ABSTRACT
When I was still a young boy, my mother moved us off the reservation to the edge of town, out where the only thing beyond us was dry buffalo grass full of tin cans and bedsprings and socks dried in stiff clumps. I walked out in the long, early morning shadows and looked across the fields to the line of mountains that ran toward our old place. Stickers poked through my soles—I never learned the magic that protects your soles if you’re Indian. On open ground, I faced away from the sun and shifted my little hips. I did a snake dance on ten-foot legs.
