“Leroy was real adventurous,” Bernie would begin. “Couldn’t sit still. Always running off. Those days, you had to have a pass to leave the reserve, but that didn’t bother Leroy. He’d get on his horse and just go. One time, he rode all the way to Missoula.”

Mimi and I had driven down to Missoula for the big powwow. From Standoff, it had taken us over six hours. I looked up the distance on the Internet and checked it against the speed of an average horse over flat ground.

“You two should try that sometime,” Bernice would say. “Borrow a couple of horses from the Goodstrikers.”

“Bird isn’t really a horse person,” Mimi would tell her mother.

“That must be the Greek side.”

“I like horses.”

“Sure,” Mimi would concede. “You just don’t like to ride them.”

Five days. So far as I could figure, it would have taken Leroy at least five days to make the trip. And that was in the early 1900s, when you couldn’t pull over for a coffee in Cardston or bed down for the night at the Red Eagle Motel in St. Mary.

“He’d go to Great Falls as well,” Bernie told us. “Man didn’t like to stay home.”

“Tell Bird about the Crow bundle.”

“Why doesn’t this husband of yours like horses?”

Mimi and I went to Yellowstone one year. We had been out to Standoff to visit Bernie and decided to drop down into the States to see the park. Those were the days when we were young and fit. We watched Old Faithful erupt, toured the hot springs, jogged up the side of Mount Washburn, saw the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, and signed up for a horseback ride.

“Leroy disappeared round the same time those idiot railroad people blew up the side of the mountain and destroyed all those salmon.”

“That was later,” Mimi would correct her mother. “That happened in 1913. On the Fraser River.”

“Who’s telling this story?”

The Yellowstone Lodge offered two rides. The Roosevelt and the Canyon. The one-hour ride cost fifty dollars, while the two-hour ride cost seventy-three. Mimi chose the two-hour Canyon ride, which went along the rim of Cascade Canyon and through a series of mountain meadows.

A romantic adventure. Indians on horses under a high Wyoming sky, and for the next two days, I wasn’t able to walk.

Bernie liked to come at the story of Uncle Leroy from different angles.

“Back in the day, we had this Indian agent. Name was Nelson or Wilson. Something like that. He lived on the reserve. So he could look after us Indians. You get the picture?”

I would nod and tell Bernie that, yes, I got the picture.