Page 9

Bonita, San Diego, California. One month later.

Bear’s home sat at the far edge of Bonita, where the road narrowed into gravel and the city forgot it was a city.

Nestled against the rise of the Sweetwater Valley, the land sloped gently toward open trails and eucalyptus groves, shaded by pepper trees and flanked by split-rail fencing.

This wasn’t the glossy San Diego of beach bars and yoga studios.

This was old ranch country, pockets of land still zoned for agriculture, where properties sprawled and neighbors waved from horseback.

His acreage wasn’t large by reservation standards, but in this part of the county, it was gold.

Two and a half acres of hard-earned quiet.

He slipped out of his modest adobe-style house with thick walls and a rust-red roof, heading for his barn—three stalls and a tack room that smelled of saddle oil and cedar.

Flint had his own run, though he rarely used it.

He preferred to stay near the barn. Near Bear.

The place didn’t look like much from the road. That’s how he liked it. But behind the gate marked Sleeping Wind , the property bloomed with quiet details: a prayer tie on the fencepost, a horseshoe above the barn door, smooth stones in stacked cairns near the sycamores.

Most people didn’t even realize they could keep horses this close to San Diego proper.

But Bonita had always been its own thing, stubborn, unincorporated, rooted.

Kinda like him. A place where tradition didn't fade under asphalt.

Bear had fallen into the rhythm of it easily.

Mornings with his horse. Nights with the stars.

Deployments interlaced between the peace.

The night was alive with sound out here on the edge of the Sweetwater Regional Trail System.

But the barn was quiet, save for the gentle shuffle of hooves, the rustle of hay, and the rhythmic swish of a tail brushing against old wood.

Out here, he didn’t have to explain himself.

Didn’t have to speak unless he wanted to.

The Paint already knew him. He listened in the way only animals did—without judgment, without impatience.

Bear moved along the stall to ?ha?té Skúya , Heart That Listens. The black and white Paint had been a constant in his life. Skúya wasn’t the flashiest or fastest, but he was something rarer, a soul that matched rhythm with purpose. A watcher. A listener.

The Paint bore two handprints on his flank, one in black, one in white.

Bear had placed them himself, for honor, for his way, and for the old way.

Symbols passed down from the stories of his Grandfather Ray, Raymond Tallbird, about Wa?blí Zí, Yellow Eagle, Bear’s great-great-grandfather, a warrior born under the winter moon in the early 1800s, who rode into battle with black clay smudged across his chest and left a print on every enemy he felled in close combat.

His Grandfather Ray’s words about his ancestor echoed in his ears.

Wa?blí Zí rode beneath the shadow of Mato Paha, Bear Butte, and dreamed in the wind of Paha Sapa.

He lived before the borders. Before Wounded Knee.

When warriors painted their vows across their horses’ flanks and called thunder down from the ridge lines.

He protected his community through the Sioux Wars, culminating in battles like Little Bighorn, in a time when warrior societies were fully intact, before the dismantling, during a time when the eagle warrior lived in their hearts.

But Bear had never seen those stories as a call to violence. He saw them as a testament to purpose. His ancestor didn’t kill for glory. He marked what he had endured. Who he’d stood for.

So, Bear reimagined the meaning of those marks.

The black handprint, once a symbol of vengeance, he wore for the living.

For the brothers who stood beside him in fire and shadow, who trusted him to see what they missed and act when they couldn’t.

It was his vow to cover their six, to carry what needed carrying, to bleed before he’d let one of them fall.

It was what his great-great-grandfather had done, too, only Bear didn’t leave the mark on enemies.

He left it on Skúya , a living witness to the oath.

The white handprint was for the innocent.

The ones his ancestor might never have had the chance to shield.

The ones Bear did. He thought of the newborn in the jungle.

The wounded child in Niger. The girl who had reached for him with a trembling hand in a field of blood and smoke.

That print, bright and solemn, reminded him that power wasn’t worth a damn unless it was used to protect those who had none.

Together, the two prints were a story only he could tell.

A bloodline reshaped. A legacy not of death, but of defense.

Bear remembered those evenings like they were carved in smoke.

His grandfather’s voice low and rhythmic, the fire between them snapping with sacred punctuation.

Stories of medicine songs and ancestors who rode not for glory but to defend those they loved.

How Paint horses, with their bold markings, were seen as spirit-kin, bridges between this world and the one that breathed just beyond it.

His grandfather said they weren’t owned.

They were chosen. If a Paint chose you, it meant you had a destiny to carry.

Back then, Bear needed something to believe in.

His father was usually drunk or gone. His mother, worn thin by triple shifts and frayed nerves, had no time to anchor him.

It was his grandfather who gave him stories.

A name. A sense of the sacred. When he was thirteen, he gave him Skúya .

Said the gelding had waited long enough.

“You don’t ride that one like you ride the others,” his grandfather had said. “You listen to him because he listens to you.”

Bear never forgot it.

Now, every time he stroked a hand over the Paint’s warm shoulder or watched Flint curl up near the barn without command, he felt it again. That old truth. Silence held wisdom, and strength wasn’t about pressure. It was in rhythm. In the way a warrior moved when no one was watching.

Bear lifted the brush and began the slow, practiced movements down ?ha?té Skúya’ s back.

His arms knew the pattern without thinking.

Elbow, wrist, pressure. Soothing, repetitive.

The kind of labor that kept his mind just quiet enough to start getting loud again.

Dust rose in faint clouds from the Paint’s flanks, the gelding flicking his ear once, then settling into stillness beneath Bear’s hand.

He remembered the first time he’d done this, not as a chore, but as an inheritance.

He’d been thirteen. Gangly. Angry at everything. His father had taken off again, and his mother was working doubles at the diner, too tired to ask why he hadn’t eaten dinner. But his grandfather had noticed. He always did.

“You want to know a horse?” the old man had said that night, gesturing with the brush in one hand and a smoldering cedar bundle in the other. “Start with his back. He carries weight before he ever says a word.”

Bear had squinted up at him. “Horses talk?”

“Every damn day,” his grandfather had replied with a gravel-rough chuckle. “But only if you stop thinking like a human long enough to listen.”

The barn smelled like pine and old leather, hay and sweat and the scent of horse that got into your bones. ?ha?té Skúya had stood quiet as the wind in a dream, flaring his nostrils once when Bear got too fast with the brush.

“Easy, hok?íla .” His grandfather’s loving term for him, just simply boy , not to the horse, but to Bear.

“This isn’t about dirt. This is about trust. You groom with your whole body, with rhythm.

Breath, hand, breath. The horse don’t care about how clean he gets.

He cares about how he feels when you touch him. ”

Bear had slowed then, his strokes falling into cadence. Brush, breathe, shift. Brush, breathe. He remembered the way Skúya had turned his head just slightly, watching him with one dark eye like he saw something worth staying for.

That was the first night Bear learned what it meant to be steady.

Back in the present, the brush moved again in that same rhythm. ?ha?té Skúya let out a slow exhale, shoulder slackening beneath Bear’s palm. The two handprints, one black, one white, stood out stark against the Paint’s black and white flank. Bear paused for a moment, pressing his palm near them.

?ha?té Skúya nudged his arm, breaking the thought.

“Yeah, yeah,” Bear murmured, setting the brush aside and lifting the hoof pick. “I’m getting to it.”

The work steadied him, like always.

His grandfather had called the horse a wak?á? , a sacred being, not to be owned but to be walked beside. Sometimes, Bear swore that ?ha?té Skúya didn’t just listen. He remembered.

Bear’s thoughts drifted.

His hair was beaded now, his temples full color, cerulean, blood red, bone white, charcoal . One side was for his brother, and the other for Em.

But he had stood in front of the mirror earlier, wet hair brushed smoothly and parted with care and remembered the weight of the beads in his palm.

Remembered the way they’d clicked softly as he worked them through his temple braids in silence that night weeks ago, the night he finally stopped running from his brother’s ghost.

He’d made peace with that.

But not with Ayla’s.

Bear’s hand slowed as he worked ?ha?té Skúya’s withers, the brush pausing just above the shoulder blade.

The gelding shifted under the touch, patient but perceptive, as if sensing the drift in his handler’s mind.

The barn grew quieter. Only the soft rustle of hay.

The low creak of wood that remembered everything.

His throat tightened.

There’d been another set of hands brushing this same flank once. Smaller. Clumsy but determined.