Ralph Nelson owned the most land on the rez, and on that land pressing against the river he kept junk. Cars that didn’t run. Piles of sheet metal and garbage and electronics like old computer monitors. Next to his house, twenty-five years’ worth of deer and moose antlers tangled and hooked in a tumbleweed of bone. Somewhere among that stuff Ralph had a sweat lodge, one that was built into the ground. No one ever sweated with him because of the garbage smell.

The sweat lodge wasn’t hard to find. Between the piles of bone and sheet metal, a small blue tarp blanketed a wide mound. Under it, a passage with hard dirt stairs spiraled down into the earth.

Ralph’s sweat lodge ran deep, and at the bottom—a fire pit in the middle, needle of light pricking through the top where smoke escaped, dirt seats, cold earth walls barred by a man-made wooden rib cage giving structure to the circularity of the mound—I stood without my head touching the roof and even when I tiptoed I didn’t hit my head.

Sitting down, I pulled my arms and head inside my white shirt and breathed long and hot, warming myself. I dozed like that, too, inside my white shirt, but never as deeply as those buried down below all over the rez. Each time I woke I forgot where I was. When I took my head out of my shirt I thought I was buried alive but then I remembered what I was supposed to be doing—hiding—but I didn’t know why, didn’t exactly know what for.

It was a long, cold day in that sweat lodge. I didn’t know what time it was, and I couldn’t feel my hands or feet. I climbed back up the spiraled stairs and moved the tarp over quiet-like and then untied some twine holding patches of deer hide over the wooden rib cage and flipped it back enough for the sun to shine through like a spotlight and light poured over my neck and down my arms like hot water.

Back down under I was in a half sleep when voices startled me awake. They were not dream voices but real voices. Men. I crawled in dirt away from the light and pressed against the earth wall. A tree root stuck out of the dirt and scratched at me. My head throbbed like I’d held my breath too long, and down in that cold earth hole I was a barely beating heart.

Outside the lodge people were coming. Sheet metal wobbled thunderously. A dog barked.

“Don’t touch my stuff,” a man said. It was Ralph. “I ain’t said you can touch. You can look, but don’t touch.”

The men walked around up above. Every so often Ralph spoke, saying he saw no one and that no one was here.