When the Legends Die Read Online Free PDF Page B

case of hunting knives.
    Jim Thatcher saw this. He went to the case and took out a knife, laid it on the counter. “How do you like this one?” he asked. They came back and looked at that knife. The boy closed his eyes and turned away. He said to his mother, again in the tongue, “There is nothing.”
    She turned to Jim Thatcher and said, “Candy,” and nodded toward the boy. Jim Thatcher filled a small bag with chocolate drops and red and yellow hard candies and set it on the counter with the ax and the ammunition. He started to put the knife back in the case, but she made a quick gesture. She wanted the knife for the boy. Jim Thatcher mentally added up the prices, two dollars for the ax, a dollar for the ammunition, a dollar and a half for the knife, a nickel for the candy. Four dollars and fifty-five cents. He glanced at the baskets. Good work, some of the best Ute basketwork he had ever seen. If somebody came along who knew baskets he might get four or five dollars apiece for them. Even Mike Lawson would give him three and a half apiece.
    He put the knife back on the counter with the other things and she nodded, apparently satisfied. He asked, “Where’s your man?”
    She looked at him, a flash of fear in her eyes. Then she shook her head, shrugged, made the sign of not understanding.
    “I remember you,” he said. “Your man is George Black Bull.”
    She wouldn’t admit it. She put the ammunition, the knife, the candy in her pack, picked up the ax, motioned to the boy, and started to leave. Jim Thatcher stopped her before she reached the door. “There’s no need to run,” he said. “They don’t want your man. He doesn’t have to hide out. That case is all cleared up. Self-defense, they called it. Do you understand?”
    She looked at him, bewildered.
    “Your man can come back,” Jim Thatcher said. “He doesn’t have to hide out. This thing is all over, finished.” He made the gesture with his hands for wiping clean, making an end.
    She stared at him.
    “You understand English, don’t you? Of course you do.”
    She didn’t answer. She stared at him, searching his face.
    “Tell George he can come back. They’re not looking for him any more. Tell him—”
    She shook her head.
    “Why not?”
    She spoke to the boy in Ute and they left the store.
    They walked down the street. People stared at them, smiled at their clothes, but nobody spoke to them, nobody tried to stop them. They walked down the street to the end and started along the road to Piedra Town. They went a way down that road, and she stopped and looked back. Nobody was following them. But she was not sure. It could have been a trick, what Jim Thatcher had said about her man. And even if they did not want her man, now that he was dead, maybe they wanted her, or the boy.
    She walked down the road until they had passed the bend and Pagosa was out of sight. There she and the boy left the road, walking carefully on stones to leave no track. They went up the hillside, through the brush, and there they sat, hidden, watching, for an hour. Nobody came, following them. She opened the pack and got out the bag of candy. They ate the chocolate drops. Then they went on, following the trails through the brush.

8
    T HEY SPENT THAT WINTER as before. Spring came again, and one day when he went to catch fish at a pool in the stream he met the she-bear again. He was not afraid of her. He said to her, “You gave me my name. I am Bear Brother and we are friends.” She listened as he sang a song that came to him, a song of friendship with that bear. Then she went away and he followed her and saw her uproot an old stump and catch three chipmunks and lick up the swarming ants. Then he went to the stream and caught fish and he left half of his fish for the bear.
    He told his mother of this and she said, “It is good to have a friend.” She told him how their people had been friends of everything in the mountains in the old days—the bears, the deer, the