In Calamity's Wake by Natalee Caple Page A

and leaning down to peer at my head. He whistled through missing teeth. You need some help or you are gonna lose that head, he said. If you don’t mind Indians I have some friends nearby who could fix you up better than any misfit money-hungry doctor.
    I looked at him. His brow was crinkled with such concern it was comical. His horse and my horse assessed each other, waiting for an answer.
    Yes, I said.
    W E FOLLOWED him towards an encampment. I struggled to stay conscious through the pain. He called the Indians Blackfeet and when I corrected him, struggling to say Blackfoot, he said, Oh, you are a Canadian!
    I stopped talking. It wasn’t that he was saying anything wrong but opening my mouth to answer the man was enough to make me want to murder myself.
    I could smell my wound and I felt a warm sticky flow down my neck. As we passed a rock formation he waved and I saw an Indian girl on horseback. From her expression I knew I must look mostly dead. She led us to a big campsite. There were twenty rings of teepees in large open clusters between two coulees. Five cairns were arranged along small hills at the north end of the camp. There were Cree and a few Assiniboine and some from other tribes there, but this was the Blackfoot reservation. She exchanged a few words with my rescuer and then with my horse and then she caught me as I fell from my saddle.
    With the help of some friends she brought me to her family. I looked up at their faces as they carried me. I had never seen such beautiful eyes.
    I lapsed into unconsciousness again and when I woke I lay within a circle of women in a large teepee. They had wrapped me tightly in blankets, soaked my hair with water, mopped the blood from my head, neck and shoulder, and tied a poultice to the wound.
    Apos-ipoca, one woman said and made the sign for dry-root.
    I lay on my back on the soft earth and turned my head to watch an old woman laying out a sheet and thenspreading bright beads of saskatoon berries across it to dry.
    How’s that? someone asked me.
    Thank you.
    A WOMAN and her daughter tended to me, clucking at the look of my ear. They called me sister-in-law. I didn’t know why. Still, it was full of kindness. I knew by the movement of their voices that I had lost my hearing on the wounded side. The hours were different in length depending on the level of my pain. The painful hours were like tacks in my brain and the smoky minutes spread out over everything. I sucked on chokecherry mash and bit the inside of my cheek when they checked my ear. I told them about the woman at the well, about my father and how he had sent me to find my mother.
    That was not her, one woman signed. That woman is crazy since the war.
    Yes, said the old man, whose name was Theophilus Little. That poor woman is one of the common casualties of the war. She lost everything but the conviction that her children are still out there somewhere.
    W HEN WE were alone Theophilus smoked a pipe and did not speak much, although he laughed often at hisown thoughts. His laugh was a rumble from the chest, almost like pleurisy. I slept and slept, waking most often when my head was being gently examined or my body shifted into a seated position so that delicious stew could be pushed through my lips.
    As the days passed, the pain in my head grew noisy and hot; I hated even to move my neck. But when I lay perfectly still, I listened to the language of the people around me. It brought me back to Zita. Theophilus called the mother Lizzy and the daughter Poesa. Children and other adults came and went, clearly asking after me. Outside I heard grandmothers singing to babies and the horses gaily neighing. Lizzy and Poesa spoke some English and I some Blackfoot but mostly we communicated by signs.
    Pain? signed Poesa.
    More, I signed.
    Poesa bid me to lie down and she spoke to her friends for some minutes.
    While they spoke I stared at the interior of the cone of the ceiling. My head expanded and contracted around