Confident in the crows’ ability to talk, she set off and began picking. Soon enough, the crows cawed. Too far away to see, the swamp woman straightened, tightened her grip on the bundle of sweetgrass in her hand. She ran to her bag, the swampy earth squishing and squashing and squishing until she stopped. Three little back-ends stuck out of her bag.

She got closer. They fumbled around with the bag’s contents, tossed strips of birch bark out onto the ground, and ooh-ed and aah-ed at the shiny objects for which she had traded.

She stood over the bag and realized they were children. With one giant swoop she scooped them up, shoved them in her bag, and slung the bag’s strap around her shoulders.

The little children screamed and the crows cawed louder.

She held the bag up to her ear and heard the children crying. Off in the distance she heard the faint sound of tiny feet running away through the woods.

“Jiistowks!” the swamp woman yelled at the crows. She needed to listen.

She followed the sound, marching through tall grasses until she stumbled upon flat ground. She stood over the children, swamp muck slipping off her, and they cowered in her shadow. They were little and fragile, dressed in nothing but the deer hide that they pulled tight around their shoulders, hiding. The swamp woman was too angry to blink, too angry to ask why. While we know she cursed those children in that clearing, to forever be little people for their thievery, no one knows what happened to the children she scooped up in her bag.

. . .

The next day—after a long night of dreams of the Greyhound parked outside my house honking its horn repeatedly, made all the more eerie when Frick woke me in the middle of the night to sleep-tell me the Jesuits were here—JP, Tyson, and I spent the afternoon resurrecting the lean-to. It had rained overnight, which made it easier to stab sticks into the ground to give extra support to the structure. We sat on the damp earth when we were done, and we smoked cigarettes until darkness filled the trees and mosquitoes swarmed and buzzed and poked at our eyes.

“Let’s get a fire going,” JP said.

We split off into the woods and collected firewood. We assembled a giant pile of sticks and logs, wet and dry, and piled them a few feet from the growing fire.

“This should last us till about twelve,” JP said, “then we can go look for that pugwagee again.”

“I don’t want to go up there,” Tyson said.

“Shut up,” JP said. “You’re coming.”

I threw them each a cigarette. Mosquitoes hovered beyond the fire’s smoke; hemlock popped and sizzled, and the river flowed and gurgled.

“How’s Paige?” JP asked. “My mom said she saw her walking down the road and she didn’t look too good.”