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thirsty?”
    “Of course I’m thirsty,” he said.
    The fire was getting bigger and the moss in the branches above us was flaring and smoke was coming off the bark. The embers of our own burned things were singeing our faces and hair; I watched the sparks climb up. When I looked over at my brother he was covered in ash like a person who had been dead a long time and I thought of how my mother and sister had looked when they sat together on the bed.
    The Indians brought all my father’s tools to be examined by firelight and I decided to remember everything they were taking: horseshoes, hammers, nails, barrel hoops, the bucksaw, the broadax and felling ax, the barking iron, an adze and froe; all the bits, bridles, saddles and stirrups, other tack; my brother’s Kentucky rifle. My Jaegerbuchse they decided was too heavy and smashed against the side of the house. They took our knives, files, picks and awls, bits for drilling, lead bullets, bullet molds, powder kegs, percussion caps, a horsehair rope hanging in the dogtrot. Our three milch cows heard the commotion and wandered up to the house for a feed. The Indians shot them with arrows. They were in high spirits. Burning logs were pulled from the fire and carried inside the house; people were tying their bundles, checking their cinches, making ready to leave. Smoke was coming from the doors and windows and then someone untied my hands and stood me up.
    Our clothes were thrown into the fire along with everything else and we were walked naked out of our gate, across the road, and into our field. A big remuda had been driven up, Cayuse ponies mixed with larger American horses. The Indians were ignoring us and talking among themselves, um s and ugh s, grunts, no language at all, though they had words that sounded Spanish, and one word, taibo, they said to us often, taibo this and taibo that. We were barefoot and it was dark and I tried not to kick a prickly pear or be tromped on by the horses stamping and pacing. I felt better that at least something was happening, then I reminded myself that made no sense.
    We were lifted up and our legs tied to the animals’ bare backs with our hands tied in front of us. It could have been worse as sometimes they just tied you over the horse like a sack of flour. My pony was skittering; he didn’t like the way I smelled.
    The other horses were stamping and snorting and the Indians were calling back and forth across our field and my brother began to cry and I was mad at him for crying in front of the Indians. Then I began to blubber as well. We trotted out through our lower pasture, three months of grubbing stumps; we passed a stand of walnut I had picked for board trees. I thought about the men who had pushed us out of Bastrop, calling my mother a nigger and suing for our title. Once I had killed all the Indians I would go back and kill all the new settlers; I would burn the town to the bedrock. I wondered where my father was and I hoped he would come and then I felt guilty for hoping that.
    Then we were going at a lope with the bluestem whipping our legs. We stretched into a column and I watched as the Indians disappeared into the woods ahead and then my horse passed into the darkness as well.
     
    W E CROSSED G RAPE Creek at the only spot you didn’t have to jump, took a path through the bogs I had not known was there, came out at a gallop at the base of Cedar Mountain. Our cattle were white spots on the hillside. We were making ground in a long flat bottom with the hills all around, into the trees and out again, darkness to moonlight and back to darkness, the Indians trusting the horses to see, driving every animal in the forest in front of us. I looked for my brother. Behind me the riders were suddening out of the trees as if they’d been called out of the blackness itself.
    Despite the dark and the uneven ground my horse hadn’t slipped and had plenty of wind. We were coming to the base of Packsaddle Mountain. It was the last piece