Baptiste would begin dancing like a great, hawking bird. He would lift his arms and we would all, all of us cower forward to watch the quick spin, the dipswoop, his head cocked smooth and sudden, so close to the arena floor, we imagined his ear could hear the whisper of quiet dust. A bird, we would say, naming crow, magpie, eagle, hawk. Then he would straighten in his dance, the music his own, and we would see the magic of deer, the elk, or the buffalo, all the animals he had become.

The children would cry sometimes or bury their faces into the chests of their laughing parents. But I remember feeling the tingle along my spine when my cousin Baptiste would turn to face me from the dance floor, Baptiste in the heat of dance would lift his open palms like a prayer, his face painted a black mask, the whites of his eyes, then blackness again. And all the dancers stopped dancing, I think, because they recognized power, not medicine power nor the power we all have now and again to strike someone with the snake of our image. The dancers stopped to recognize the clear light that surrounded Baptiste when he chose to honor the old ways. We looked at him in the dust of that dancing day, everyone, it seemed, in love with all that Baptiste was in lightning seconds.

I thought of Stoner, of all the things he’d probably seen, but I didn’t think he’d ever seen dancers like that, or was ever likely to see anything like it again in his life. I’m sure he didn’t have a clue what it meant. And the saddest realization I’ve had was that I wasn’t sure what it meant either.

The strangest thing happened when Harvey was watching the dancers. Baptiste had entered the arena and he was moving very slowly, not to the direct beat of the music, I guess, but somehow still in time. Baptiste held a staff of hawk feathers that I recognized but had never known him to dance with. I remember a sudden furious wind of dust in the center of the dance floor, a winding column that turned a single time with wiry force and I had an urge to draw my gun. Some of the elders had stopped dancing but I noticed Baptiste kept dancing as if nothing had happened. Some of the young kids kept dancing too. There was a kind of small drama unfolding that no one was talking about and I began to wonder if the event was all in my head. Still, something curious seemed to be happening. And then it happened.