-hobybuchanon- Native American Indian Girl Returns -

Hoby tightened his gun belt and mounted his own horse. "Then let's give him something to be afraid of."

Tala reached into the folds of her blanket and pulled out a small bundle of yellowed envelopes, the ink faded but still legible. "They gave them to me the day I left. The matron thought they'd make me sad. She was right. But not the way she meant."

"They changed my name. Said 'Tala' was too hard to pronounce. Called me 'Margaret.'" She almost smiled. "I ran away seven times. The eighth time, I stayed gone."

"You said you'd come back for me," she said. Her voice held no accusation, only a fact, like the shape of a scar. -HobyBuchanon- Native American Indian Girl Returns

They stood together in the growing light, the mountain casting its long shadow over the ranch. Somewhere up in the pines, a hawk screamed. And the old spring, hidden and forgotten, bubbled up from the dark heart of the earth—waiting to be remembered.

Hoby remembered that blizzard. Remembered finding a half-frozen Indian child curled against a warm spring, her dark eyes calm as if she'd known all along someone would come. He'd taken her in, raised her alongside his own sons for four years, until the state had decided a white rancher wasn't fit to raise a Native American girl.

The girl—no, not a girl anymore, he saw now—turned slowly. The face was the same sharp, intelligent map of cheekbones and dark eyes, but the child who had left on the Indian Agency truck was gone. In her place stood a young woman with the stillness of deep water. Hoby tightened his gun belt and mounted his own horse

"The reservation is dying," she said. "The water's poisoned. The elders are sick. And the company that owns the land upstream—they're owned by the same man who owns the bank that holds the deed to your ranch."

Hoby's throat tightened. "I should have fought harder."

Tala looked toward the mountain, and for a moment Hoby saw the child she'd been—the one who could speak to horses and find water in a drought and read the weather in the flight of birds. The matron thought they'd make me sad

"What do you need?" he asked.

Hoby went still. "Royce Tillman."

"A horse," she said. "And a man who still knows how to listen to the land instead of trying to own it."