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despite my effortsto fight them off with my riding crop. After they gobbled up the pups the dogs pretended to be ashamed and embarrassed. Enough!

    We found Duane sitting cross-legged in the dust. The dogs set up a fearsome howl but never dared jump out of the truck without Grandpa’s permission. We got out and Grandpa knelt beside Duane who wasn’t moving. They spoke in Sioux and Grandpa helped Duane to his feet and embraced him tightly. When we got back to the house Grandpa said I should leave, and to tell no one at our place of the visitor. Despite the passage of seven years or so he still partly blamed Naomi for letting father go back to war, and they were frequently at odds.

    I’m sure I loved Duane, at least at the beginning, because he so pointedly ignored me. He came from up near Parmelee on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, and though his looks were predominantly Sioux his eyes were Caucasian, cold and green like green stones in cold flowing water. Technically he was a cowboy—it was all he knew how to do and he did it well. He refused to live in Grandpa’s house but took up residence in a shed that was once a bunkhouse. Two of the Airedales decided to live with him of their own accord. Duane refused to go to school; he told Grandpa that he could read and write and that was as far as he needed to go in that area. He spent his time looking after the remaining Herefords, repairing farm buildings, cutting wood, with the largest chore being the irrigating. The only other hired hand was Lundquist, an old Swede bachelor friend of Grandpa’s. He taught Duane irrigating and jabbered all day on the matter of his own Swedenborgian version of Christianity. Lundquist daily forgave Duane for the death of a distant relative in Minnesota who was murdered during the Sioux uprising in the mid-nineteenth century. The actual farmwork wasn’t that onerous since Grandpa mostly grew two crops of alfalfa a year within his forest borders, and the bulk of the rest of our land was leased on shares to neighbors.
    On New Year’s Day of that first year Duane received a fine buckskin quarter horse from a cutting-horse strain, plus a handmade saddle from Agua Prieta on the Arizona border. Normally the gift would have come on Christmas but Grandfather had lost his religion during World War I in Europe and didn’t observe Christmas. The day stands out clearly: it was a warmish, clear winter morning with the thawing mud in the barnyard a little slippery. I had gone way over to Chadron with Grandpa the day before to fetch the horse, and the saddle had come by mail. Duane came riding in on the Appaloosa from feeding the cattle and saw me standing there holding the reins of the buckskin. He nodded at me as coolly as usual, then walked over and studied the horse. He looked at Grandpa who stood back in the sunlight against the barn. “Guess that’s the best-looking animal I ever saw,” Duane said. Grandpa nodded at me, so I said, “It’s for you, Duane.” He turned his back to us for a full ten minutes, or what seemed an unimaginably long time given the situation. Finally I came up behind him and ran my hand with the reins along his arm to his hand. I whispered “I love you” against his neck for no reason. I didn’t know I was going to say it.
    That was the first day Duane let me go riding with him. We rode until twilight with the two dogs until I heard Naomi ring the dinner bell in the distance. Duane rode across the wheat stubble until he turned around within a hundred yards of our farmhouse. It was the most romantic day of my life and we never spoke or touched except when I handed him the reins.

    One of the main sadnesses of my life at that time, and on occasions since, is that I matured early and was thought by others to be overly attractive. It isn’t the usual thing to be complained about but it unfairly, I thought, set me aside, brought notice when none was desired. It made