And now I am thinking that, even without bait, I probably would have had better luck with my fishing pole.

Despite everything that has happened, I still long to learn things from my father. He knows so much. I want him to teach me some of those many things he knows. The useful things, that is. Not more about those markings which just cause trouble. I can’t believe I was caught absentmindedly making such marks in the earth. They make no sense at all, yet I keep remembering them—like bad dreams that keep coming back. I need to get them out of my mind and concentrate on other things. That is why I have been hacking at this part of a dry pine branch with the knife my father loaned me.

I put his knife down on top of the flat stone behind me. I hold up the piece of wood in my left hand. I meant it to be a catfish. But no catfish ever looked like this. I doubt that anyone could tell which end is the head and which the tail. I sigh, hold it out at arm’s length, and drop it into the stream.

Instead of being carried away, it stays there in front of me. It circles around and around in an eddy. It bobs up and down, up and down, as if it is as confused as I am about which way to go. It is not like the long stick that I see farther out in the fast water, being carried by the current. Straight as an arrow, that big stick is allowing itself to be taken downstream.

Perhaps it will float all the way to the Mississippi. Maybe it will trace the long route my father and others of our people followed by flatboat to head west. They went all that way out to what they hoped would be a new home far away enough from the Aniyonega to be allowed to live their lives undisturbed. What is it like out there? Aside from my father, I do not know anyone who has resettled there. Only a few of our Tsalagi people have gone out to Arkansas. Despite the hardships here, with the white men pushing in from all sides, most of us are still here in what little is left of our eastern homelands.

But can we stay here?