Starfish by James Crowley Page B

log up and secured the V-shaped end into place as an additional brace. Ulysses watched them through the window from the meadow and seemed to approve of the process and the mule’s work. They did the same with the second log, and when they had finished, Grandpa said that he would sleep easier that night.
    Then, they cleaned the lodge. This really reminded Lionel of being back at school. Grandpa said that there was no way that the children could keep their heads straight if their lodge wasn’t in order, so he sent Beatrice out to find a pine bough and showed her how to fasten the branches and some long dried grass to replace the broken broom. He then sent Lionel down to the stream with an old rusted bucket, and when he returned, put him to the task of cleaning and scrubbing every square inch of the lodge with an old bristle brush that they found in the small open-sided stable.
    After the windows were washed and the lodge’s floor scrubbed, they cleaned out the stable and assessed it for supplies. over the next few days, they built a new outhouse from lumber that they found lying across the rafters of the stable, and they patched the sunken roof and collapsed side of the lodge as best they could. They salvaged what remained of the rat-ravaged grain stores and organized an array of rusting tools and farm implements.
    Lionel looked around at their little lodge and the outbuildings. He could not believe how much they had accomplished in the short time since their grandfather had arrived. “Looks pretty darn good, don’t it?” Grandpa said, almost as if he was reading Lionel’s mind. “But I’m wondering if you could do one more thing for me.”
    Lionel nodded and followed as his grandfather led him down to the stream.
    â€œRemember me tellin’ you how Napi created the land for the animals?”
    â€œYes, sir, of course.”
    â€œThen he created the people, right? Our people.”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œThis here’s the serviceberry,” Grandpa said, reaching out to a spindly clump of bushes that grew near the stream. “Napi told the first people, the ones with the stone knives, to use this to make their arrows.”
    Lionel’s face lit up in anticipation.
    â€œListen to me, Lionel. I want you to pick only the straightest branches you can find.”
    Lionel thought he was going to burst. He found several options and showed them to Grandpa, who carefully selected an assortment of the branches and boughs and brought them back to the front steps of the lodge.
    Grandpa pulled a stool out into the late afternoon sun and sat down with his pocketknife in hand. “But did you ever wonder how the people knew what it was they should eat?”
    Beatrice stepped out from the late afternoon darkness of the lodge.
    â€œWell,” Grandpa began, “old Man gathered the people and showed them the buffalo. ‘You must go down to the Great Plains and hunt them,’ Napi told them. The people did, but the buffalo killed and ate them.”
    â€œAte them?” Lionel interrupted. “Buffalo don’t eat people.”
    Grandpa skinned the thin bark from the slender branches with his knife and continued, ignoring Lionel’s question.
    â€œNow, old Man, he’s a traveler, always on the move, so one day he came across the dead hunting party and felt bad. old Man decided that the buffalo should not eat man, but that man should kill and eat the buffalo.
    â€œThe old Man went out and found some of his people who were still alive. ‘I don’t understand. I created the buffalo for you to eat. why do you let them kill and eat you?’
    â€œOne of old Man’s children stepped forward. ‘we don’t have any weapons, and the buffalo does. He has horns to cut us down and is very fast and powerful.’
    â€œNapi thought about it and realized that he must give the people something to even the odds against the