And so he makes decisions. A sacrifice is in order and he knows it. Truth-telling is part of the price, if he can do it. He leaves the little house during daylight while Ruth is gone to the elders, and he hitches a ride with a passing truck into town in order to make arrangements.

At the old white house dwellings it is decided. Ruth stays for the night and the next morning she walks back to her boat in the heat, with remorse and doubt, feeling she’d committed to giving too much, wondering if she believes in things that don’t exist. This is the wrong mind, she knows, but she has been the one always willing to give, always searching for help. She remembers when she was a girl and she was told by her grandmother that she would have to give her dance clothes away to another girl at one of the ceremonies, even the red blanket with the black raven sewn on its back in tiny, nearly invisible stitches. It had been given to her by her cousin in the north and it was not their traditional clothing, anyway. “But this is our way,” said her grandmother, a woman learned about the past, and one given to wearing ribbons woven into her braids. Each time Ruth saw the girl, the happy recipient of the blanket, she had to push down her feelings of envy and loss until one day she saw her and thought how lovely the girl looked, how happy she was to have the dance clothes she wouldn’t have had if not for Ruth.

Now she would have to come up with smoked salmon, blankets, woven baskets, and money. Goods for the journey of words northward. Something for each person who will speak and pass along word of their need. This year there were no berries to dry and offer. She’d already been robbed of most of her earthly goods by the men and boys who hated her protest against them, and now she might not even have fish to sell.

She forgets how practiced she is in new beginnings.

Ruth stops at the Marco Polo long enough to get some things and then walks to town and, saying nothing about what has just happened, she takes her mother to Linda’s for pie, made this year of canned ingredients.

“It’s just not the same.” Aurora puts down her fork.

“Yeah. Nothing is,” Linda says, looking out at the black rocks, dismal. The pencil in her jeans pocket breaks when she sits down. “Damn, I keep doing that! Do you know how many pencils I go through in a day?”

In the forest, two young men each carry a gallon of gasoline. Michael David, age thirty, and his younger friend, General. They have been paid to start a fire. They would not be caught. It is guaranteed. They had Ruth’s wallet and they would leave it behind. She’d already been caught starting fires by Dick Russell, and the Department of Forestry. The women make small burns in order to grow their grasses for weaving. They know she’d be the prime suspect. And there is going to be a new hunt as soon as possible. These boys want to be part of it. Michael David and his friend have brought the two gallons of gasoline to pour over stacks of dried pine needles and down a line of forest. It has been so dry it won’t take long at all for the fire to take, and it doesn’t. As soon as the smell begins, as soon as the fire is lit, the crackling sound becomes loud and the smoke begins to rise.