She wasn’t sure how long the car had been stopped. The car lights shined on her grandmother’s house and then the back door was opening and Grandma was reaching for her. Louise walked steadied between Charlie and her grandmother. Moon struck the pond, a dark ache of shine that made Louise stumble. “She’s more shook up than anything,” Charlie told her grandmother. Louise remembered how Charlie had stood for a moment at the door, turning his hard-billed hat in his hands. He almost looked sorry to Louise as if he had suddenly come to his senses and decided to be Indian. He didn’t stay long. When her grandmother started to unbutton Louise’s blouse he turned a shy face from them. He didn’t say good-bye before he left. He was there and then he was gone.

Her grandmother put a war-grass poultice on Louise’s arm and led her up near the cottonwoods. “I won’t let them take you again,” she said to Louise. Louise felt a rush of weakness in her shoulders, the backs of her legs. She fell asleep beneath the trees, hearing the cold, high river of wind above her. Her grandmother and her sister, Florence, slept beside her out under the stars and she stayed warm. When she woke in the squinting light of morning her grandmother and her sister were gone. She remembered the leaping deer, the strange girlish scream of the stranger. She was stung with the idea that he had probably died. The bruises on her arms were the color of huckleberry stains. She scratched her head, picked small clusters of glass from her scalp. In places, her hair was only bristles where glass had clipped her. She tapped a grit of dust above her left eye and found she was still bleeding. Her forearms were swelling but her grandmother’s poultice relieved the soreness.