the little one-room storehouse to herself. There was even a cot. The next morning at dawn she gathered some supplies and set off. Making excellent time, she reached her destination on the evening of the third day.
Then she found she had made the trip for nothing. She stared across the winding creek at the area where, in winter, fifty tepees crowded beneath the trees. Either she was early, or they were late returning from following the buffalo north. White Thunder’s small tribe had not arrived yet.
She watched a squirrel running through the tall grass. The grass had grown well during the spring and summer. It would support the tribe’s horses for most of the winter, until the tribe moved on. Jessie stood looking around her wistfully. She had looked forward to talking to White Thunder, and she was terribly disappointed. She had not seen him since the spring, so he didn’t know that her father was dead. Nowshe probably wouldn’t see White Thunder until later in the fall. She wouldn’t be able to get back this way until after the fall roundup.
Jessie crossed the creek, deciding to make camp for the night. She went directly to the spot where she had spent so many nights, the place where White Thunder’s mother, Wide River Woman, always erected their tepee. But it was lonely there without her friend and his family, without the sounds of the children, without the women telling stories as they worked and the men calling triumphantly after a hunt. It seemed more lonely there than any other place on the trail had seemed.
As she spread out her bedroll and gathered wood for a fire, Jessie recalled the first time she had come to this region, eight years before. She had followed her father without his knowing it, followed him because he had a newborn baby with him, and she feared he meant to leave the baby somewhere to die. He had been furious because it was a girl. Jessie wasn’t so ignorant that she didn’t know the baby was her half sister.
Her father had brought the baby here, and she had been relieved. She wasn’t aware that he was leaving the baby with its grandmother. The Indian mistress who had lived with Thomas for a year had died giving birth. She was White Thunder’s older half sister. Jessie learned all that much later.
Wanting assurance that the baby would be safe, Jessie revealed her presence to the Indians after her father had left the camp. White Thunder’s mother guessed who Jessie was by her resemblance to her father, and because she could speak English, she and Jessie became friends. Even White Thunder’s austere stepfather, Runs with the Wolf, tolerated Jessie. He had known Thomas Blair from his early trapping days in the late 1830s, and they had long been trading friends.
Jessie came to see the baby every month that year, until the weather got too harsh for the journey. She grew close to White Thunder and his younger sister, Little Gray Bird Woman, and she flourished, having friends for the first time. Her father was not a warm man, and the Indians filled a gap in Jessie’s life.
The following year, when the weather finally permitted Jessie to travel north again, it was to find that her baby sister had died during the cruel winter. Jessie might have stopped going, but she’d found that the Indian camp was the one place where she could be herself. She could even dress like a girl, which her father wouldn’t allow. She found deepening friendships there, particularly with White Thunder.
She had the best of both worlds when she stayed with the Indians. She could stay by the tepee as young girls were supposed to, learning to sew and create beadwork, to cook, to dress and tan buffalo hides. But it was not frowned upon if she wanted to go hunting with White Thunder, or enter a horse race, or join in the boys’ games. She could get away with all of that because she wasn’t one of them, and also because she had come to them in male attire and displayed excellent male skills.
They accepted her. They
Janwillem van de Wetering