eye of Grandfathers. “For seventeen winters, and before, I have wronged you. I have not told the tale. Sure you know it mostly, for Sparrow survived it. Then there was all of that time you spent in His presence—much more time than I was granted, our interaction being less agreeable.”

Father continued, “I never spoke of my encounter. There was not much need. The wounds are here to see and the entire surviving tribe saw his actions among men. There was no stigma to me falling under his knife. Indeed, he honored me with the gift of his white-man’s longknife and steel tomahawk—and honored you, my son, with the Bow Unbent, and those other things that you now carry as a man, the steel knife and the flint tomahawk he stripped from me.”

He paused and splashed away the tears with the cold river water, then looked at him squarely. “You, the remaining people always saw as their hope. Me, they saw as the principal man—half-blessed some say—to fall before the demon; you the happy end, me the sad beginning. It is not so.”

“Father, do not blame yourself.”

“But I am to blame. Oh, how I am to blame! The people have assumed me cursed by my own great running ability. That is how the story still goes, I know. Even the Muddy Waters tell it that way, ‘The Warrior-too-fast, who had the misfortune to catch a demon!’ I have been silent on it, have I not?”

“Yes, Father, you have never related the chase beyond the falling out of Proud Scout. All assume you alone caught the demon, turning his wrath on us. That is quite bad enough. Most of the warriors yet lived at the point that you caught up with the demon and brought him back upon us.”

“If I had been fast enough to catch that demon, I would feel less sorrow than I do—I think. One never knows for sure about such feelings until they descend from wherever they float waiting to afflict us.”

“Father, it is cold and you are naked and bathed.”

“And here I will tell the tale untold, as cold as I was hot when it happened, as cold as I was when I woke living in the snow and unpinned my leg from the frozen world where it was stuck fast by that longknife! Have you wondered why he left me gifts, war gifts, his weapons, and the rest to you? Because he was done making war! He only made war on us so long as the Magic Boy remained. When Thunderer recalled the Magic Boy the demon fled.

“He outpaced all, even I. Even so he ran with the easy assurance of a youth playing tag with a toddler. He ran me out along the Little Prairie before a herd of grazing buffalo as witnesses. Then he slowed. I was heaving my lungs and he barely breathed hard. He was making a race of it, a game. He let me catch up and then flew off faster than a brown bear! This angered me. I was the fastest of The People, the fastest by far, and he left me gasping for breath. He had some play in him. It did not occur to me that he had been playfully departing, until I screamed that he was a coward—I challenged him.”

“When he turned and looked over that painted shoulder as dusk came down, swiveling that head incapable of growing a scalp lock, the buffalo raised their hairy heads and watched night fall on our tribe. His look alone spoke anger at me, as if there were a man inside who resented my calling back the demon that ruled him.

“He cleaved my elbow, broke my wrist, and pinned me to the earth. He left the long-knife in me and took my arrows rather than scalp me. He intended to kill my people with my arrows and it drove like ice through my heart. When he passed on by to take up the back-trail I knew that I—that my anger and pride—had called the demon down on The People. I laid bare my throat and looked back at him, saying ‘Me!’

“He spoke gravely in the demon tongue, paused, and traded tomahawks, most cruelly, as a demon would, indicating that my people would be butchered by my own weapon. He then spoke matter-of-factly and walked off.

“I then thought of White Bird of Morning, and pleaded, “Not Her!’

“He turned and looked at me, at my bared throat, and spoke in the demon tongue with the tone a warrior uses when remembering a woman fondly. He turned and stalked off as I cried and begged for him to slay me instead. I then came to my senses and yelled a warning to Proud Scalp that the demon was coming. Although the other warriors in their prime were butchered mostly brutally, Proud Scalp was shot through his good leg, as if mercy was being shown. Unfortunately the big vein was hit and he bled out in the night. By the time I got to him at dawn he was cold against that tree. I killed our people, Son!

Father then said with a hiss, tears rolling down his cheeks, “You should hate me, and use that hate to bend that demon bow! Take it. Do great things; make a name as a Whiteman hunter or Mud Water killer, or, as might be your way, a traveler, and teller of demon ways.”

“I cannot hate you, Father.”

He returned the wrung out buckskins and bent to pick up his old, withered father before he could try something stupid like putting them back on, and carried him to the shelter. He could hear a crow caw way off, and he knew he had been marked by a war party.

He felt full of life now, no longer as if he groped in the dark. As he set Father down inside the shelter by the fire, he felt proud of the old man, for finally unburdening that terrible truth, and was moved to comfort him.

“Father, the demon liked you. He smelled you on us like a dog would. Mother asked him for permission to look for your scalp among his collection, and yours was not there. The demon, in his dumb way, made friends with me, only because you were not there. I must finally deliver his message. I must put doubt behind me. I am ten winters older than you were when you fought that demon. It is about time I delivered his message.”

The interior of the crude shelter reeked, but this no longer felt like an assault on his sensibilities, but like a message passed in sorrowful smoke, the smoke of long suffering that might wizen him, finally, after these long wandering years.