Trickster's Point

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Authors: William Kent Krueger
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them folded the night before and slipped them on. He was buttoning his flannel shirt when the old man entered without knocking.
    “I was beginning to think you were going to hibernate this winter, Corcoran O’Connor.” Meloux walked to the empty chairat Rainy’s table and sat while Cork drew on his boots. Walleye had come in, too, and flopped at Meloux’s feet. “Rainy told me about your visitor last night.”
    “I wouldn’t exactly call it a visit, Henry.”
    “What would you call it?”
    “A warning, maybe.”
    Cork took the arrow from the stand where he’d put it in the night and handed it to Meloux, who looked it over carefully.
    “A warning, you say? About something you have done or something you should not do?” the old Mide asked.
    “You tell me, Henry.”
    “If I could tell you, Corcoran O’Connor, I would not have asked.”
    Cork sat down across the table. “Have you given any more consideration to what we talked about last night?”
    Meloux reached into the pocket of the plaid mackinaw he wore and pulled out a creased sheet of paper, which he handed to Cork, who unfolded it and laid it on the tabletop. Meloux had written on it in pencil.
    “You asked about those Sam Winter Moon taught to hunt in the old way and who were still alive and still on the reservation. Those are all I could think of, but it is not everyone.”
    “You’ve forgotten some?”
    The old man seemed mildly irritated by his suggestion. “I may not see so good anymore, Corcoran O’Connor, but my brain is still as sharp as the head of that arrow.”
    Cork had no doubt it was true, but there the similarity ended, for in the sharpness of the old man’s brain there was no sinister purpose.
    “Though we were good friends, Sam Winter Moon did not share everything with me or with others,” Meloux explained. “He was a man who, for his own reasons, sometimes kept secrets.” The old Mide gave Cork a penetrating look. “Who does not?”
    Cork slowly went down Meloux’s list of names. The handwritingwas small and precise. Meloux had been taught at the Indian school in Flandreau, South Dakota, where the administrators and teachers had done their best to pry the Indian out of him and fill the void with all things white. They’d done a poor job of it. Meloux had, indeed, learned from them but, for the most part, not the lessons they’d intended.
    The names on Meloux’s list were all familiar to Cork, and, for almost all of them, he could see neither the reason nor the twisted moral fiber that would result in sending an arrow into Jubal Little’s heart. But there were two possibilities that did stand out. The first was Isaiah Broom, the man who’d brought the news of Jubal’s death to Crow Point. All his life, Broom had been an agitator and activist on behalf of the Iron Lake Ojibwe and, during Jubal Little’s gubernatorial campaign, had been an outspoken opponent. Cork had seen raging anger in the huge Shinnob enough times to believe he might be capable of murder.
    The other name was Winona Crane.
    “Winona hunts in the old way?” he asked.
    “Sam Winter Moon told me that she was as good a hunter as he had ever taught.”
    The door opened, and Rainy stepped in, bringing with her not only the wet chill from outside but also the good smell of freshly baked biscuits. “Breakfast’s ready,” she said brightly.
    *   *   *
    After they’d eaten, Meloux said, “When you told me last night about the voice from the woods, I thought maybe it was a manidoo. ” He was speaking of the spirits that, in his unique understanding, filled the world around him. “But it was not a manidoo who came knocking last night with that arrow. I have been out already this morning, looking.”
    “Did you find tracks?”
    “None that these old eyes could see.”
    Through Meloux’s windows, Cork observed that the cloudsseemed to be hanging lower and lower, and he knew that very soon they could deliver icy rain or more sleet or even snow, so

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