I could feel the bad times coming. I forced myself not to think about my wife far away and through with me or about what had happened to Louise. I’d had a burning in my gut to throw myself into my work. Cold was coming. I saw the warm days slipping to the hiss of my white breath. And I knew what that meant. I’d seen Indians in the dead of winter sleeping on door stoops. And I had thought they were drunk. I’d gone up to them thinking I was going to enforce the law and all I found was someone too poor to have a house to sleep in. Someone who had lice in his hair and cloth moccasins, twenty below, a coat so ragged the wind whistled through it.

I didn’t blame the white man for everything because I had seen Indians around here with less than a spit of Indian blood in their veins, the bastards of bastards left over from the French fur trappers, who rode herd on the rest of us. The Indians who had their fingers in every pie because the rest of us were too busy fighting each other. While we knocked ourselves out to heat the cracks in our paper-insulated homes they ran cattle with the white man. Those Indians were the first to tell us how to save money while their icehouses were stacked with beefsteaks and commodity butter. The kind of Indians that Indians themselves didn’t recognize, the kind of Indians who claimed to be white when it suited them.

Sometimes I thought Louise married Yellow Knife because he was dark as shoe leather. Baptiste couldn’t walk into any place and pass for white. No place. It was Baptiste and no dogs allowed. He scared all the white people. He could be walking down the street, dull sober, and those white people would charge to the other side without even the pretense they weren’t afraid. Yellow Knife entered a bar and got served just because the bartender was afraid to kick him out. It didn’t matter if Yellow Knife cleaned every other customer out of that bar, that bartender still served him until someone finally called us to haul him out.