I think of my uncle Red Bird. I can almost hear his calm voice reminding me that whenever I am feeling unhappy, I should ask myself who is causing that unhappiness. Is it someone else’s fault or is it my own? Right now, I know the answer to that question. My jealousy is not Ahyokah’s doing. It is mine. And even if she does have my father all the time, she also has no friends because of that, aside from her three dolls. That cannot be easy for her.

I need to turn my mind around and change my thinking. If I want to know Sequoyah—to learn from him—then I will have to accept my new sister as part of the bargain.

A small hand reaches up to take my hand. I look down at Ahyokah who has slid over to sit in front of me. She is nodding her head, her lips pressed together in a look of triumph.

“Father will tell us that story now,” she whispers up to me.

“Long, long ago,” his voice takes on that slow, sure rhythm I always associate with our oldest tales, “there were seven boys who were great friends. All of them loved playing chunkey. They would spend most of their days down by the town house in the middle of their village playing the game. One after another, each of them would roll a chunkey stone while the others would slide their sticks along the ground trying to knock it over. And if no one succeeded in striking it, they would measure whose stone came closest to the place where it stopped rolling, using the notches in their sticks.

“They loved their game so much that they did not go to the fields to guard the corn from birds and animals or do anything to help. They hardly ever came home except to eat, and their mothers grew impatient. They scolded those seven boys, but it did no good. Finally, the mothers got together and decided to do something. That night when those boys came home, their mothers served them a soup with no corn in it. The only things in the broth were chunkey stones that their mothers had gathered up and boiled. ‘Because you like chunkey better than corn, this is what you must have for your dinner.’

“This made those boys very angry. ‘It was wrong for our mothers to treat us this way,’ they said. ‘Let us do something.’ They went down to the town house and began to dance around and around. Around and around they danced.