There was something about Baptiste. Baptiste was from the old ways, and everybody hoped he would be different from his mother. He knew things without being told. He knew long before anyone else when the first camas had sprouted. He would inform his mother the night before the flower would appear and he was always right. He knew stories no one but the eldest elder knew but he knew the stories without being told. “He knows these things,” her grandmother had said, “because the spirits tell him. He is the last of our old ones, and he is dangerous.”

On the day Louise’s great-grandmother had died Baptiste foretold her death. It was in the spring, on a day so clear clouds faded overhead like wide ghosts. Louise’s great-grandfather was branding horses in the high field and, she remembered, Baptiste had come over with his grandfather to watch. Louise was six years old at the time but she still remembered Baptiste, because it was one of the few times she had seen him out of school then. But she remembered him most because of what had happened that day. And that day Louise sat up on the hillside with her mother, her grandmother, and Old Macheese—her great-grandmother. Louise thought at first Baptiste was frightened of Old Macheese and had chosen to sit away from her.

Old Macheese had survived everything, even smallpox, but her grandmother said her face had always been pitted. Louise could still remember Old Macheese’s face, places where disease had died beneath her skin, bruised places where the blood had pooled for good. Old Macheese liked to rub her knuckles down Louise’s spine, liked to laugh at her when she tripped or cried, whenever she hurt herself. And after the old woman died Louise’s grandmother had told her Old Macheese was just that way, mean.

Louise had wondered if there was something wrong with Baptiste that day, because he stared at her, and even when she made faces at him, he did not stop his watching. She had heard stories about him, how he could see and hear things other Indians could not, how his mother had the rattlesnake power. He sat away from the others, rocking back and forth, digging his slender fingers deep into the black soil while his grandfather worked. He wasn’t called down to the corral like the other boys. His grandfather had let him be alone and quiet on the hill.