on the rez was hard. Really hard. They gave all this aid to foreign countries, spent all this money, making horrible weapons that could never be used in a civilized world, while little kids grew up in hopeless poverty and died too young. The big problem with the rez was the lack of job opportunities. What a pity that those entrepreneurs didn’t set up low-impact manufacturing plants on the rez, to make jobs for people who faced driving hours to even find one. They could have offered jobs making exclusive clothing or unique dolls; they could have made jobs creating prefab houses and easily-set-up outbuildings; they could have opened a business that would make sails for boats, or wind chimes, or furniture. There must be a thousand things that people could manufacture on the reservation if someone would just create the means. Craftsmanship was so rare that it was worth diamonds in the modern world. It was almost impossible to find anything made by hand, except for quilts and handcrafted items. Well, there were those beautiful things that the Amish made, he amended. He had Amish-built furniture in his cabin, provided by a small community of them nearby, from whom he also bought fresh butter and cheese and milk. Now there, he thought, was a true pioneering spirit. If the lights ever went out for good, the Amish wouldn’t have to struggle to survive.
* * *
Parker had been running one of J.L.’s new fillies through her paces while he pondered the problems of the world, and was just putting her up, when he heard fast hoofbeats and a young, winded voice yelling.
He moved away from the corral at the back of the big line cabin where he lived most of the year and looked out front. A palomino was galloping hell for leather down the trail. A youngster in boots and jeans and a long-sleeved flannel shirt and a floppy ranch hat, obviously chasing the horse, was stopped in the dirt road, bending over as if trying to catch his breath.
He kept his usual foul language to himself, not wanting to unsettle the young boy, who looked frantic enough already.
“Hey,” Parker called. “What’s going on?”
“My . . . horse!” came a high-pitched wail from the bent-over youngster. She stood up and a wealth of blond hair fell out of her hat. It wasn’t a boy after all. She sat down on the ground. She was crying. “She’ll make me give him back,” she sobbed. “She’ll never let me keep him. He knocked over part of the fence. She was calling the vet when he ran away and I was afraid . . . he’d hurt . . . himself!”
“Wait a bit.” He went down on one knee in front of her. “Just breathe,” he said gently. “Come on. Take it easy. Your horse won’t go far. We’ll follow him with a bucket of oats in a minute and he’ll come back.”
She looked up with china blue eyes in a thin face. “Really?” she asked hopefully.
He smiled. “Really.”
She studied him with real interest. She must have been nine or ten, just a kid. Her eyes were on his thick black hair, in a rawhide-tied ponytail at his back, framing a face with black eyes and thick eyebrows and a straight, aristocratic nose. “Are you Indian . . . I mean, Native American?” she asked, fascinated.
He chuckled. “Half of me is Crow. The rest is Scots.”
“Oh.”
“I’m Parker. Who are you?”
“I’m Teddie. Teddie Blake. My mom lives over that way. We moved here about four months ago.” She made a face. “I don’t know anybody. It’s a new school and I don’t get along well with most people.”
“Me, neither,” he confessed.
Her eyes lit up. “Really?”
He chuckled. “Really. It’s not so bad, the town of Benton. I’ve lived here for a while. You’ll love it, once you get used to it. The palomino’s yours?” he added, nodding toward where the horse had run.
“Yes. He was a rescue. We live on a small ranch. It was my grandmother’s. She left it to my dad when she died. That was six months ago, just before he . . .” She made a face. “Mom’s a teacher. She just started at Benton Elementary School. I’m in fifth grade there. The ranch has a barn and a fenced lot, and they were going to kill him. The palomino. He hurt his owner real bad. The vet was out at our place to doctor Mom’s horse and he told us. I begged Mom to let me have him. He won’t like it,” she added with a sour face.
“He?”
“Mom’s would-be boyfriend from back East,” she said miserably. “He works for a law firm in Washington, D.C. He wears suits and goes to the gym and hates meat.”
“Oh.” He didn’t say anything more.
She glanced at his stony face and didn’t see any reaction at all. He’d long since learned to hide his feelings.
“Anyway, he says he’s going to come out and visit next month. Unless maybe he gets lost in a blizzard or captured by Martians or something.”
He chuckled. “Don’t sound so hopeful. He might be nice.”
“He’s nice when Mom’s around,” she muttered.
His face hardened. “Is he, now?”
She saw the expression. He wasn’t hiding it. “Oh, no, he doesn’t . . . well, he’s just mean, that’s all. He doesn’t like me. He says it’s a shame that Mom has me, because he doesn’t want to raise someone else’s child.”
“Are your parents divorced?”
She shook her head. “My daddy’s dead. He was in the army. A bomb exploded overseas and he was killed. He was a doctor,” she added, fighting tears.
“How long ago?” he asked, and his voice softened.
“Six months. It’s why Mom wanted to move here, to get away from the memories. My grandmother left us the ranch. She was from here. That lawyer helped Mom get Daddy’s affairs straight and he’s really sweet on her. I don’t think she likes him that much. He wanted to take her out and she wouldn’t go. He’s just per . . . per . . .”
“Persistent?”
She nodded. “That.”
“Well, we all have our problems,” he returned.
There was a sound of hoofbeats. They turned and there was the palomino, galloping back toward them.
“Wait here a sec. Don’t go toward him,” he added. “It’s a him?”
“It’s a him.”
“Be right back.”
He went to the stable and got a sack of oats. The palomino was standing in the road, and the girl, Teddie, was right where he’d left her. Good girl, he thought, she wasn’t headstrong and she could follow orders.
“Look here, old fellow,” Parker said, standing beside the dirt road. He rattled the feed bag.
The palomino shook his head, raised his ears, and hesitated. But after a minute, he trotted right to Parker.
“Pretty old creature,” Parker said gently. He didn’t look the horse in the eyes, which might have seemed threatening to the animal. He held a hand, very slowly, to the horse’s nostrils.
