BEATRICE GROWS WEARY • COLD AND MORE SNOW • INTO THE MOUNTAINS
WHEN LIONEL woke, Beatrice was still asleep. He lay curled in the buffalo robe next to his sister and thought about the clay people and if they grew to become the Blackfeet. He wondered if the people Napi the old Man created were the same as the first two people the Brothers and priests at the boarding school had told him were the first created. Their first man had also been created from the earth: the woman from a rib. Lionel concluded that they must have been the first two white people, and that the clay people Grandpa had told Beatrice about were the first of the Blackfeet.
Lionel got up, stoked the fire for Beatrice, and led Ulysses down to the stream to drink. A distant sun stretched across the dull morning sky. Lionel turned with the first light and looked toward the great mountains and the black menacing clouds that clung to their tops. He returned to their camp and found Beatrice rolling up the buffalo robe. She seemed detached and tired, so Lionel lifted the bundles and tied them to Ulysses the way his grandfather had showed him, without speaking.
They ate cold elk and were soon on their way, riding well into the afternoon. They continued to follow the stream, pushing Ulysses up the increasingly rough and rocky terrain and under the long stretches of trees that seemed to touch the sky. They came to several forks in the stream but always kept to the right, fighting the deep banks of snow that lay on either side.
Lionel noticed that the stream grew smaller the higher they traveled, and eventually more difficult to follow. By late afternoon, the only evidence that the river was still with them was the low gurgle of water that struggled unseen under its heavy coat of winter ice and snow.
Sometime late that afternoon, it began to snow again. The snow covered the trees and caused their branches to bend and drop their burden onto the children and the great horse as they passed. Lionel grew cold as the day wore on, and Beatrice pulled the robe tighter. They drifted in and out of sleep, but Beatrice always woke in time to keep Ulysses going or to navigate the river’s increasingly treacherous banks.
It soon became dark, but Ulysses continued to climb. occasionally he would throw back his head or nip gently at the children’s feet to wake them, as if he could tell when the children were slipping while they slept. Beatrice began to cough sometime in the night, and Lionel thought about when she had been sick. The captain had told Lionel that it was possible that Beatrice might never be able to leave the infirmary. But Beatrice had showed them. Beatrice always showed them.
The snow stopped falling sometime near morning. Lionel woke and looked above them at the clearing clouds and the ink black night with its sparkling array of stars now clustered overhead. Beatrice continued coughing in her sleep, so Lionel stayed awake, taking in the landscape that surrounded them. Light soon filled the morning sky, revealing a world that was entirely new to him. Lionel had grown accustomed to the wide-open space of the boarding school and the reservation. Here in the mountains, he couldn’t see more than a hundred paces before the dense snow-covered trees or large white-dolloped boulders blocked his view. They continued on, and soon Lionel fell back asleep.