Epilogue

IN THE END it was decided that Lionel, along now with Corn Poe, should return to school. They were turned over to the boarding school’s administrators who immediately stripped them of their buckskins, issued them uniforms, and took them to the outpost’s barber.

Lionel and Corn Poe sat on rough pine benches in a cold concrete room while their hair was cut away in chunks and scattered on the floor around them. Lionel looked over at Corn Poe and the relatively pale skin of his exposed scalp and couldn’t help, for the first time in days, but smile.

In no time, he and Corn Poe were laughing. They laughed, despite reprimand, both thinking about the lodge in the meadow and their long summer days spent running through the Great Wood. They thought about Mr. Hawkins and Junebug and the sweat lodge with Barney and Tom Gunn from Heart Butte. They thought about the wolverine and the bear and the stories of Napi the Old Man, and they laughed about the infuriated look that Beatrice had been able to instill on Jenkins’s and Lumpkin’s scowling faces. This was a laughter that was, as is the case with young boys, beyond control. For this was a laughter that could not, no matter what the governments, teachers, or Jenkinses of the world said or did, be silenced.

The adjustment back to school was difficult for Lionel and Corn Poe, but they both worked hard and eventually finished their yearly studies. Lionel’s grandfather moved down into town for the winter to be closer and took a small room in the back of a lumber mill, where he swept the floors and watched over the place at night.

In the spring, Lionel’s grandfather took what little money he had saved, and with the two boys as his partners, invested in a small herd of cattle. The herd was matched cow for cow by the government, and when the snows melted, they moved their outfit to graze on their own “reservation,” the small plot on the banks of the Milk River near the northern end of the Blackfeet’s allotted lands.