This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2022 by Stephen Graham Jones

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

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eISBN: 9781542034449

Cover design by Holly Ovenden

Published in coordination with Plympton Literary Studio

1.

Eleven months after her husband Arthur swerved around a stopped school bus and mowed down two first graders and got sentenced to twenty years, Millie Two Bears went to war against the prairie dogs.

It started when she was drinking her morning coffee and waiting for her car to warm up. There through the window, on the rise that was the south edge of Arthur’s family’s allotment, was the clump of shaggy horses that had made this part of the reservation their summer grazing the last couple of years.

“Hey, you guys,” Millie said to them, and lifted her mug in solemn greeting. More mornings than not, she watched the sun rise with them. When it had been her and Arthur nursing their coffee instead of just her and the horses, he would always lean up from his chair when the first horse crested. For a moment, it might be a big elk, clambering up from the coulee, skylining itself like it wanted its head on a wall.

It was usually just the horses, though.

They hardly even flicked their tails about Millie anymore, either.

Millie didn’t name them or anything like that. But she did know them by color, and build, and number. There should be four: two sorrel mares, one trashy paint that looked funny when its winter coat was coming off, and the stocky grey one.

There were just three this morning, though?

Millie squinted them closer, because she had to be counting wrong, and . . . there it was, coming up last. And—favoring its front leg?

Millie stood to see if there were hanging flaps of skin on that leg, or a tangle of barbed wire dragging behind, and that was enough movement to send the four horses ghosting off.

There’d been no blood on the grey’s leg, and no wire.

“Came down wrong after a layup, then,” Millie said into her mug.

Arthur would have liked that. He never missed any of the high school basketball games.

She smiled a bit, thinking of how he would have chuckled about a horse dribbling, shooting.

Goddamn him.

When Millie came home from work that afternoon, instead of going right into the trailer, she went out to that rise at the edge of the property—not her property anymore, come the end of next month, but Arthur’s brothers’ and cousins’, and their kids’, and on and on. In one more generation, forty people were each going to have a few square feet of this land. Meaning no one would really own it.

Already she’d seen his cousins slowing on the road to gauge the land, the trailer.

But that was still six weeks away, like a ball of static that fuzzed Millie’s thinking up each time she tried to see past it. She understood, of course: if Arthur no longer lived here, then she had no claim on the place. And since her Uncle Chester’s last daughter had moved out, there was a bedroom she could have for nothing if she wanted it, so it wasn’t like she didn’t have anywhere to go.

Just, this was where she’d planned to always be.

With Arthur, the idiot.

Millie stood on the rise where the horses had been that morning and looked back to the trailer, to see what she might look like from here: a woman without her second and last husband; a woman with two first-marriage sons, one in Seattle, one in Minneapolis, neither of which had cell service, evidently; a woman cherishing the coffee she still made too much of each morning, just from habit; a prison widow who still kept her husband’s coffee mug unwashed in the cabinet; a mother who had called the fire management office herself when her husband had driven their not-paid-for-yet truck out to Starr School, where the family of one of those first graders lived, and set that truck on fire, walked away.

But she couldn’t start thinking about that again.

She breathed in, let it all out for the thousandth time, and turned to pick her way through the grass to the trailer, and . . . stumbled.

Not because she’d tripped over something, but because she’d stepped partway into something—a hole just wider than her house sandal. It brushed the bare top of her foot with dry coolness, and the fetid, tangy scent pluming up made her throat close, her sinuses contract.

Millie refocused her eyes, looked down the back side of the slope.

It was bare, with mounds dotted all through it: finely sifted soil carried up from deep underground, soil that would soon, she knew, harden, become permanent.

“Oh no you don’t,” she said, and stepped to the exact top of the rise, which was where Arthur had always said the property line fell.

Three steps in from it, almost right where the horses had been standing, was another prairie dog hole. This one was crumbled in a bit on the side. Like from a hoof. And she’d been wrong about the grey horse not showing any blood—it had just been too far for her to see.

Smeared along the inside of the hole, clotting in the dryness, was what had to be blood. And there was nothing sharp here, meaning this had been a break, that a bone had punched through the fetlock, the pastern—terms Millie hadn’t had to conjure for years. They were right there waiting, though.

Not that they helped that horse.

“I’m sorry,” Millie said to it, wherever it was out there, and then scraped some of that loose soil around the hole back into the darkness, knowing it wasn’t going to be enough.

2.

The word she got from her supervisor at the housing office was that horses stepping in prairie dog holes was just a smear campaign, pretty much. Horses know better.

But she’d seen that grey favoring its front leg, and this start-up prairie dog town was right there.

What else could it be?

Anyway, when Arthur’s family came to claim their allotment back, she didn’t want it to have been taken over by prairie dogs—that would reflect bad on Arthur, like he’d really let the place go.

Yeah, he was a killer, he’d run over those two kids with their whole lives waiting ahead for them, and everybody on the reservation had to spit after saying his name just to get that taste out of their mouth, but Millie didn’t want it to be said of him that he hadn’t at least protected his own land.

“Poison,” Junior from Fish and Wildlife told her, emphasizing that he wasn’t saying this in any official capacity, and then following that up with the fact that she hadn’t heard this from him at all, really. The Blackfeet were supposed to “live in harmony with nature,” all that.

Which is fine and good in theory, of course.

But Millie had seen that grey horse limping. And she’d seen how prairie dogs could raze a few acres, could make them look like the ass-end of a military firing range.

“Oh, and hey,” Junior said, calling Millie back to him. He was standing in produce at the IGA, trying to decide on a bell pepper.

“Remember, we’re not talking,” Millie whispered to him, just playing.

“You still wanting to rent that little camper out?” Junior asked.

The little 1962 job sitting on cinder blocks about fifty yards east of the trailer. The camper was where she and Arthur had lived when they were saving up for the big trailer.

“Who you got?” Millie asked.

“Somebody with a shovel,” Junior said back, smiling with his eyebrows, mostly.

He was talking about the flyer Millie had posted on the bulletin boards around town so long ago that their paper was stiff and sun-bleached. The flyers said there was one camper to rent, but it didn’t have insulation, it was three miles out of town toward East Glacier, it might or might not have small animals nesting in it, and whoever lived there would have to re-dig the outhouse, since Millie didn’t need a boarder always clomping into the trailer for the good bathroom.

So, being cold, living with mystery rodents, digging a shithole, and paying seventy-five dollars a month was the deal, pretty much. Surprisingly, even at that price, there’d been no takers. Especially after what Arthur had done.

Still, “I might have someone,” Junior said, saluting Millie bye with a withered bell pepper, and that was that.

3.

As it turned out, Millie did feel kind of evil, putting the poison pellets out. Not like she was being a bad Indian, but like she was failing as a human in some vital, can’t-go-back way. Too, she remembered a kitchen she’d worked in down in Great Falls thirty years ago, when she’d been escaping the reservation. After finding roaches packed around the cooling lines of the chest freezer, the assistant manager had started leaving green poison pellets in the alley, since of course they couldn’t be in the kitchen. After a couple weeks and maybe a half pound of pellets, all the stray roaches that got stepped on, darting from this shelf to that counter, their insides had been frothy green with poison.

Millie, sipping her morning coffee, had to imagine that was what was inside her prairie dogs now.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Wasn’t that far,” a woman said back, scaring Millie enough that she sloshed coffee into her lap.

The woman was Indian, had a duffel slung over her shoulder, and her clothes . . . her slacks were from when Millie had been in her twenties, her light jacket had actual epaulets on the shoulders, and her hair carried some punk story with it, it looked like.

She was looking out where Millie had been: at the property line the prairie dogs were encroaching on.

“Um, who are you?” Millie managed to get out.

“Junior said you might have a place,” the woman said, then turned back to Millie. “They call me Frog.”

“Frog?”

“I used to be able to jump, in high school.”

“Where was that?”

Frog shrugged one shoulder and squinted, like she was consulting some internal directory, then came back with, “Rosebud.”

Millie nodded, knew some people from there.

“Junior told you about it?” Millie asked, chucking her chin out to the camper. It wasn’t exactly sitting so level anymore.

Frog held the flyer up.

“I forgot the shovel, though,” she admitted with a smile.

Millie set her up with one, and fell in digging alongside, and then helped Frog clear out the camper as much as it could be cleared out.

“I’ve got some blankets,” Millie said.

“It’s perfect,” Frog said back, looking out at the rise again.

“Just until the snow, though,” Millie said. “It’s too cold.”

“I like it here,” Frog said, stepping down onto the ground as if testing it. As if being sure about it.

“How do you know Junior?” Millie asked.

“I don’t, really,” Frog said. “He was dragging a dead moose out from under that bridge—”

“East Glacier?”

Frog nodded. Millie had heard about someone dumping a moose there.

“And I was watching, I guess,” Frog said.

Millie nodded. This is how things happen on the reservation, yes.

“Seventy-five dollars?” she said then, just to get it out of the way.

“Oh yeah,” Frog said, and dug the bills from her rear pocket, which Millie noted: not from a wallet, not from a purse, but just stuffed into her pocket. The exact amount.

“What you got going on over there?” Frog asked then, about the rise.

Millie looked over there with her, told herself she’d been staring out there hard enough that Frog must have keyed on it.

“Prairie dogs trying to move in,” Millie said, then added the name in Blackfeet, straight from Junior: “Kitsisomahkokata.”

“Prairie dogs,” Frog repeated, still looking out there.

“They’ll be gone soon,” Millie said.

4.

The prairie dogs were still there at the end of the week. If they were conking over dead, then Millie guessed they must be doing it underground. She knew they had different little rooms for their lives, but—did they have death chambers too? Or did whatever room they died in become a death chamber?

Frog was taking coffee with her on the trailer’s porch by then. It meant that the extra cup Millie kept making for Arthur wasn’t extra anymore.

“It’s not even my land, not really,” she explained right out of nowhere, her tone sounding like an excuse, she knew. For the poor job she was making of this.

“I heard about your husband,” Frog said back, staring into her mug.

Millie tightened her lips, and her heart.

“It was just that one mistake that one time,” she said, probably for the ten thousandth time.

“I’m sorry,” Frog said, and cupped her hand over Millie’s.

“But he shouldn’t have done it,” Millie was sure to say, because if she didn’t, then it could be like she was blaming those first graders for not being more careful. No, it was for sure and for always Arthur’s fault.

They hadn’t called her to the stand for his short trial—they’re short when you confess to everything and don’t want a lawyer—but if they had, that’s what she would have been sure to try to say: that it hadn’t been those kids’ fault. But, too, if they’d let her, she would have said that Arthur wasn’t bad, he had just been in a hurry. He usually obeyed every traffic law, even when nobody was watching.

It was just that one time.

“Look,” Frog said then, directing Millie’s eyes up to the sky.

A hawk was circling.

The prairie dogs each had their little chins lifted to track this dangerous shape across the sky. One of them barked, and the rest chittered in agreement.

“They have different vocalizations for everything,” Millie said. She’d read it on her computer at work, during her lunch hour. “If you wear a red jacket one day, then what they start saying about you means ‘red jacket.’”

“They’re smart little dudes, yeah,” Frog said, then corrected with “Prairie dogs, I mean.” As if that had been in question?

“Coyotes eat them too,” Millie added.

“Chicken nuggets of the prairie,” Frog said, either making it sound like a quote from somewhere or saying it like a joke, Millie couldn’t quite tell.

“I’m going to cover them up,” she said, suddenly decisive.

Frog looked over to her like she was impressed.

Millie went around to the road side of the trailer, came back with the same two shovels they’d used to dig out under the laid-over outhouse—not that that afternoon of digging had even been worth it. Millie was already insisting that Frog just come into the trailer, use the good plumbing.

“That’ll work?” Frog said, about covering the prairie dogs up.

“One way to find out,” Millie said, and leaned Frog’s shovel against the porch. “No rent for July if you help me.”

Frog breathed in as if considering this, but finally had to shake her head no, just slightly.

“It won’t take that long,” Millie said, trying not to make this into an argument.

“It’s not that,” Frog said. “It’s just . . . I can’t. I’m sorry.”

Millie considered this, and considered what her next question should be: Frog couldn’t because she couldn’t be mean to the poor little animals? she couldn’t because of a promise she’d made to a South Dakota prairie dog she’d run over back in high school? she couldn’t because she was vegetarian?

That last one didn’t track perfectly to Millie, but, on the reservation, vegetarianism was suspect enough that it could explain a lot of deviant behavior.

Millie didn’t push it. She told herself it wasn’t her business, that Frog was a boarder, not hired help. Sure, they took their coffee together, they used the same inside bathroom, they talked about this and that, Frog’s questions always so basic that Millie had begun to suspect a head injury somewhere in her past, but, really, this was Millie’s war to fight, not Frog’s.

It took her all afternoon to plug up just half the holes. By the second one, she’d figured out that if she rolled some big rocks in first, then they would clog the works, give the dirt she shoveled in a kind of make-do floor to stop at, so the hole could fill faster.

When she came back to the trailer, sweaty but sort of exhilarated, Frog had left July’s seventy-five dollars tucked under Millie’s coffee mug. The bills were crisp and pristine, like just minted, even though Frog hadn’t left the trailer since she got there that first day, so far as Millie knew.

Inside, under the kitchen light, Millie inspected the bills to see if they were counterfeit, but, in the end, they spent the same at the IGA as any other cash. Maybe Frog was that rarest of breeds, the Independently Wealthy Indian, Millie told herself. Or maybe she’d robbed a bank somewhere along the twelve-hour trip from Rosebud to here.

It took two more days to fill in all the holes, but even by the time she was packing the last one down, the first one was already collapsing in, from sharp little teeth and claws digging from the underside.

The next morning, every hole had burst open again—that was the only word—and had a prairie dog jutting up from it, its hidden little tail presumably wagging with delight.

Frog stepped over from the camper and nodded thanks for the coffee Millie had waiting in an insulated travel mug, because she hadn’t known when Frog might emerge.

“They’re back,” Frog stated, taking her lawn chair.

“I think they burrow around the rocks,” Millie said. Then, “Don’t they usually stand by the holes, though? Not in them, right? What, do they have little shelves in there to stand on?”

“Good, good,” Frog said, and had her coffee up to her face by the time Millie could look over, for what Frog meant by that.

5.

Two days later, inspecting the prairie dogs’ industry, Millie stepped across the property line, into what she had to guess was “their” territory, then stopped short: there was a dead hawk in the thinning grass, its claws pointed up on its stiff dinosaur legs like a cartoon.

Millie circled it, circled it again, and her circling stumbled her into another dead hawk, this one more desiccated.

“What the hell?” she muttered.

Frog was standing in the open doorway of her camper, her hand visoring her eyes. She was wearing the slacks she evidently slept in, which didn’t make sense to Millie. But she’d resisted asking, so far.

She made her way back to the trailer, told Frog about the hawks, which, in her head—“Frog,” “hawks”—sounded like some ridiculous children’s story. Was Badger next? Muskrat?

“Maybe it’s that poison,” Frog said.

“Poison?”

“The prairie dogs eat it, the birds eat the prairie dogs . . .”

Millie nodded, could buy that, yeah.

Except Frog had barely been suppressing an amused grin while saying it. No, while offering it. As if she wanted to leave it out there between them, see if Millie would bite on it.

What could Frog know about prairie dogs up here in Montana, though? When she wouldn’t—no, no: “couldn’t”—even step out there among the holes?

“I never asked,” Millie led off, trying to wash any suspicion from her words, “what brings you to Montana anyway?”

“I was lucky,” Frog said back, or let slip, as most of her attention was focused out on the hill again.

Lucky? Millie said to herself.

“Lucky you ran into Junior, yeah,” Millie said, like trying that out. It was the only real follow-up she could come up with.

“Junior,” Frog said, focusing now on Millie’s mouth, as if rewatching each of those two syllables pass over Millie’s lips.

“The Fish and Wildlife guy?” Millie prompted.

“The moose,” Frog filled in. “Yes, yes, we knew about the moose.”

And then she drifted back to her camper, lost in . . . thought? Reverie? Whatever it was, it was infectious: driving to work, Millie drifted into the other lane, caught a horn from a semi, found her side of the road again, her heart beating fast, her passenger-side tires throwing shoulder gravel up into the wheel wells, a thousand furious little pings, like an upside-down meteor shower.

We knew about the moose, though?

Millie took her lunch an hour early, went to her Uncle Chester’s place. She told herself it was to figure out if her bed would fit in that back bedroom when she had to move in next month, but really she was there because he kept towers of the Glacier Reporter in the corner by the potbellied stove, to start fires with.

She found the issue just a few layers down. Anyone with information about the illegally harvested moose could call Fish and Wildlife anonymously.

Millie tried to add this together with Frog’s we.

It didn’t equal anything.

Instead of going back to work, she went around to Kalispell, stood in the only pet store she knew about until the owner finally had to shrug his way over to the aquarium she was at, ask if she was interested in that fish.

“No,” Millie told him. “Not a fish.”

6.

That night, right before sundown, Millie let her new ferret go right at the top of the hill. She’d seen videos of trucks with huge vacuum cleaners in their beds, sucking prairie dogs up from their dens, but getting a truck like that up to the reservation would cost serious money. If the tribe were paying, then sure. But this was just Millie.

The ferret had cost eighty dollars, but the pet store guy said she had to buy a habitat too. And food, and bedding, and a how-to book.

Millie left all that in the car with the receipt, to return the next time she was in Kalispell. Her story was going to be that the ferret slipped out of the box and escaped her car when she stopped for gas.

Standing at the top of the hill, surrounded by holes, Frog watching from the porch, Millie let eighty dollars scamper away. It ducked immediately into one of the holes it was supposed to find.

Coyotes and hawks each went for prairie dogs, the websites said, but the prairie dog’s actual “assigned” predator was the ferret. To Millie, clicking deeper and deeper, they were long and slinky little lions, pretty much. The way this one had just rocketed down that hole, though, she was reconsidering. “Heat-seeking missile” was more like it.

“Dinner,” Millie said after it.

She brought a beer out for Frog, cracked her own bottle open. Frog watched the operation closely, with great interest, and then immediately cut the underside of her index finger when she tried to get her own beer open, like bottle caps were completely new to her.

Millie fetched a paper towel for the blood, opened the beer herself, then pretended not to notice when Frog coughed most of the foam of her first drink back up.

“Not much of a drinker, yeah?” Millie said.

“Did you name it first?” Frog asked, and, when Millie looked over, Frog added, “The ferret.”

Millie tried to process this.

“Killer,” she said.

Frog liked this. It almost made her laugh out loud, even.

Boarders, Millie said to herself. Maybe this was the lot of all landlords, to always be stymied by the weird people who move through. If she ever got another boarder, then she’d know.

Still, that night, shutting down the lights in the trailer, Millie stopped in the utility room. Its window showed two sides of the little camper—enough that she saw when Frog stepped out, the lights already off behind her.

For a long moment she stood, taking a reading on the night, it looked like, and then she . . . what?

She was stepping up onto the camper’s tongue, and affixing a little sort-of antenna to the top of the camper? With a magnetic base, Millie had to guess, as the camper top was rounded, and anything with enough weight would slide right off.

“Hunh,” she said.

A drifter from Rosebud, just making her way up to Glacier probably, travels with some sort of mobile hot spot antenna?

Could be, could be.

Also: “None of your business, old girl,” Millie said aloud, which was when the antenna-thing swept around to the window she was at, as if gathering her words.

Millie fell back into the folding table Arthur had built for her, and then—then—

A dish opened at the top of the antenna, as if listening even closer to the ruckus she was making in her own utility room, in her own trailer. It looked for all the world like one of those lizards or snakes Millie had seen on nature shows, its hood opening up to scare its prey still long enough to get a bite in.

Millie swallowed, the sound gushing in her ears, and she crawled out of the utility room, sure to keep below the level of the window.

At the same time, she wasn’t sure that hiding behind a wall really made any difference for this antenna.

Or whatever it was.

7.

The next morning, Frog’s coffee went cold when she never came over. Finally Millie had to heat it back up and knock on the door of the camper.

No answer.

She turned, studied the road—no cars—then all four corners of the horizon. Same nothing.

“Frog?” she called out, knocking again.

Telling herself this was a safety check, she lifted the camper door up and to the left corner, disengaging the flimsy lock.

Millie stepped up, blinking to try to get her eyes to adjust to the dimness.

It smelled antiseptic. And that aggressive little antenna was nowhere in sight.

“Frog?” Millie called out again, not quite as loud, and mostly just to cover herself, should Frog step up behind her.

Listen for the outhouse door, listen for the outhouse door, Millie told herself.

She also promised not to move anything.

But that didn’t mean she couldn’t take a casual look at what was already there, in plain view.

On the table of the tiny dinette with A + M carved into it were notepads and papers. This was Frog’s workspace. For whatever her “work” was.

Millie licked her lips, looked behind her, listened all around her, and leaned over.

Mostly it was sketches. Of . . . the prairie dog holes? A little map of them, and then some from different angles, down to the smallest little piece of dirt, as if each grain mattered.

Also, Frog had sketched the hawks. Not as they were dead, but as they’d been floating through the sky.

The freshest drawing, though, was of Millie herself, as she’d been at sundown yesterday. She was at the top of the hill, the cardboard box by her feet, and, humping across the ground in front of her, about to slither down into a hole, was the ferret.

Written under it, in quotation marks, was “KILLER.”

Millie backed out, shut the door as quietly as she could, and then sat on the camper’s fold-down steps until Frog emerged not from the outhouse, but from the other side of the trailer.

“Oh,” Millie said, trying not to show how startled she was.

“You should come see,” Frog said, her eyebrows V’d up in concern, or pre-apology.

It was the ferret. It was under the propane tank. Dead, but no skin broken, no blood. But it had obviously been crushed.

Millie looked back to the trailer, which was also the direction of the rise at the property line.

“I don’t . . . understand,” she said.

Frog shrugged like this made sense, like Millie not understanding made perfect sense.

Later that day, still shaken, Millie finally called Junior.

8.

Junior insisted that, if Fish and Wildlife asked—if anybody came asking—he wasn’t the one making this connection between Millie and two of his high school cousins.

The reason he couldn’t be involved was that each of his cousins had a rifle with them, and a glitter to their eyes.

Frog watched, and Millie could tell she was taking notes in her head, to copy down later in the camper’s dinette.

Millie and Frog sat on the porch with sandwiches and shooting earmuffs and the two boys set their sandbags up in the bed of their truck, parked at the end of the trailer. Every time a prairie dog popped its head up, they plugged it.

This went on for four hours. By Millie’s count, four hours was enough time to kill twenty-seven prairie dogs. They might have a language of sorts, but they didn’t use it to tell each other not to have a look-see at what all the commotion was topside.

“This should do it,” Millie said, having to speak loudly and clearly.

Frog neither agreed nor disagreed, just watched, flinching with each muted crack of the small rifles.

When the boys took a break in the cab of their truck, Millie and Frog lowered their earmuffs to their necks.

“The lead in the bullets embeds in the soil,” Frog said, just stating a fact, chucking her chin out to the prairie dog ghost town.

“What’s that antenna you put on the top of the camper?” Millie asked back.

“I just—I have to keep in communication,” Frog said, selecting her words carefully, it seemed.

“With Rosebud?”

“With Rosebud, yes,” Frog said.

“Derek Goes Back still winning all the cash down there?” Millie asked.

Again, Frog paused, as if consulting some inner directory. What she came back with was “Fancydancer. Fancydancers win cash prizes.”

“If they’re good, they do.”

“He still wins,” Frog said, satisfied with herself, then flinching when one of the boys fired from the open door of the truck, another prairie dog getting tossed over against the side of its hole.

No death chambers for you guys anymore, Millie said to it. To all of them.

What she didn’t say was that there was no Derek Goes Back, as far as she knew.

It made her tremble inside, close to the bone.

That night, after Frog was back in the camper, probably sketching the day’s events and waiting for Millie to go to sleep so she could “stay in communication,” Millie took a flashlight out to the prairie dog town, to inspect the carnage.

The coyotes were going to feast tonight, she knew. And the birds tomorrow. A stink like this was going to be might even draw a badger or a little black bear in.

The prairie dogs the boys had plugged were all halfway out of their holes, frozen in every manner of death. Mouths open or shut, eyes closed or open, little paws clenched or hidden.

The few who had been blown all the way out of the holes, they had their backsides matted with blood. Meaning . . . maybe those little rifles the boys had been shooting had been more powerful than they looked? Maybe they hit hard enough to force the prairie dogs’ insides out.

It was the only thing Millie had to explain their bloody backsides.

She shut the trailer down, locked the front door.

The next morning, a prairie dog poked its head up from a hole, stared into her soul, and she had the distinct sensation of eyes painted on a fingertip—which was stupid. This wasn’t kindergarten, this was real life.

And then another poked its curious little brown head up, and then another, and another.

Before, Millie’d been sure their cute little tails were wagging underground—with nerves, with anticipation, with possibility.

She wasn’t thinking that anymore.

9.

Nothing’s eating those dead ones,” Millie said to Frog after work.

It was a buffet out there. It should be Wild Kingdom.

“What have you tried so far?” Frog asked back. “To get rid of it, I mean.”

“It?”

“Them, them, sorry. What have you tried so far?”

Millie thought back, ticked her attempts off out loud: poison, burying, the ferret—which she admitted had been a terrible idea—and, finally, boys with rifles.

“That’s four,” Frog said, as if satisfied. Like ticking things off in her head as well.

“That is four, yes,” Millie said.

Millie could tell Frog heard the challenge in that.

“And how long do you have?”

“How long do I—?”

“Time frame, I mean,” Frog said, as if embarrassed. “Sorry.”

“Five weeks,” Millie said. Then, “It’s because a horse hurt its leg in one of their holes,” she added, suddenly feeling like she needed a better excuse than an obligation that existed only in her head, to pretend that her husband, runner-over of first graders, had at least been taking good care of the family land.

Frog’s fingertips were to Millie’s forearm, her eyes imploring, the corners of her mouth trying not to rise in anticipation.

“It started with a horse, you say?” Frog asked.

“‘It’?” Millie asked back, for the second time, now.

“This,” Frog said, sitting back into her creaky chair, and swept her hand out over . . . over the budding prairie dog town, yes. But, also, over all of the reservation spread out before them. Maybe all of Montana?

“Why are you here?” Millie asked, watching Frog’s face closely but trying not to be all “police detective in an interrogation.”

“Who wouldn’t want to be?” Frog said, her eyes coated with sudden tears. “But I’m talking too much, I shouldn’t—you need to do what you need to do, you don’t need me interfering. I shouldn’t interfere. I can’t, I mean.”

She giggled after this.

Millie didn’t.

Frog stood, nodding to herself that she was doing the right thing, here.

“How many things do I need to try to get rid of them?” Millie asked, having dialed back into this conversation for where it went off the rails, and, apparently, it was either just the right question or just the wrong one: Frog was watching the holes, which meant her face and neck were kind of silhouetted for Millie against the pale side of the camper, which in turn meant Millie could clearly see Frog’s throat sort of gulp this moment down.

And, even if that was just really nothing, was just Millie making something out of nothing, Frog’s hand on the side toward Millie, the hand down by her constant slacks, did definitely ball into a fist.

“Do you think you can?” Frog asked. “Get rid of . . . of them?”

“I’ll bait the coyotes in and build a fence around them, so if they want to eat, they have to dig those little guys up,” Millie said, making it up as she went. “I’ll hire one of those trucks to suck them up from the holes. I’ll have my cousin pour concrete down into their dens. I’ll—I’ll poison all the grass and plants, so there won’t be anything for them to eat, and they’ll have to keep moving, find somewhere else. I’ll park my car over there and leave it running with the tailpipe right over them.”

“Good, good,” Frog said.

“Who are you?” Millie asked. “Are you, you know, real, or you just here for . . . like a joke, to have some fun?”

“A joke?”

“Naapii,” Millie said. “Old Man—he’s always doing stupid stuff with ducks and everything else.”

“Trickster figure,” Frog said then in her flat voice, like identifying. No: like an out-loud computer printout.

“He messed with these guys once, even,” Millie said, pointing with her lips out at the holes.

“Tell me,” Frog said. Her whole body was a sponge.

“He just—he tricked them into the ashes of a fire for this stupid game they were playing, and after they were cooked, he ate some of them.”

“He ate them,” Frog repeated, like tasting that herself. “But—isn’t there a bobcat in this version of the story?”

“You have it too, down at Rosebud? Same story, I mean.”

“Its tail gets . . . cut off?” Frog went on, leading Millie.

“I think it’s a lynx.”

“We don’t have those.”

“They’re not just a Blackfeet thing, I don’t think.”

Frog shrugged, wasn’t going to make an issue of this.

“The important thing is the chopping off,” she said, doing her hands to show what she meant by “chopping,” as if that was the part Millie wasn’t getting.

“Of the tail,” Millie completed, using Frog’s own emphasis.

“Of whatever,” Frog said.

“Do you know those two kids’ names?” Millie said then. She hadn’t really thought Frog was from the old stories—all that was gone and done with already. But she might be from the story Millie was already in.

“The ones your husband Arthur ran over, you mean?”

“I told you his name?”

“That is his name, isn’t it?”

“I think you do know one of their names, at least,” Millie said. “I think—I think you’re an auntie, a cousin. I think you waited by that moose so you could use Junior to get out here. I think you had that flyer all the way from last summer.”

Frog didn’t gulp, didn’t nod. She just stood there, watching the holes.

“I’m not that aunt, that cousin,” she finally said.

“If you were, I would tell you that—that,” Millie started, saying this for the first time. “When Arthur came home that day, he drove his truck right out there where the holes are now, and he . . . he connected the two garden hoses, to wash the front bumper off.”

“Why two hoses?”

“Because it’s too far.”

“No, I mean,” Frog said, “why did he park all the way over there instead of over here?”

“Because he didn’t want what he was—what he was washing off on his family land, I think.”

“It’s all Blackfeet land, though.”

“But it’s not all Two Bears land,” Millie said.

“I’ve got to—” Frog said, and tilted her head at the camper.

Millie nodded, understood, sort of: Frog had enough intel that she couldn’t hold any more. Not until she drew all this out on paper.

At the bottom of the two steps Arthur had hammered together, though, Frog stopped, said, “What were their names? If it’s culturally okay to say them, I mean.”

“Now that they’re dead, you mean,” Millie finished for her.

Frog nodded.

Millie just turned away, watched the holes.

10.

Two days later, on the way into work, Millie stopped in the road and rolled her window down to see the dead horse on the side of the road.

It was the stout grey one with the game leg.

All the big rigs that blast through the reservation have those cowcatcher bumpers up front, and they don’t slow down for anything. Not even a horse that can’t get across the slick blacktop as fast as usual.

“I’m sorry,” Millie called out the window to the horse.

Instead of coming home for lunch like she usually did, she spent her whole hour doing internet research, clicking deeper and deeper into bulletin boards, and what they told her she needed was white gas.

Millie pulled up to the trailer at dusk with four jugs of it.

If these fumes were good enough for rattlesnake hunters in Texas, they would be good enough for a prison widow in Montana.

One with a boarder who Millie didn’t think was even really from Rosebud. Not inside, anyway.

Nothing was making sense.

Nothing had made sense since last summer, really.

In the last of the light, she saw that the holes were closer to the trailer now. It made her feel justified with extreme measures.

She squatted down to look under the porch, see if any prairie dogs had sneaked in. They hadn’t, but when she rotated on the balls of her feet, she could see right under the camper.

There was a mound there.

Millie watched it and watched it, then stood, went inside for a tuna fish sandwich with double mayonnaise.

Pouring concrete was probably better than gas fumes, she decided. But who would carry all those heavy bags? Where would she mix it? How many trips would it take in her car to get enough out here? If Arthur hadn’t burned his truck after washing it clean, it would probably just take one trip.

You can’t if your way through things, though, she knew.

She ate her sandwich at the kitchen table and watched dusk sift in over the holes.

The prairie dogs were poking up from their holes almost in a rhythm, like that carnival game with the moles, where you hit them with a club. They were poking up but never scurrying across to anywhere. That was probably why the hawks had died, Millie realized: they’d had to dive-bomb into the holes, which broke their wings.

And the ferret had just been a pet shop job, not a real wild predator. Of course it hadn’t made it even a single night on its own, without its habitat.

“Concrete next,” Millie told herself.

That was the ticket. After the prairie dogs stumbled up, groggy from the gas, she would pour concrete in, blocking their way. Then the hawks could come in, have a feast, finish this out for her.

So, this load of white gas, it would just be a test, Millie told herself. To see if she needed to make all those trips with her trunk weighed down with bags of ready-mix.

When she came out to carry the jugs over to the holes, though, Frog was already at her trunk. She’d opened it somehow, was studying the jugs.

“We’ll just put them out there,” Millie said, reaching in, hauling the first jug up and over, onto the bumper.

“What is it?” Frog asked.

“It’s to make them drunk,” Millie said.

Frog licked her lips. She was flushed, breathing faster than usual.

Millie considered the possibility that Frog was one of the prairie dogs who had prayed themself into two-legged form to defend the rest of them. It would explain a lot.

It was stupid, but Millie was used to stupid. After Arthur had done what he’d done, she’d spent night after night in the living room walking clockwise circles and then backing up counterclockwise in her own steps, trying to turn time backward, wind it to back before Arthur had been in such a hurry.

Compared to that, Frog being a secret prairie dog made a lot of sense, really.

She was a vegetarian Indian, wasn’t she? Was that even a real thing? And what was she doing all the way up here, really? Why was her rent money so crisp, her clothes so outdated, her questions so left field?

“I can’t,” Frog said, about helping carry the jugs.

“I know,” Millie said, and, when she grabbed the jug off the bumper, stabilizing that wrist with her other hand, Frog touched Millie’s forearm again. But this time it was a plea, it felt like.

“This isn’t—” she said, and turned around, spoke the rest with her back to Millie: “The fifth thing, the next thing, it’s . . . it’s not this. If you do this, I’m not sure I can, that I’ll ever . . .”

“Ever what?” Millie asked.

Frog leaned her head back and breathed in deep.

“Don’t listen to me, I’ve messed things up enough already,” she said, and moved two steps away, stood there, her back still to Millie, which Millie took as a sign that this white gas might finally be the thing that worked: if Frog’s fellow prairie dogs all died, then she would be stuck here on two legs, wouldn’t she?

Millie lugged the jugs out to the holes, for the morning. The reason she left them there was to give the prairie dogs a preview of what was coming, and to give them a chance to pack up if they wanted, leave on their own.

But also, now that she was thinking about it, since Frog wouldn’t go out there, then the white gas would be safe, too, wouldn’t it?

This was almost over now.

It had to be.

11.

For the first time Millie knew of, the lights in the camper stayed on all night. Or, all of the night she was awake to check on them. What she was waiting for was Frog sticking that little antenna on the roof. But that moment never came. And then, just before sunup, the windows over there were still pale yellow.

Millie wanted to unplug the extension cord then plug it back in fast, to see if Frog would open her door to check the connection—see if a prairie dog was gnawing a cable. Instead she carried a cup of coffee across. Her story was going to be that the thermos was soaking in the sink, and the coffee would cool too fast in the mug. Thus this hand-delivery. Who could complain about hand-delivered coffee at dawn?

She knocked, knocked again, then called and called louder, even knocked on the window.

Finally she lifted the door up and over, then pulled it out delicately, gingerly.

Frog wasn’t in there, but . . . there was a voice coming from . . . the dinette table, yeah. A hockey-puck-looking thing sitting there.

It was mumbling.

Millie stared at it and stared at it, the whole time falling back through her life, through everything she’d read in a magazine or seen on a screen, trying to make this make sense.

The mumbling was no language she could understand.

Slowly, as if being careful with her exit could be enough of an apology that this wouldn’t have to be happening, she backed out, balanced the coffee on the fold-down step, and walked a circle around the camper, like trying to circumscribe this wrongness, keep it contained to this one place only.

On her circuit around, though, she couldn’t not see the little antenna-thing magneted to the back side of the camper now. Like it—or Frog—had learned a lesson about being somewhere it could be caught out in the open.

It had the same pebbly texture as the hockey puck inside, meaning they were probably talking to each other.

Millie called out to Frog again, her voice unsteadier than she liked—it wanted to ramp up into a scream, or collapse into sobs—and when there was no answer, she stepped up onto the tongue of the camper and tugged the antenna off, its magnetic base somehow not actually magnetic, even though this was definitely metal it was sticking to, and a magnet was the only thing that made anything close to sense.

Holding the antenna away from her, Millie tried to hear the mumbling from the dinette, to see if this was changing it any, but the door was all the way on the other side from her.

This had to be doing something, though.

Millie pushed up hard from the tongue, reached as high as she could, and planted the stubby little antenna on top of the camper, where she imagined it really wanted to be, for better service, or signal—connection. Whatever it needed to reach, it had to be able to reach it better from higher up, right?

The bad part about jumping, of course, was the falling right after.

Millie tried to hold on to the side of the camper, but it was smooth.

Her legs didn’t take the impact well, sent her sprawling. But: nothing broken, nothing sprained. Just an old woman, getting jarred again by life. Or whatever this was.

When Millie went back inside, the words coming out of the hockey puck still didn’t mean anything.

She stepped in and up, stood at the table as if chastising this hockey puck for not following the rules. It just mumbled on.

“You,” Millie said down to it, and touched it lightly with the pad of her index finger.

Without breaking stride or even taking a breath, the words shifted into her head and it was—Uncle Chester was talking to her? In the Blackfeet he’d been falling back into more and more lately.

Millie only knew snatches of phrases anymore, though.

She didn’t jerk her finger back. Just gasped, her heart spilling its next two minutes of beats all at once, it felt like.

Slowly, the words going back and forth from Blackfeet to English for a few sentences, the mumbling adjusted itself so Millie could understand it. And then it plugged deeper into her head, it felt like, wasn’t even language at all—was going around language.

“Oh,” Millie said, the fingertips of her left hand lightly touching the hollow of her chest.

She’d never been spoken to like this. Maybe in the crib, she supposed. Maybe when she’d been in the hospital, just coming up from anesthetics, and woke to Arthur telling her stories about him and his brothers when they were kids.

It was a connection so deep that it felt spiritual, not technological.

Millie pushed her right index finger down harder on that puck, not wanting to let this go.

She was making sense of this mumble now, wasn’t she?

It was a repeat transmission sort of thing, which made Millie remember submarine movies. The message was that DZ49A was to abort and return, abort and return, that an aberration had been detected and was magnifying out of control.

Millie swallowed, looked behind her all at once, sure Frog was going to be standing there, and that movement pulled her finger away from contact with the hockey puck. The words garbled again, filling the camper with their mumble.

Abort what? Return where?

Millie looked around the camper, as if “where” might be obvious.

What she finally saw instead was the latest scattered sketches Frog had been making.

There were roughed-in drawings of all the attempts Millie had made to get rid of the prairie dogs, but clipped to each one was a smaller card, with that same scene—the ferret, the two boys with their rifles—only these cards were preprinted. What Frog had been sketching, then, was her firsthand witnessing of Millie’s attempts? The way people will do rubbings of headstones in graveyards, when they could just be snapping a picture instead?

Slowly, not really wanting to, Millie picked up the card with the two boys, and studied it closer.

In the card, they each had their hair done in three thin, stubby braids, like the old-time Blackfeet. When they’d been here shooting, though, they’d been buzz cut for basketball. So . . . so it was like whoever made the card, whoever drew it, they’d known there were two high school boys, and that they were Blackfeet, but they’d . . . had to guess, about the hair? Well, consult the books, then guess from that.

Millie stepped back, didn’t want to touch any more of this, didn’t want to have to know it. It didn’t make sense, it couldn’t make sense.

But—no.

Yes, though.

If there were cards, preprinted cards, then . . . she shuffled through.

Her next attempt—they were numbered—wasn’t white gas, it was a large water tank on a trailer, its hose directed down into the holes.

“That would work . . .” Millie said out loud. And water wouldn’t even leave the land sick and poisoned like this white gas might.

Why hadn’t she thought of that?

Was it . . . had she not thought of it because Frog had been drinking coffee with her, trying just to watch but accidentally probably doing more? Nudging Millie’s thought processes this way instead of that?

“No,” Millie said, and took another step back, to leave this camper forever, but her foot went straight through the floor. It didn’t stop at the ground, either, but stabbed down into the new prairie dog hole that had opened up under the camper.

Millie screamed, jerked her foot back hard enough to cut her knee on the ragged tear in the floor.

It was already ringed in blood, though. Dried blood. Crusted blood. And—no. No no no.

At the edge of the hole, like it had been trying to hold on, not get pulled down, was a cleanly cut-off hand, the stump congealed over.

A woman’s hand. Frog’s.

Something had come up from the ground, punched through the bottom of the camper, and . . . and pulled her back through, down with it. The hole was too small for a full-grown person, but with enough force—

Millie shook her head no. No no no.

Frog hadn’t aborted, she hadn’t returned.

She was part of it now, though. Part of, to her, history.

“This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen, though,” Millie said. According to the cards, she was supposed to be getting a water truck out here next, right? And then more and more foolish things, dumb attempts.

None of them work, though, that’s the thing.

Instead, all of them, they’re—they’re like a formula, like ingredients. The perfect ingredients for . . . for what?

Millie stepped back from the hole, reached for a cabinet handle to keep from getting pulled in too, and that was when she saw the butcher paper taped to the rounded ceiling.

And what was drawn on that butcher paper.

12.

Sitting in her idling car, Millie knew now why Frog had been in the same slacks every day. In the future—this was how it always was in movies—fashion had fallen away, and everybody wore the same uniform, jumpsuit, whatever.

The future is where Frog had to be from, right?

How else to explain the talking hockey puck, the radar dish antenna, the preprinted cards about things that hadn’t happened yet?

As for why Frog had come back, it was . . . she’d come back because if you could go back and see the three-days-long herds of buffalo from a train, then you’d do that, wouldn’t you? Or if cavemen were your thing, or Greek stuff, or Shakespeare’s plays, or the American Revolution.

These prairie dog holes were Frog’s Greek stuff, her cavemen, her buffalo herd that went forever.

Drawn on the butcher paper Millie had pulled down from the camper’s ceiling, the butcher paper that was now caught on some grass but would blow down into the coulee soon enough, was what Millie had never considered about her prairie dogs: that the reason they stood in their holes instead of by them, the reason they never scurried from here to there for grass seeds or social hour, was that they couldn’t.

Each individual prairie dog, according to Frog’s sketch, was the end of a tentacle.

This was why all of those prairie dogs the boys shot had bloody backsides. They’d each been torn off. But, as soon as they were, another pushed up, like the whole tentacle was made of prairie dogs. Or, like this, this thing, it knew it was still young and vulnerable, and needed to keep up appearances, not draw attention. But it had to eat, and breathe, or maybe get sunlight. So: prairie dogs.

And it suffered no hawks, no ferrets, and what it especially didn’t tolerate, going by the hole in the floor of the camper, was people knowing about it. People sketching it out on butcher paper.

It was a good rendering too, Millie guessed. Frog had really done it with attention, and love: a cutaway showing this thing from the side, its many tentacles branching up to the surface.

There was no cyclops eye or huge parrot beak where all the tentacles met, either, as Millie guessed she would have expected, if a giant smart monster living underground had even been in the realm of stuff she could expect. At the center there was just a gooey, shifting mass, conforming to the cavern it had wriggled into underground. Or: that it had made? chewed? carved out with acid, or some X-Files power?

But no, Millie realized—its power wasn’t any of that. It was that it could turn its tentacles into prairie dogs, because prairie dogs’ digging teeth and digging claws could make this thing’s chamber down there bigger and bigger. Each of those tentacles was a conveyor belt, moving mouthful after mouthful of soil up to the surface, making more room down below, so the thing down there could spread out more and more, filling every nook, every cranny.

Maybe it had been asleep since whenever it crash-landed here, back in dinosaur times or whenever, and it took all the way until now for some prairie dog to dig down too deep, gift some of its DNA to this shapeless thing, starting this whole process.

Which, Millie imagined, was going to be a funny reason for the world to end: an adventurous prairie dog.

But it would take a while, too, she imagined. It didn’t grow fast, wasn’t going to spread everywhere overnight. No, judging by the holes it was making to breathe through or whatever, it spread about as fast as grass.

Meaning: it would be years before it got big enough to swallow everything.

And somewhere in there? Somewhere in that stretch of time, it would get big enough to get worshipped, probably. By people with hockey-puck technology. By people who could shunt tourists or scientists back in time, to document their genesis. Or, just to stand close to it, in wonder.

And of course it would happen here, on Blackfeet land, right? Not as payback for all the shit, all the history, that doesn’t matter, is just a speck blowing past, but because, right over there in Glacier is the Backbone of the World, and right up north is Chief Mountain, meaning right where Arthur’s land is, right here where the wild horses and spooky elk clamber up from the coulee, Millie’s between those two holy places.

This is where it starts, yes, she knew all at once.

Millie dropped the car into reverse, her foot on the brake.

She finally didn’t back up, though.

In her head she was walking backwards circles again, and making wishes.

No: making deals.

She wasn’t supposed to have thought of the white gas, was she? She wasn’t supposed to have been running internet searches that day, she was supposed to have come back to the trailer for lunch by herself. But, because Frog had been there, and might use up some of Millie’s sixty minutes, she’d stayed at her desk instead, and that was the day that click opened up under her mouse, which opened another page and another page, finally landing her at “white gas.”

It was messing everything up now, though. It was making those preprinted cards wrong.

So, even if Frog had wanted to abort, to return, she wouldn’t have had anywhere to go back to, would she? Because the future was already changing, way ahead of her. Ahead of them both.

Millie turned the car off.

13.

The next morning, Millie looked through the steam of her coffee at the holes that had opened up in her life.

The coffee was strong and good.

Like all Indians, she’d always imagined what it might have been like to live two hundred years ago. Cold, she decided. And probably hungry sometimes. And also, there wouldn’t have been coffee.

She was good right here, thanks.

Now that she understood better what was going on, she could tell that these prairie dogs still standing up from their holes, they were kind of waving back and forth, just slightly—exactly how you wouldn’t, if standing on a little shelf—and they were also gulping air in, to pass down and down into the ground.

Overnight, six or seven more holes had opened up. Probably because now it knew that she knew.

And Millie had checked: none of those holes were under the porch. Yet. There could be some under the trailer, she figured, back there behind the skirt, but she didn’t think so.

The jugs of white gas were still out there at the top of the rise, too. This thing could pull hawks from the sky when no one was looking and it could fling ferrets all the way over the trailer, but white gas was its kryptonite. Probably because it took away the oxygen.

Millie was considering this from every angle.

In the old stories, Naapii never did the right thing first—only when pushed, only when everything else went bad. He only ever did the right thing when he was forced to do the right thing.

Was this spot on the reservation where all of those stories started? Had the old-time Blackfeet figured out what was down there, and used it, or—or did it used to come up top, have adventures with ducks and berries? And did the back-then Indians figure out how to keep it from spreading out, taking over everything?

Maybe it had only retreated underground when oil drilling had come to Montana, Millie thought. It was funny that something that lived underground would be allergic to something else from underground.

Life’s stupid that way, though.

“Can you tell me?” Millie said out to it.

As one, every prairie dog turned to her, fixed her in a sea of unblinking black eyes, not a whisker twitching.

“You can hear me at least,” Millie said.

The ground didn’t quake in reply.

“You have to, I mean,” Millie said, rising, setting her half-full mug up on the two-by-four railing.

Inside, the phone was ringing. It was because she was late to work. Or maybe it was Arthur’s relatives, calling to give her a week to move out instead of until the end of the month, because without Arthur here, why was she?

It didn’t matter.

Millie stepped down from the porch, walked out onto what she now knew wasn’t just a rise, but the top of a shell. The crust hiding the future.

She didn’t care about Frog’s world, though—that future was already gone, was more gone with each step Millie took.

The world Millie cared about was her own.

She walked right to where she thought the property line must be, turned around and faced the trailer, the road. To her left was the sharp drop into the coulee, and to her right, three miles of grassland, and then town.

Behind her was the past, and before her was her future.

“Stop me if you can,” she said then, not loud at all, because she knew for certain that every sound was funneling into these holes, was draining down to that filled-up chamber down there.

And she picked up the nearest jug.

All around her, the prairie dogs stood up higher from their holes, and then higher than they should be able to, so they were wavering on tentacle stalks, their faces at Millie’s eye level.

Millie’s face went cold. Her breath got deeper. Her hand on the jug shook, but she didn’t let the jug handle go.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it, her eyes crying a bit in spite of her telling them not to.

She screwed the cap off, had to turn away from the harsh fumes billowing up.

All along the tentacle stalks now, spaced regularly every ten inches or so, little black marbles appeared: prairie dog eyes, for prairie dogs not quite born yet, but waiting their turn.

They were getting themselves ready for this violence that was about to happen. That they could already taste on the air, seeping up out of the jug, invisible.

“Their names were Jeremiah and Natasha,” Millie said, her voice unsteady, and she sloshed a bit of the white gas out. “Jeremiah and Natasha,” she said again, and sloshed more gas out.

It didn’t fizz like acid on the crust of dirt, and it didn’t send up tendrils of dangerous smoke.

But the stalks of prairie dogs felt it.

Slowly, all the tentacles withdrew into their holes, became individual prairie dogs watching her again. And then those prairie dogs slipped under as well.

Millie shook her head no, but she stepped over to the closest hole, the first hole she’d seen that first day, and she was just tilting the jug over into it when something wet and bulgy was pushing up.

Millie gasped, stepped back, dropped the jug, and then felt down to right it and screw the cap back on.

The wet and bulgy thing coming up was shot through with red veins, and the hole had to crumble out to allow it through.

It was a horse head.

The stout grey that had cut its leg in the hole. That had left some of its blood behind—its DNA. The horse that was dead in the ditch on the way into Browning.

But it was just a horse head. And the horse was suffocating in that slimy caul.

Millie crawled to it, pulled at the wet sheath over the horse head, but it was too tough. Finally she had to bite, rip it with her teeth enough to give her fingers something to grab.

She pulled the caul down like peeling a wet jacket from a kid.

The horse head shook back and forth with desperation, and then a single foreleg stabbed up through the dirt, planted a hoof right by Millie’s leg, almost crushing her foot.

She scrabbled back, gave the horse enough room to fight its way up from this wider and wider hole.

It stood, shook its afterbirth off.

Its black mane was pasted to its neck, and its eyes were wheeling with terror, but it was alive, it was here.

“You!” Millie said, and ran forward, hugged the horse’s wet neck. Its muscles were rippling, its skin jumping, but it let her hold on, and cry into it.

And then, when the horse whinnied, Millie looked behind her.

Two of the other holes had birthed up wet, veiny sacks.

She rushed to the first one, bit and tore the caul off, and then got the other one off as well.

Jeremiah and Natasha stood up, looking around in wonder, their eyes blinking too fast, their lips unsure.

This was where Arthur had washed their blood off his truck, wasn’t it?

Millie laughed, hugged both children to her at once, and only finally let them go to lift them onto the horse’s back.

When the horse just stood there, awaiting instructions—had it ever even known a saddle?—Millie finally slapped its rump. It jerked forward, Natasha instinctually grabbing on to the mane, Jeremiah grabbing on to her to keep from sliding off, and like that, they cantered off.

Right out into the road, not a single one of them looking both ways first.

“Oh,” Millie said, and, in a rush of warmth up and down her body, understood: the horse didn’t remember getting hit by a big truck. These two kids didn’t remember Arthur having hit them by the school bus that day.

They were all from before those very last moments.

Millie smiled, her heart a rabbit in her chest. A bird, trying to flutter away.

For the first time in years, she ran, her slip-ons falling off partway to the trailer.

When she came back out, she was holding Arthur’s old coffee mug.

The one she’d still never washed. The one that still had his DNA on it.

Reverently, cupping it in both hands, she deposited it by one of the holes and stepped back.

When nothing was happening, she finally had to lift one of the jugs again. She didn’t have to tilt it over a hole. Just holding it was enough, apparently.

A prairie dog rose up from the hole just high enough for its small hands to take the mug. Then it slipped back down into the darkness.

“Thank you,” Millie said, and turned away to let this happen.

A quarter mile down the blacktop, that grey was clopping along, Jeremiah and Natasha bouncing on its back.

Halfway through Browning, there was going to be a parade of people walking behind it, Millie knew.

The good days were here again.

Almost.

After two hours of waiting, Millie finally collected the jugs, set them all up on the porch one at a time—they were heavy—and then she went inside, just to lie down for a bit. And then for just a little bit more.

Somewhere in there, the screen door opened and shut, and then footsteps were moving heavy across the living room floor, and then—Millie could hardly contain herself—the bed creaked with the weight of another body lying down beside her, alongside her.

Without looking, she felt back with her hand, interlaced her fingers with other fingers, and she drew that hand across her side, held it close to her heart.

No, she wasn’t moving out at the end of the month, thank you.

This was her home.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Robert Hall for some help with language and pronunciation—really, Robert’s helped with a lot of my books and stories. If language stuff is right, it’s because of him. When it’s wrong, that’s me. Thanks to Jeff VanderMeer, for inviting me here. And, just for being one of the good people in the field. Jeff leaves the door open behind him, I mean. Thanks to Kjersti Egerdahl for shepherding this story through its many, many stages. It’s good to work with professionals. The product’s always better. And thanks to Charley Flyte for bringing Millie’s voice alive. This story couldn’t have had a better reader. And thanks as well to all the alone prairie dogs I pedal past on the side of the road. I loop back to you guys, yeah? Because: you’re standing there waiting for your partner to peel up off the blacktop, come back to you, I know. I apologize to you for cars, for people, for roads, and I know it’s useless, that doesn’t bring your dead back. But I don’t know what else to say, either. How to explain what’s just happened. So, I write stories. On the page, I can get things close to making sense, sometimes, if I’m lucky. But I always think about you little guys, standing on the side of the road like you do, waiting. I’m sorry. I wish the world were better for you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo courtesy of the author

Stephen Graham Jones is the New York Times bestselling author of My Heart is a Chainsaw, The Only Good Indians, and Mongrels, among others. He is the recipient of the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award; the LA Times Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction; three Bram Stoker Awards; and two Shirley Jackson Awards, among many others.