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these people?”
    Dezbah picked up the blanket from the ground while the soldier made big movements with his hands and walked back and forth between the soldiers and the grandmother and her. He was yelling at the other men and said he would tell the white leader that the soldiers didn’t have anything to do, that they made sport over some naked old granny. Better send away for their wives quick, he said. Better send them to town soon, because they were pretty bad off to act that way. She knew, somehow, that he was being funny as he said it, making himself look sillier than the grandmother, so the men would listen to him and let Dezbah take the old woman away. Dezbah ran after the grandmother, who was stumbling now on feet that had become very bad during the walk. Dezbah caught her and folded the ranting old woman in the plain green wool blanket. With one hand she tried to tuck the grandmother’s straggling, dirty gray and black hair up into the traditional bumblebee hairdo at the back of her head. She was afraid to look at the soldiers but heard the man still scolding them in a lewdly humorous way about their own mothers and grandmothers.
    â€œGo!” his voice said in her head and she didn’t need to be told again.
    Keeping her arms around the grandmother to hold the blanket in place, Dezbah bundled the old woman as deeply among their people as she could. Most made their houses, which were nothing more than holes dug into the ground, covered with whatever they could find, in the Pecos River Basin, on the eastern side of the river. Since the soldiers controlled all food except for the scarce amount the people could hunt or grow themselves in this desolate place, the people needed to stay closer to the Fort than they would have liked. The soldier’s compound squatted in the middle of the forty mile square of desert imprisoning the Navajos.
    Bosque Redondo was far from their own lands and within that of the Comanche. The Comanche raided the unprotected Navajos, taking children and women since there were no horses to take, and those raids made living on the outskirts of Hweeldi even worse than living within constant sight of the soldiers, who forced the people to build adobe houses that were supposed to have been for themselves, but in reality were built so that only the soldiers could use them.
    At first Dezbah had tried to stay farther away, but when the grandmother had begun acting in this way, the girl could not stay away from her long enough to make trips to the fort to collect their rations, take water from the river or gather droppings for a fire.
    When she returned with the grandmother to the miserable pit house she had dug from the ground with her own hands, she sat down outside it with the old woman, who began picking up sand and flinging it hard at Dezbah berating her and calling her a killer.
    People came out of their houses and looked at them.
    â€œYou should tie her up, maybe.” The suggestion came from Blue Bead Woman, who had been relieved of the beads she was named for, along with her man and her two oldest sons, before she took the younger children to Fort Defiance. Three of them had perished on the great journey and Blue Bead Woman, once prettily plump, was now wasted so that you could see sunlight through the flesh between her arm bones.
    Dezbah said nothing, just shook her head. She ducked another handful of sand.
    â€œI wish I had tied up that boy I had,” Blue Bead Woman said. Dezbah nodded. They all knew how, during the seige in Canyon de Chelly, her younger son had gone crazy from the thirst and heat and had suddenly run out of their hiding place in full view of the soldiers. They had cut him down, wounded him real bad, and when his father and brother tried to go out there and save him, the soldiers got them too.
    They’d had lots of practice with their guns, killing the people’s horses and sheep, their cows, even the dogs. And then they had chopped down and