Frick flipped over the salted pork and it seared and smoked.

“I was guiding nonmembers on hunts, and Corinne was with me full-time. One afternoon, I was supposed to take out this guy, Charlie, that was his name—I’ll never forget it—but Charlie didn’t show, which wasn’t unusual. Those white guys were always jerking us around. They’d get their permits to hunt on tribal land, but then they wouldn’t show.

“So Corinne was out there with me, waiting, freezing. Absolutely freezing. It was raining, so the dirt roads in the woods were mud and slick. We waited in my truck for Charlie to show, and an hour passed. I wanted to hunt, but Corinne was shivering, even with the heater on. It was like she couldn’t get warm. Maybe it was her mother having disappeared.”

Frick drained the water from the fiddleheads and then dumped them into a large metal bowl. He salted them, and then he put the salt back in the crooked cupboard and he pulled out vinegar and drizzled it over the steaming fiddleheads. The salted pork was sizzling slow, hardening.

Mom’s cigarette smoke wandered toward me.

“I was mad,” Frick said. “Damn mad. I wanted to hunt, but Corinne was there, shivering. Kids don’t always know everything, don’t know how hard it is to make enough money to buy food instead of hunting. And we were low on both—money and food.”

The pork began to burn, smoke, hazing the camp, and Frick kept flipping each piece over and over.

“I should’ve hunted. I should’ve killed more time. But I only had my 9mm with me—it was the gun I carried when I guided—and I got out of the truck and sprayed every bullet I had into the rain and sky and then I reloaded twice, ran through two clips in thirty seconds.”

Frick dumped the salted pork into the fiddlehead bowl. He mixed it up with his hands, like a salad.

If it weren’t for my mother’s smoking, I would have forgotten she was there. She got up from the table and went to Frick. He fluffed the fiddleheads and salted pork together, and Mom held her cigarette out to him, and he took a drag from it. Then one more. Mom came back to the table.

“It’s funny,” Frick said, blowing smoke. “The things you remember, the things that come to you throughout the day. Little things. The tiny details like the mud and bullet casings and the rain and the guy’s name you were supposed to be guiding out there on a hunt, out there to kill. That was why I had to leave Rosebud, because I’d kill him, even though he didn’t deserve it.

“You see, he did show up, but he was late—way late—and we were leaving. If someone’s an hour late why think they’d show up? Even Indians know better, with all that ‘Indian time’ crap. Corinne had fallen asleep—she’d crawled down below her seat and was tucked right against the blower motor. I drove slow, because the dirt road was long and wet and slippery. Halfway down that road there was a sharp curve. I took it quick all the time, had one of them spinners clamped on the steering wheel, used to crank right around that turn—no matter how mad Corinne was, she always laughed at that, made me turn around two, three times to do it again.”