Coyote blue

into battle or people thought you were a Crazy Dog Wishing to Die."
    "What's that?"
    "A warrior who is so crazy, or so full of sadness, that he rides against the enemy just so they will kill him."
    "Was my dad a Crazy Dog Wishing to Die?"
    Pokey smiled and looked wistfully ahead. "It is bad luck to speak of it, but no, he did not wish to die. He just got too drunk and drove too fast after his basketball games."
    They drove south through Lodge Grass, where the only activity was that of a few dogs trying to clear their throats for the day's barking and a few ranchers cadging free coffee at the feed and grain store. Once through town, Pokey turned east on a dirt road into the rising sun to the Wolf Mountains. In the foothills the road became deeply rutted, and washed out in places. Pokey shifted into low and the truck ground down to a crawl. After a half hour of kidney-jarring bumps and vertiginous cutbacks, Pokey stopped the truck on a high ridge between the peaks of two mountains.
    From here Samson could see all the way to Lodge Grass to the west, and across the green prairies of the Northern Cheyenne reservation to the east. Lodgepole pines lined the mountain on both sides, as thick as feathers on a bird, thinning here, near the peak, where the ground was arid, strewn with giant boulders, and barren but for a few yucca plants and the odd tuft of buffalo grass or sage.
    "There." Pokey pointed east to a group of car-sized boulders about fifty yards from the road. "That is the place where you will fast. I'll wait for you on this side of the road if you need me, but you must only come up here if you have a vision or if you are in trouble." Pokey grabbed a bag from the floor of the truck and handed it to Samson through the window. "There's a blanket in there and some mint leaves to chew when you get thirsty. Go now. I will pray for your success."
    As he walked down the hill toward the boulders, Samson felt a lump rising in his throat. What good is medicine if you die of thirst? What good is medicine, anyway? He'd rather be in school. This was no fun, this was scary. Why did Pokey have to be so strange? Why couldn't he be more like Harlan, or Ben Cartwright?
    Once on the downhill side of the boulders Samson could see the place where he would sit through his fast: a small stone fire ring under the overhang of one of the boulders. Samson sat down facing the sun, which was now a great orange ball on the eastern horizon.
    He thought of Grandma at home. She would be pouring Lucky Charms in everyone's bowls about now, getting his little cousin Alice's insulin out of the refrigerator and filling the syringe, making sure everyone was dressed and ready for school. Uncle Harlan would be sitting in the living room drinking coffee and telling all the kids to be quiet because of his hangover. Samson's aunts would be pulling the blankets off the sweat lodge and loading them into the back of Harlan's truck so they could take them to the laundromat. Normally, Samson would be trading punches in the arm with Harry and Festus and lying to Grandma about having his homework done. He wanted to be at home with everyone else, not sitting by himself up here on a mountain. He had never been by himself before. He decided he didn't like it. For the first time in his life he was lonely.
    He tried to think of the Spirit World. Maybe he could go there really fast, find a spirit helper and go back up to the truck so Pokey could take him to Lodge Grass and get a Coke: thirty minutes, tops. Get in, get out, and nobody gets hurt, as Uncle Harlan always said, something he picked up in Vietnam.
    Samson tried to imagine the hole he would enter the Spirit World through. He couldn't do it. Maybe a prayer.
    "O Great Spirit and Great Mother," Samson prayed in Crow. "Hear my prayer. Please let me find my spirit helper so I can go home."
    He waited a moment. Okay, that didn't work, back to the hole in the ground.
    After two hours he grew bored and his mind wandered to the Ponderosa, then to school, home, the planet Krypton, the snack bar in Crow Agency, the McDonald's in Billings, the damp basement of Lodge Grass High School, where Harlan had taken him and shown him old black-and-white films of his father playing basketball. He wondered what his father had been like. Then wondered about his mother, who had died when he was only two. Her liver quit, Harlan said. No one else would talk about the dead. He tried to remember her, but could remember only Grandma and his