Matt's Arc

Chapter 3 of 7

The wolf led Matt off the shelf and up a narrow cut in the rock. Smoke thickened in the trees. They came out in a clearing where a wide hide teepee stood against the pines, wolves painted around its base in black and red. A fire burned outside it under an iron pot. Two men and a woman stood by the fire and watched him come. None of them spoke. The wolf sat down at the woman's feet. At the edge of the clearing stood a tall carved post. Wolves at the top, then a long snout, an owl, a turtle at the bottom. The paint was old but kept up. The woman pointed at the post without looking at Matt. He understood. He walked to it and put his hand flat against the wolf's mouth at the top. His hand shook. He kept it there until she nodded once. "You crossed the line," she said. "That gets you the fire. It does not get you a name." She was maybe fifty, gray at the temples, her hair tied back with a plain green band. Matt's stomach dropped. He knew that band. The girl had worn one exactly like it every day of the summer she turned eleven. He said nothing about it. Not yet. "I'm looking for someone," he said. "She lived in town when we were kids. Her mother's people were up here. She told me once, only once, and only to me." The older of the two men shifted his weight. "Town men say a lot of things," he said. "Prove she told you." Matt reached into his shirt pocket and drew out a hawk feather, brown and cream, the shaft worn smooth. "She found this by the creek behind the factory. She split it with me. She kept the other half in a tin under her bed. She said her uncle up the ridge taught her hawks watched the boundary." He held it out on his palm. "If you knew her, you know if that's true." The woman took the feather. She turned it in the firelight. She looked at the man who had spoken, and something passed between them that Matt could not read. Then she looked at the green band around her own wrist, and back at him. "Her uncle," she said, "is dead six years." She closed her hand around the feather. "But he did say that. And she did split a feather with a town boy. She told me his name once, when she was angry at him for not following her." Matt's knees went soft. He sat down in the dirt by the fire without being asked. The woman crouched across from him. "She is not here," she said. "She has not been here in a long time. But you have bought the right to ask where she went. Eat first. Then we talk about what you owe before I tell you."