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risk by cruising through town with a truck full of beef that didn’t belong to them, at a time in history when the Great Falls police would’ve gladly arrested an Indian for no reason, and also generally kept their eyes on any Negroes, since they were then causing trouble down South. In return for these risks, however, the Indians were not able to take prompt possession of the money they were fully entitled to—$100 per beef side (beef was cheap then). And even more perilous in their view, they had to wait conspicuously around town to get the money from my father, who they only partially trusted. Before, they’d trusted the Air Force because one of them had once been an airman, and Indians always tended to trust the government to take care of them because that’s the way it’d always happened. In that way they were not so different from my father.
    The danger of the new scheme—an arrangement my father worked out, believing it would please everyone—was that he was in the middle between parties who were both criminals, and who didn’t trust or like each other, but who he himself had decided he could trust, if not actually like. And worse, each time beef was delivered, he immediately owed money to Indians who no one would want to owe money to or be owed money by because they possessed well-respected violent tendencies. Two of them, the Tribune later said, were murderers, and another was a kidnapper. All three had been in Deer Lodge Prison for more than half their lives. Looked at all these years later it is a ridiculous scheme that should never have worked even once. Except it did and is no more ridiculous than robbing a bank.
    One day in mid-July my father got up in the morning and told us all he was planning to drive out to Box Elder, Montana, on the highway north toward Havre to inspect a piece of prime ranch land his new company was hoping to sell at a big profit. He wanted my sister and me to go with him, since he said we’d been Air Force brats all our lives and knew nothing about where we lived and spent too much time indoors. In any case, our mother could use a quiet morning to herself.
    We drove in the white-and-red Bel Air out Highway 87, leading north and up into the hot, ripening wheat fields in the direction of Havre, which was a hundred miles away. The Highwood Mountains, east of Great Falls, were to our right at an indistinct distance, blue and hazed and more mysterious looking than the way they looked with town as their point of reference. After an hour, we passed Fort Benton where we could see the Missouri River below the highway—the same shining river we saw out our school windows. It was smaller and calmer and headed east along the base of chalk and granite bluffs, on its way (I already knew) to its meeting with the Yellowstone and the White and the Vermilion and the Platte and finally the Mississippi at the border of Illinois. The highway went down and along a creek bottom, then up again onto a bench with more cropland, and different blue-tinted mountains ahead of us—longer and lower than the Highwoods, but just as hazy and timbered and foreign looking. These were the Bear’s Paws, my father announced authoritatively. They were on the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation, which meant Indians lived there but didn’t own anything outright because they didn’t need to with the government taking up the slack, plus they weren’t competent to own land anyway. He’d done business out here before, he said, and we could drive onto their land without trouble or permission.
    WE DROVE UP the narrow highway through the wheat until we passed a small dusty town with a grain elevator, then quickly came to another, which was Box Elder—the name of the shady trees on our block. It had a short little main street across some railroad tracks, with a bank and a post office, a grocery, two cafés and a service station, and was surprising to be out there in the middle of nothing. We turned east off the highway onto a