She didn’t see him at first. He was still as a deer. Baptiste Yellow Knife sat on the bank watching the river. She thought if she looked away for a moment she would lose him, that he would blend away into the river grass. “I could see you,” he said. He waved to her. “I could see you the whole time.” He seemed almost shy to her. He was sober. She felt a sudden rush of relief push at her chest. She grabbed Baptiste’s shoulders and squeezed him. She had believed Baptiste would know where to look for her and he had answered her thoughts.

“I waited here for you every day,” he said. “I knew you’d come back to this place.”

She tried not to reveal that she was puzzled. She looked away from him. “Oh,” she said, “I thought maybe you knew I’d been thinking about you.” She had wanted to see Baptiste here in this spot, had felt she had conjured him there, but was disturbed now to think Baptiste had spied on her in this place all along.

“I knew you’d come around to me. I did know that,” he said and encircled her waist with his long arms.

“Not like that,” she said, though for the first time it felt good to be close to Baptiste. “Not like that at all,” she said and pulled away from him.

He did not move to touch her. He glanced toward the water. A bird fluttered over the far bank. Baptiste’s arms were tight to his sides, his shoulders braced.

“I thought you were different,” she said, “different in a way. Different like your mother.”

He threw a small, round rock at the water. “What?” he said. “You think I can read your mind? Come on, you give me too much credit,” he said. “If Indians like me had so much power we would have won.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and looked at the slow curve of the river. Baptiste had known to find her here because he was an ordinary man, an ordinary man obsessed with a woman. She didn’t know what to feel. She felt disappointed. Baptiste was right.

The birds stayed away from the weeds where she and Baptiste hid from Charlie Kicking Woman. They sat up on the hill in a thatch of rustling grass where they could watch Highway 200 and the Flathead River. To the east, Louise could see the Mission Mountains, the distant threads of snow that marked them. She could see the corner of her grandmother’s house. Baptiste spotted Charlie first. Charlie’s first stop was her home. She strained to hear the voice of her grandmother, the knock of the closing door, but she heard nothing. He soon appeared again, walking the fields to the root cellar. In the red dusk light of fall she could see the shine of his blue-black hair.