Chapter One
The harvest was complete in the morning, and that evening my mother died. I went
to bed late that night, full of the raw ending of crop and life, and dreamed
about the Nez Perce children, their shiny black hair cut short and falling
smoothly to the side. They ran to my house screaming, chanting; but it wasn't
for money, kitchway, like my mother described. I walked outside and saw the
bodies of the children's parents cut into pieces, bound oddly back together. A
wide-eyed head coupled with a foot, a hand joined a stomach, red and messy; it
was a bloody totem. No matter how carved up they were, I could still see it was
their mothers and fathers. I knew then, I could have killed my parents for what
they had done.
I didn't grow up where my mother did. Elise Steele flourished in the cattle
country of the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon, on the ranch Chief Joseph of the Nez
Perce called Heart of the Beast. I was my father's daughter, born twenty-eight
years ago at his homestead alongside the Columbia River. I was what occurred two
centuries after Lewis and Clark sailed down our river eating dogs and writing
history.
On that last day of harvest, the full moon passed. My pioneer family had always
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