The Beaded Moccasins by Lynda Durrant

Author:Lynda Durrant [Durrant, Lynda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Hepte pulls down her leggings and straddles the bowl.

After living in a cave all winter with two hundred Delaware, I think I've smelled and seen and heard just about everything people do.

But I've never seen anyone empty her bladder in the cave. We always go outside.

Hepte stands and pulls up her leggings. "Tonn," she says, pointing to the bowl.

"Keko windji?" I whisper. What can she be thinking?

She says something, and Chickadee pulls down her leggings and straddles the bowl. Chickadee smiles up at me as a little bit trickles out. She stands up, points to the bowl, and chatters at me about a mile a minute.

Gray lumps of brain float and bob in a pool of yellow urine. It looks like sour milk long gone to curd. Hepte and Chickadee look at me expectantly.

"Ku," I say, shaking my head. "Ku, Hepte."

Hepte shrugs her shoulders, then sets to work. She dips her hands into the steaming mess and mixes it into a paste. She begins to rub the paste into the bloody side of the deerskin. Chickadee helps, the gray mass curling out between her chubby fingers.

I can't bring myself to look for more than a moment or two. It occurs to me, as I'm looking down at my tunic, that my butter-soft leather clothes and beaded moccasins were tanned by Hepte, and surely in the same way. And that's the same bowl we've used for our family dinners. The same pot we eat from. How could she—

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