They followed the road toward Perma until they came to a thick grove of trees up on the hill. The brush was dense and cool. Beside a tree Louise could barely see the lean-to that her grandmother had built for her. “Florence will bring you food,” she told Louise, “but you stay here for a while.” Louise grabbed her grandmother’s hands and held onto her for a moment. Louise had never hugged her grandmother. That was not Grandma’s way. It was just enough to hold her hands, to look into Grandma’s eyes. Louise liked the way her grandmother would always shake her hand with both hands like she had not seen her in a long time. “You be good now,” her grandmother told her.

Grandma left her alone. She watched her grandmother walk up the hill a ways and then turn toward home. Her grandmother did not disturb the brush. She left no wake in the quiet grass. Louise had known her grandmother to pick huckleberries without staining her fingers. She was quick and limber. She was respectful. She carried the old ways in her. Louise realized she knew little of the things her grandmother had taught her and she felt ashamed.

Louise had shrunk back from the stink of brain tanning, even when Grandma called for her help. She hadn’t wanted to boil tallow and pound chokecherries into meat. Lately Louise had become uncomfortable with the smell of buckskin tamarack and jerked meat. She remembered Mrs. Finger sniffing her clothing, how she had hung all Louise’s clothing out on the white clothesline soon after she had arrived. Louise had sat in the house wrapped in a thin towel. She had watched Mrs. Finger through the glaring windows, the white flash of Mrs. Finger’s diamond ring as she hung up Louise’s few pieces of clothing. Mrs. Finger had made Louise feel that she was soiled, that her skin would never wash clean, that her dresses would always smell like woodsmoke. And she wondered if she too had become like Charlie Kicking Woman, homesick at home, alone with thoughts that she was better and worse than everyone else.

Louise lay back on the rough wool blanket her grandmother had carried to this place. The day was cool and the deer-hoof moon was a smear of white dust in the sky. She watched the slow sun lift over the river, heard the scratching rattle of cattails down in the low field. As she closed her watering eyes she saw the shadowed branches of trees above her, heard the distant sigh of a car passing the highway.