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TO THE GRAND PLATEAU

The three dogs are off leash, responding to voice commands when Sam finds it necessary to speak them away from distractions, which isn’t often. They seem psychic, as though channeling the desired destination from the humans who follow in their wake.

Close behind the dogs, Two Moon carries a collapsible shovel. Having left his backpack at the house because this hike will return them to the glen by nightfall, Sam totes a mattock. They aren’t on their way to a placer mine; however, what they might dig up could have more value than all the gemstones Vida has unearthed since her uncle taught her how to find sapphires and chrysoberyls and other small treasures.

Hiking behind the men, the women talk of Eternal Fawn and Ogden, both gone and yet as present as anyone in this procession. Sun Spirit learned of her grandmother’s first love only when Eternal Fawn was two days from death, having outlived her husband, Jim White Cloud, whom she loved but to whom she had never revealed that she obeyed her parents and broke off a relationship with a Wasicus whom she’d loved even more.

“She said she suffered no regrets,” says Sun Spirit, “although I’m sure I saw a honeyed sorrow in her eyes, a sweet and mournful wondering about what might have been. My grandfather Jim was a good man but closed on himself like night-blooming jasmine in daylight. I suspect your uncle Ogden opened his heart more easily than did my grandfather.”

“Wide open,” Vida confirms, “at all times.”

“For understandable but nevertheless wrong reasons,” Sun Spirit says, “my great-grandparents stood stubbornly against the truest of true love.” Her smile is a charming arc of irony. “And yet, if they had not forbid her to marry your uncle, I would not exist.”

The wolves follow the women, their expressions solemn and their stares brightened by animal eyeshine, surveying the forest as if on guard for a threat they sense but cannot yet see.