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gunshot pretty carefully; they even rigged up a sort of torch so this old Indian could give his opinion. They must have decided it was bad because they all went and talked for a while and then they came back and pulled off the rest of her clothes and raped her.” He looked upriver where the Indians were climbing up the canyon. “Lizzie Lizzie Lizzie.”
    “She’s in a better place.”
    He shrugged. “She’s in no place.”
    “There is still Daddy,” I said.
    He snorted. “When Daddy finds out he will likely ride straight for that woman he keeps in Austin.”
    “That is low. Even for you.”
    “People don’t go around saying a thing unless it’s true, Eli. That’s another thing you ought to know.”
    The guards looked back. I wanted them to stop our talking but now they didn’t care.
    “Momma knew she could save you,” he said. He shrugged. “Lizzie and I . . . I dunno. But you’re a different story.”
    I pretended not to understand him and looked around. The canyon walls went up a few hundred feet and there was bear grass and agarito spilling out of the cracks. A gnarled old cedar stuck out of the face; it looked like a stovepipe and there was an eagle’s nest in it. Upriver were big cypresses with knock-kneed roots. Five hundred years was nothing for them.
    When the sun hit the upper walls of the canyon a wailing and chanting went up. There was a shot and the burial party began to file back down to the river and when they reached us they knocked us down and kicked us until my brother shat himself again.
    “I can’t help it,” he said.
    “Don’t worry.”
    “I’m worried,” he said.
    Several of the Indians thought we ought to be marched to the burial site and killed along with the dead man’s horse but the one who was in charge of the war party, the one who’d dragged me out of the house, was against it. Nabit u ku tekwaniwapi Toshaway, they would say. My brother was already starting to pick up bits of Comanche; Toshaway was the chief’s name. There were charges and offers and counteroffers, but Toshaway would not give in. He caught me watching him but gave no more account than if I were a dog.
    My brother got a philosophical look and I got nervous.
    “You know,” he said, “the whole time, I was hoping that when the sun came up they would see us and realize they had made some terrible mistake, that we were people just like them, or at least just people, but now I am hoping the opposite.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “What I am getting at is that the very kinship I had hoped might save us might be the reason they kill us. Because of course we are completely powerless over our fates, but in the end they are as well and maybe that is why they will kill us. To erase, at least temporarily, their own reflections.”
    “Stop it,” I said. “Stop talking.”
    “They don’t care,” he said. “They don’t care about a word we say.”
    I knew he was right but just then the debate ended and the Indians who had been for killing us came over and began to stomp and kick us.
    When they finished my brother lay in a puddle of water among the stones, his head at an angle, looking up at the sky. There was blood running into my throat and I threw up into the river. The rocks were floating all around me. I decided as long as they killed us together it would be fine. I caught a wolf watching me from a high ledge but when I blinked he was gone. I thought about the white one I’d shot and how it was bad luck, then I thought about my mother and sister and wondered if the animals had found them. I got to blubbering and was cuffed in the head.
    Martin looked like he’d lost twenty pounds; his knees and elbows and chin were bleeding and there was dirt and sand stuck everywhere. The Indians were changing their saddles onto fresh horses. I was hungry and before they could put me on another horse I sucked water from the river until my stomach was full.
    “You should drink,” I told him.
    He shook his head.