Read Online The Coyote's Cry by Jackie Merritt - Free Book Online Page B

relatively smoothly. He’d learned to live with grief and an ache for a woman he couldn’t have, but it was funny that he had rarely thought of his Indian blood until falling for Jenna. There were so many mixed marriages and relationships between Native Americans and whites that most of the population in and around Black Arrow paid scant attention to ancestry. There were a few pure whites, like Carl Elliot—or so they claimed—and there were also a few pure Comanches, like his great-grandfather.
    But George WhiteBear was the only pure-blooded Indian in the family. And he was one of the handful of Comanches who proudly clung to the old ways, to teachings handed down from generation to generation. It was George who had educated his offspring and their offspring in Comanche history. Bram remembered most of what he’d been taught.
    The Comanche, like the Arapaho, Blackfeet, Cheyenne and Sioux, were considered Plains Indians. In the old days sign language permitted different tribes to communicate, and George had even shown his progeny some of the signs. George also boasted about the Comanches’ amazing horseback-riding abilities and their ferocity in battle. Then there was the subject of counting coup—the act of touching a live enemy and getting away from him—which broughtgreat honor to the brave warrior who managed that feat. That had always fascinated young Bram.
    But then George would speak in a quieter voice, a sad monotone, about the Comanche people being forced onto the reservation in Oklahoma in 1867. “The government developed what might be called a conscience in the early 1900s and gave each Comanche still living—not many by then—160 acres of land. Many did not like farming, and sold or leased their land to whites. My father kept his and it is still my home,” the old man declared.
    But the stories Bram had always liked best were about the traditional vision quest that was so important to most of the Plains Indians, as their religion centered on spiritual power. Everyone had to find his personal guardian spirit, and would go off alone with a little food and water to search for it. George WhiteBear had stayed alone in the wilderness for eight days and nights, and then he’d heard coyotes communicating with each other all around him. One had entered the circle of light from his campfire and looked directly at him with eyes glowing amber from the fire, and it was at that moment that George had known that the coyote was his guardian spirit. To this day, George listened to the cries and calls of coyotes and knew what they were saying to him.
    Sometimes, when life became more drudging than satisfying, Bram would cynically wonder if he should undress down to a breechcloth, find some wilderness and look for his personal guardian spirit. But he was more white than Comanche, if not by blood then by lifestyle, and he wondered if he would have a successful vision quest. After all, he’d been raised almost as white as Carl Elliot had raised Jenna, with a few notable exceptions, of course, mostly brought about by Great-grandfather George WhiteBear.
    The sun was just beginning to bathe the landscape in a peachy-orange light when Bram reached the turnoff fromthe highway that led to George’s acreage. It was a dirt road with a row of power poles along the side, accommodating George and Annie McCrary. Annie had become widowed only two short years after she and her husband, Ralph, bought their land. Annie and George weren’t bosom buddies, by any means, although Annie acted as if she wished she were. She kept an eye on her neighbor and dropped by George’s place about once a week with something from her garden—fresh or canned—as an excuse to check on him.
    Annie’s place was farther down the dusty washboard of a road than George’s, and Bram didn’t anticipate seeing her today. He felt sure George would want a ride to town to see his daughter, which