I try to hand the knife hack to him, but he doesn’t notice. While I’ve been studying this knife, he has turned his gaze out of the shop. What is he looking at? His eyes seem again to be focused on the road outside—as if expecting to see something there. But all I see is a wagon passing by with a Tsalagi family in it. All of the people in that wagon—a man, a woman, and several children—are quiet and carefully averting their gazes from us. They are far away and their faces are turned from us so that I cannot recognize any of them, though that does look like one the wagons owned by my friend Ugama’s uncle.

It appears as if those people are worried that looking our way might bring them bad luck or worse. The woman next to the man is hunched and even has her shawl over her head. There is nothing more terrifying to most Cherokees than witchcraft. We are even more frightened of that than we are of the white men.

As if to prove the truth of what I thought, the man driving the wagon lifts his left hand in our direction. He makes a sign that is meant to keep black magic away. My father does not seem to even notice that. He is looking far beyond that passing wagon.

“I was glad to get the business. But the thought of having to use the language of the white men to identify the things I made troubled me,” he said. “Why did we have to use their language? Why could we not use our own? Our language is as beautiful to hear as the singing of the birds. Why would we not want to keep hearing the birds sing?”

Language? I did not come here to talk about language.

Why is he telling me this? I am no longer sure what this is all about. The only thing I am becoming sure of is that he is not about to teach me anything regarding blacksmithing today.

“I need to go,” I say. I try to hand the knife back to him, but he raises his hand, palm out.

“Wait.”

He begins searching with both his hands along one of the shelves. When he turns back to me he is holding a knife sheath in each of his hands. The first is strung on a rawhide cord, the old style that would be worn around the neck. He looks at me, shakes his head to himself, and puts that sheath back in its place. Then he hands me the second one, the one with a loop on the back so that it can be hung from a belt like the one I wear around my waist.

“Here,” he says. “I give you this sheath. You can use it to hold that knife. I loan you that knife. See what you can make with it.”