It had been a slow day on patrol. I hadn’t seen another car on the highway for hours. Nothing but the late-spring smell of sage and hay. I figured I would drive on over to the Magpie place. It was a hot day for spring. My uniform was burning like steel wool. I hadn’t seen much of Louise lately. I had heard the rumors about her and Yellow Knife, stories that he’d been hanging around her, stories that he planned to marry her. I was hoping against that possibility. Baptiste Yellow Knife had turned into a mean, sullen man, a drinking man. I thought I might just take Louise out to my car and show her my log chart, show her all the times I’d picked Yellow Knife up. Drunk and disorderly, trespassing, assault, drunk and disorderly, drunk and disorderly, creating a public nuisance. The list was long. I thought about showing her grandmother too. Louise wasn’t easy to convince.

I reminded myself that soon I would have license to chase her again. She was a truant, one of the half-breeds we had to round up every year for school. It was my job to hunt her. She ran away often, sometimes twice a week, and over the years she had become a headache to me. I wanted to save her. I believed if I kept corralling her, eventually school would stick. I don’t know if I imagined what she would become with an education but I knew what she would become without one. I didn’t want to see Louise White Elk in the poorhouse, a husband like Baptiste beating her on weekends, ten squalling kids and another on the way. I wanted something different for her, and sometimes my wife accused me of wanting her for myself.

The BIA social worker Mr. Bradlock had tried everything. Once he placed her in the Dixon school with all white students. Then they placed Louise back in the Ursulines’, then back again to Dixon. She didn’t like it much at either place and ran away every chance she got. Last fall, she had hooked up with Georgette Small Salmon in St. Ignatius and the two of them ran off to Hot Springs together. I picked Louise up two days later, smelling like cigarette smoke and alcohol. She was wearing sunglasses. Georgette had punched her because Louise had been acting as though she was better than everybody else. Louise, Georgette told me later, was acting like a white woman. I guess when Louise asked Georgette what made her think acting like a white woman was acting better than everybody else she got slugged. The bruise around Louise’s eye looked like the fat, split seam of a plum.

Mr. Bradlock thought Louise’s grandmother would be old-fashioned, someone he could reason with. “You may be talking to an old woman,” I told him, “but this is an Indian grandmother you’re talking to.”