Above them on the rocky slopes, maybe forty or fifty Tukudekatoddlers, adolescents, women, men-tried to keep the babies quiet. They were among the last of their people, among the last free native people in the entire United States. The Civil War was over, Edison had invented the phonograph, and these people were still living outside, still making their homes in what any of us would call the middle of nowhere. Maybe they were scared; maybe they were furious; maybe they were resigned. Probably they were hungry. Probably there were some refugee Bannocks or Nez Perce with them, men who had so far avoided the reservation, men who had rifles, men who had known little in their lives besides deracination and subjugation. It'd be another couple of hours until dawn. If the sky was clear, the Milky Way would have been huge and dazzling, a sleeve of light draped across the sky. And in all that immensity, there was nowhere for the Tukudeka to go, no retreat, no quarter, the world had left them behind, somehow they had become strange and wrong, scattered amongst the hills, and everything was on the line: their idioms, their legends, their ancestors, their kids. Maybe they slept; maybe one or two managed to forget their situation long enough to whisper to each other and smile, before the crystalline night reasserted itself and their aches and injuries came back and they were reminded again of the soldiers camped in the field below, bent on chasing them down. One hundred and twenty-eight years later, I'm camped beside an alpine lake in December, not terribly far from Soldier Bar. For me nothing is more compelling in this country than the night skies: on winter nights the stars flicker white and red and blue, twisting and glittering in their places. In the same moment they can seem both astonishingly close and impossibly far away. This is not typically comforting: you feel the size of the Earth beneath your back, which is massive enough to hold all of its cities and oceans and creatures in the sway of its gravity, and on the far side of the Earth is the sun, 300,000
TWO NIGHTS I 51