Baptiste returned to walk down the long, polished halls of the Ursulines’, his snake rattles tied to the tops of his boots. The old ways clicked in his tongue. His eyes were careful but he no longer avoided trouble. He became a man with sweat-rimmed, tight-armed shirts. He didn’t dress to please anyone but himself. He did not talk just because he was spoken to. He became an Indian who was not afraid of being Indian, the worst kind, the kind nobody liked, neither the Indians nor the whites, the kind of Indian who didn’t care if he was liked. He had become a man who would not bathe to make a good impression. And even though he seemed coarse to Louise and she wanted to avoid him she could not stop the desire she had to stand close enough to him to feel the heat of his chest.

She found there was something in her that knit with his flinching jaw, his yellow-nailed fingers, his frowning grin, the hard hollow curve of his stomach, the straight line of his lips. She found herself thinking of the back of his head, the brush scruff of his black hair against the collars of his shirts. She found her own longing in his desire, the way he would kiss the strands of hair on her forehead and then suddenly back away from her to gulp air, to look at the hills or the ground as if he had to catch his breath.

He was her husband now, the man she had married. She sat down on the bed and removed her stockings. If there was a medicine spell on her she thought she could wear it out because it was the biggest part of her. The idea of old marriage spun in her head. Her grandmother had warned her of the many ways that Baptiste could have captured her: the razor-toothed badger close to her ankles, the claws of bears, whisper-dreams of birds swooping strands of her hair, her thoughts read by magpies, fish puffing her desires to blinking water, eagles circling her, her dreams owned by snakes. She knew his medicine could read her loneliness somehow and she thought maybe the trick was to close in on Baptiste, chase him away, suffocate his desire with the having before the venom in his blood could shrink her fast heart quicker than fire.

She had convinced herself that the only way to get past Baptiste was to stand up to him, to marry him because the more she ran from him the more he had chased her. She knew he could kiss her breasts and sleep with his nose on her pillow. He could slip his hand between her legs, but he could not own her. She held his longing now.