One of the men must have told about them coming here. Dwight looked around at them, his gaze traveling from face to face, wondering which was the traitor. “We’re a tribe. We don’t have private meetings and you’ve been having too many of them here of late.” Wilma took a seat in the room before the men, her bag in her hand. “You see these chairs. They are not empty. Your ancestors sit there. They are listening to you.” She sat down, bag on lap. “Nothing you do is secret. We have heard about your plan to kill a whale.”

The men looked at each other, uncomfortable.

“The decision has been made.” Dwight said, facing his elder, but feeling as if he still had a boy living inside him, remembering her from old, her hands up as she sang, mumbling prayers in the old tongue. He was a new and different kind of warrior, he told himself, and not easily understood by the old ones. Times change.

“Unmake it,” she said.

Milton, slower than the others, because of what his mother drank when she was pregnant, smiled with pride. “We’re going to hunt a whale.” He said it with awe and wonder. He was slow, they all knew, and not aware of the conflict that was taking place.

It was at this meeting that a reporter walked in. Ruth opened the door to her. The reporter was blond and Germanic and seemed to know Wilma, too.

Ruth, who along with the elders was against the whale hunt, remained standing at the door like a guard, then went inside and stood before the men. She, too, had become a different kind of warrior. “You want to bloody the water and our land when the time isn’t right, when the elders across the bay haven’t even been consulted and none of us have been asked.”

“This is a tribe. It isn’t a democracy.” Dwight regretted his words as soon as he said them and saw the reporter take notes. She would begin to turn the world, or at least the country, against them. She took a picture of him.

“Get that woman out of here.” Dwight pointed to the reporter. “And her.” Meaning Ruth.

“Tribe. Right. That’s what I mean,” said Wilma, crossing her arms like a closed door. “One people. One decision. Take photos, Ursula.” The photos were of men hiding their faces, turning their backs, looking away, Dwight looking angry.

The next day it was all in the news, including the San Francisco Times. The photographs were telling in themselves. When more reporters arrived a day later, notebooks and pens in hand, recorders turned on, the A’atsika men had already talked among themselves and were armed with new words. They argued treaty rights, and their return to tradition. Some of these reporters, especially the white men, thought the tribal hunters were men of mystery and spirit, foreign enough to their own America to be right. Yes, to return to their ways would be the right thing. After all America had done to them, they should be given that. When the animal rights activists arrived, the A’atsika men had to decide if they should have them removed by the police or if that would only look worse for their cause. The news had leaked out that they were planning to sell whale meat to Japan.