“You got any ideas who might be trying to get back at him?” I asked with a tight jaw. I didn’t wait for her answer. “I’ll write up a report,” I told her. “Do some checking.”

Yellow Knife had more problems than I could solve. I planned to head back home and hit the sack. I tried to put the incident to rest but it stayed with me. I drove home wondering who would go to such lengths to get at Yellow Knife. The deed was meant to shock him. I figured someone had Yellow Knife’s horse in their pasture but that story didn’t hold together. The person had purposely left a horse for Yellow Knife to find and it had to be somebody from here.

Louise THE LONG HUNGER

The winter that Baptiste had told her to prepare for finally arrived. Cold crawled up the windows of her grandmother’s house and stayed. Snow fell for three blind days, a dry snow that chirped under her shoes and drifted so high she had to fight to open the door of the outhouse. The Flathead River, the highway, and the hills became the same white plain. Snow piled up against the root cellar and caught up under the eaves of the house. Dry snow snaked through the walls, sifted through the weather-cracked floors. Louise would wake to find the silt-like snow covering her face and her chinhigh blankets. Even the red-bellied stove couldn’t chase an early-winter cold that dipped to fifteen below.

When Louise would go to Malick’s store, her grandmother would wrap Louise’s feet in so many newspapers she would have to struggle to get her father’s old boots on. She would wrap each finger in catalog paper and shove her hands deep into wool socks. Mr. Malick always scolded her when she arrived with her face burning with cold, her eyes small and watering. He told her she could freeze to death in ten minutes with a good wind. Linder Schultz had frozen to death on a walk from his house to his barn, Mr. Malick told her. Lay right down and died. She pulled her scarf up to her mouth.