I found a little patch of ground with no vegetation growing—hard, chilled soil and rocks—and settled onto it and built a small fire. I chugged the Steel Reserve to rush the buzz. The river flowed like a sound machine and I spaced out, watching the cold ground. Like looking at the stars, there were various rocks stuck in the mud that seemed to outline a figure. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it, and it got me remembering a story my mother told me.

It was after the tribe had forced my father to leave. I was no more than ten, eleven—he’d come up, had driven ten hours to take me for the summer. Mom wouldn’t let him, kept saying, “That’s what you get when the money’s late!” I remembered it: the police charging in and dragging him away from the bedroom door—“I have rights to my son!”—behind which my mother had barricaded us. It wouldn’t have come to that if we’d gone to camp with her boyfriend—or if her boyfriend had been around—but that was how it ended up. She’d covered me with a blanket and had hidden me in the closet among her upside-down shoes and snapped plastic hangers.

She’d told me the story after all that, after he’d been banned and visited me through the phone for some time.

The story was about the stone people. I remembered standing on a chair that had been pulled to the sink. Mom washed dishes, and I dried them. She made conveyer-belt noises as she passed me a dish. At some point—perhaps when the noises grew less funny—she told me about Gluskabe, the man from nothing. I never understood—and I still didn’t—how Gluskabe was from nothing since Kci-niwesk—the Great Being—had created him.

He’d come from somewhere, I said to my mother, and she laughed. “Honey,” she said, maybe passing me a plate or a spoon to dry, “men are so self-absorbed and so proud they would like to think they created themselves.”

Before Gluskabe got us right, or close to being right, my mother said, before he shot an arrow into an ash tree and split it in half and out poured us into first light—the people of the dawn—he made beings out of rocks. For a time, he walked among them and tried to teach them. But they were cold stone, aggregates of minerals, and when they walked, their joints of quartzite sparked and created fire that caught the dry grass and spread to the oak ferns and then to the shagbark hickory and birch bark and oaks until the world was half burning. One stone man pointed to the sky—to the sun—and then he pointed back to the earth as if predicting.

The stone people couldn’t feel the heat, couldn’t feel pain, and so Gluskabe accepted he’d failed. One by one, he set out to smash them, to destroy them, to start over. But some of them ran off to the mountains and hid. Occasionally, my mother said, the stone people come out and walk among us.