We covered five miles, and each clocked mile I kept thinking to myself that she had run this mile, measuring myself against her strength and falling short. Louise waved her hands at me, but I had spotted them too. The grandmother and Louise’s sister. Florence didn’t look well. I was half relieved because Louise had been telling me the truth. I got out of the car and swung open the back door to let them in. I noticed Florence’s left leg. It was so swollen it looked like an extension of her torso. It wasn’t good. Her leg was so big it looked as if it would split open. I stared at it as I struggled in my pocket to find my good knife. I squatted down next to her. I told Grandma Magpie to cover Florence’s face.

I’ve seen every stretch of this ground. I’ve walked the Jocko in the thunder-heat summer. My ankles have grazed the nests of a hundred rattlers, but in all my time I have only heard about one rattlesnake bite that wasn’t just story. A white man from Thompson Falls got the bite about eight years ago. Poison clutched his heart. He died.

“This won’t hurt too bad,” I said to Florence, knowing it would hurt like a son of a bitch.

“Hold her leg,” I said to Louise. The sun was so bright the back of my head ached. Louise sat right down in the dirt next to her sister and held onto her leg. I brushed my arm past Louise. I could hear the dryness of my skin against hers and it made me gulp breath, and I felt ashamed, halfway neglecting my job, thinking about Louise when I should have been thinking about her sister and the task at hand. Louise smelled like lemon and salt, sweet almost. I felt the gooseflesh rise on my arms.

The grandma told me the bite was just above the anklebone on the inside of the leg. I turned Florence’s foot out. It seemed her leg would squeak it was so tight with blood and water. My fingerprints stayed on her ankle long after I let go of her. I used her grandmother’s red scarf as a tourniquet. I could see the double prick of the bite where the lightning lick of fangs could have shot enough venom in the girl to kill a six-foot man. I held my breath for a minute and prayed for both of us. I hadn’t seen a bite before but I had heard the stories. With some the cool venom soaks the brain, with others the venom rides the nervous system like lit gasoline, short-circuiting, functions failing. I had never heard of an Indian dying from a bite, and I didn’t want to be the first to witness it.