Louise asked her grandmother how she had gotten the handkerchief back. How did the old woman manage to snatch back her blood from Baptiste Yellow Knife’s tight fist, his ugly smile? Grandma didn’t answer her. Louise imagined many things and settled on Sister Bernard and her hard thumping knuckles. She wouldn’t let the boys play with dead rattlers or poke at the mouths of dead birds with sticks. And she wouldn’t let Baptiste keep a blood-soaked handkerchief.

Louise had a dream that followed her from a long night into morning. It was a familiar dream. She heard a Salish voice, neither a man nor a woman’s voice. The voice did not speak to her but to the dream she cupped in her small hands like a million water-colored glass beads.

It is cold. Snakes sleep in deep holes trapped by snow. We tell our stories now. Rattlers are quiet. It is so far back your blood smells like oil in the tongues of your grandmothers. The snow is frozen so hard it can bruise. The snowdrifts are razor-edged. Snow shines. We’re locked here. Outside Grandma’s house, a naked man stands near a red fire. His face the face of a woman, smooth and deep planed. His back is lean with ribs. His hips are narrow. Flames light high on the roof of Grandma’s house. Base-blue tongues of flame burn buckskin tamarack. Black wood dust to white wood ash. The naked man blows through teeth, his cracked lips whistling to fire. His whistle calls a great wind up from snow.

Firelight becomes one small candle. It flickers, then fails white, then fails, fails white to smoke. Steady wind scatters white ash to thin choking sheets of hot dust. Snow and timber powder, hot and cold. The man stands before the white stars, the endless snow.

His white light is turning to morning.

Louise never asked her grandmother about the handkerchief again. She knew who had brought it back. She remembered stories of her great-grandfather: the secret training rituals of medicine people sent to find a single pin in a night that pressed to forty below, one pin dropped deep in snow, miles from where they stood shivering and naked. Her grandfather had saved her. Somehow he had picked her blood from the dark hands of Dirty Swallow. And she knew it had been at a great price. She would never talk to Baptiste Yellow Knife again.

When Louise was fourteen, Baptiste snuck up behind her and slipped a rattler’s tail in her hand with the slick skill of a small wind passing. She wasn’t sure what to do with it. She stared at it for a long while, then dropped it deep into her pocket, hoping it would fall out of the hole she hadn’t mended. But the tail became a power she was afraid of, a feeling she had never had before.