Chapter 31

Valerie Boren-Odell, 1990

Risking his life to save that of another is something that every ranger must be ready to do.

—Horace Albright, the first superintendent of Yellowstone National Park and the second director of the National Park Service, 1928.

Picking my way up and down slopes, around rock outcroppings and deadwood by flashlight and a fingernail moon, I'm acutely aware that our circumstances could change in a heartbeat. We might be walking into trouble, or trouble could be one step behind us. If Braden and Rachel have evidence stockpiled at their camp, they are in danger, and so are we. No one will be safe until this thing is made public. Maybe not even then.

Alton Parker is a big man in this county. He is on hand-shaking, shoulder-slapping terms with everyone important, and it looks like at least some of his business dealings are much shadier than I'd imagined. Who are his cohorts? Who's aware of this but looks the other way? Anyone I've worked with? Any of the people who watched as Edwin was loaded into an ambulance? Did they know?

I ponder the depth of it downslope after upslope after water crossing, amid star-blanketed meadows, over firefly-lit ridges. Parker beat me at this game the last go-round. He thinks he's beaten me for good. We put the Feds in their place, he's telling himself. Lady ranger, she'll know better than to mess with ol' Alton Parker.

If evidence exists, I want it. I'll do almost anything, go anywhere to get it.

Even in the dark, I've begun to recognize territory from the missing person's search for Braden. He was right under our noses all along. I want to wring his neck and congratulate him at the same time. As he leads us along a softly trickling creek, smoke tinges the air, the smell of a cookfire being tended nearby.

Curtis glances back at me, points upward. His senses, like mine, are on high alert.

We turn the corner, and the camp is exactly where I thought it might be. Firelight casts flickering shadows on the rock formation above, drawing a cratered face. I already know what we'll find after we pass through the underbrush and boulders ahead—the remains of an old dugout, shielded by what's left of a stacked-stone wall built in some long-ago time. We were here during our search. We saw the evidence of recent habitation. Braden and Rachel must have been moving their hideout from place to place to avoid being found.

Braden and Rachel…and whoever is tending the fire in that camp.

Braden whistles a nightjar's call. The person in the camp whistles in return.

Curtis visibly tenses. I do the same, think, We're ready.

But neither of us could be ready for what awaits when the campsite comes into view. By the fire, a woman sits cross-legged on a woven straw mat, her body shrouded in a colorful blanket. She turns silently to watch us, the fire's glow outlining the contours of a face that is old, but not ancient. Her cheeks are still fleshy and round, her lips full. Her dark eyes reflect the dancing light as she studies us. She projects no apprehension upon seeing our radios, uniforms, handguns.

On the whole, what I feel from her is an unexplainable sense of…peace. She seems as if she has grown from the forest itself and has always been in this place. I know that's not the case, and in the moment, I can't imagine how she could have gotten here, except that these kids must know an easier way in.

"Come," she says. Her voice is both commanding and gentle, compelling in a way I can't explain. "I've been wondering about you."

"Mrs. Blackwell?" I ask. But I've seen photos of Sydney and Braden's grandmother. She's a tall, stern-looking woman with a gray braid and a cowboy hat, robust even in her old age. The sort of woman who would wear a nickname like Budgie as a badge of honor.

This tiny, soft-spoken sprite in the blanket shawl can't be her. When she answers, her voice carries a hint of an accent I can't place. "Budgie is safe with Hazel now."

"With…Hazel? Hazel Rusk?" My mind reaches for connections. "That name is on the land where the loggers came in. By the looks of things, I'm assuming they didn't have permission to cut the timber."

"No, of course. It is a terribly wrong situation. I only came to see about it yesterday."

"So…then you are a relative of Hazel Rusk's?"

"Yes and no. This depends on which Hazel you mean."

My exhausted legs groan in protest as I squat on my bootheels. I'm not in the mood for riddles.

"Sit," the woman says. Then she motions to Curtis, as well. "Hattak himitta…binili."

Chuckling under his breath, he moves to settle himself by the fire.

"I apologize. My Choctaw is not very good," the old woman says to him. "Many years I've been away. Very far away. But you are young to me. You are all himitta, young. And this is a battle for the young, this business of the trees. I left here so long ago, when I was not even your age. But I suppose, had an old woman called me young then, I would have laughed, too. I could have called you handsome, instead, but I don't remember the word. I left here so long ago. My Choctaw is not good."

Curtis shakes his head, seeming almost embarrassed. "My Choctaw isn't good, either. But young is fine. I like it better every year."

"Ha! Wait until you are my age!" She smiles serenely, her gaze resting on the fire. For a moment, she seems mesmerized. "I knew a very old man here once. He told stories and sang songs from the War between the States. That was his war. I grew older, and I had my war. These trees, this is your war, and their war." She indicates Braden and Rachel, who are busy digging up a metal canister of the sort campers use to cache food and supplies. "But my sisters would never forgive me if I had failed to come back for the fight."

"So…Hazel Rusk is your sister?" I take out my notepad and pen, turn to a blank page.

"Yes…and no."

"But she is a relative?"

"That is a long tale." Her eyes gather the flickering light, direct it my way. "Let these young people show what they have found—they're very clever soldiers—and then, if you still have an ear for it, I'll tell you my story…and the story of this place."

"At this point, I think we're here until morning," Curtis interjects.

I start to protest, but the truth is he's right. Extracting two teenagers and an elderly woman from the woods, while making sure we aren't ambushed, will be more feasible in the daylight. Aside from that, I want to hear this woman's story. All of it.

"I'll divide up the stew." She reaches for a camp pot suspended over the fire. "I've brought my wooden spoon. Dewey carved it from a branch all those years ago, right in this very place, but I have cooked with it in many places. He was sometimes a bad boy, that Dewey, but he carved a good spoon."

Braden and Rachel beckon us into the remains of the rock shelter, where their sleeping bags lie atop a lightweight rain tarp. There they open the cache can, begin setting out photos, handwritten notes, diagrams of the logging camp, the throughways.

"We always kept the stash buried here," Braden explains, his face shockingly boyish. "That way if we got caught, they wouldn't have all our evidence, you know? Sydney could find her way to this place if she needed to. Grandma Budgie used to bring us a lot."

"Sydney sent me here looking for you," I say, astounded by the mass of documentation Braden and Rachel have collected. "But she didn't tell me to look for anything else."

"If Sydney came herself, she would've found it. My sister and me have our signs. We used to play a treasure-hunt game, bury stuff, and give each other clues to find it. But Sydney was supposed to stay at Mrs. Wambles's place and keep her ears open and her mouth shut unless she knew for sure I was out of commission. Sydney is tough as a mule, but she's as stubborn, too, and she talks too much. That's why I told her, ‘If people ask you questions, just make stuff up.' It's also why I didn't tell her everything about what Rachel and I were really into out here."

"She knew enough to be scared to death for you," I point out. "She hitchhiked to my house in the middle of the night, looking for help."

Worry etches Braden's features, aging them. "She wasn't supposed to end up involved in it all. I thought Parker would just keep hunting me, but he was looking for me in the end of the park where I left the car, and that's not where Rachel and I were operating from. The car was a decoy."

"This isn't a game," I say. "Parker took your sister from Mrs. Wambles's place and tried to strong-arm the details out of her." I'm still struggling to figure out the details myself. How have Braden and Rachel managed all of this? The photos in their cache were shot with a good zoom lens, sometimes close enough that people's faces are recognizable. These two teenagers are incredibly lucky they didn't get caught.

While I'm awed by their work, I'm also frustrated. "What are you doing out here? Why didn't you come to the Park Service with this?"

A silent debate passes between Braden and Rachel. They frown at one another. He inclines his head, she nods.

"Because of Grandma Budgie," Braden answers when he turns our way again. "I knew Mama was lying in the note she left about Grandma Budgie having a stroke and about taking her to the City of Faith in Tulsa. When I called Rachel, she was like, ‘Seriously? That hospital's closed down.'?"

Pulling off her ball cap and unleashing a bedraggled blond ponytail, Rachel jumps in eagerly. "I told him, ‘Braden, that witch of a mother of yours is full of crap. She's just trying to get money again.' And then I thought, what if she's trying to get all the money, you know? Like, forever? But Braden said that his Grandma Budgie's last will leaves everything to him and Sydney."

Curtis turns his attention from the pictures. "Did Jade know that?"

"Everybody knows. It's not any secret." Braden combs a hand through his thick red hair, sags like he's being forced to recount embarrassing family details in the principal's office. "Every time Mama would come around, Grandma Budgie would tell her if she'd get her life together, things could be different. Mama would do it for a while, then she'd leave again and stuff would be missing from our house. A few months back, Mama knocked on the door all banged up, she said from a car wreck. We hadn't seen her in…maybe four years? Grandma Budgie told her, ‘Jade, this is the last time. I'm too old for this and so are you. These kids need a mother.'?"

Braden snatches a piece of bark off the ground, shreds it in his lap, watches the splinters fall. "Mama told us she was starting into AA meetings and she'd found a job at a nursing home down in Hugo. Her and my grandma would sit up in the evenings and drink tea and talk about the ranch, and buying some new furniture, making the kitchen modern and stuff like that. They decided to have Parker fix the barn and the pond dam. Sydney was happy, and I was glad my grandma and Sydney wouldn't be alone when I left for college or the military. We all got to believing it, you know?"

Braden's mouth trembles almost imperceptibly. He swallows hard before speaking again. "It was dumb. Sydney is just a kid and Grandma Budgie's old, but I knew better. I could tell something was up with Mama. She kept coming home later and later after her shifts, and she'd be in a weird giggly mood. Sometimes I'd walk into the kitchen and catch her on the phone, and she'd hang up real quick and say, ‘Oh, that was just work.' I never should've left the house that night I went to meet Rachel."

"You didn't know, Braden." Rachel's hand finds his. "Everybody wants to love their own mama. Jade's the one who did wrong. Not you."

Braden stiffens, resisting absolution. The weight of an entire family rests on his seventeen-year-old shoulders. "Mama was just looking for a chance to get my grandma out of the house, and that night I was gone, she went for it. She got drugs from the nursing home or somewhere, and she tricked Grandma Budgie into taking some, and she left us a note about going to the City of Faith. Then Parker came by later, saying all this stuff about ‘Oh, Jade took such good care of my poor old mama at the nursing home. I owe Jade big time for that. She and Budgie are like family to me now. I promised I'd be here for you kids if you ever needed it.'?"

I scribble notes furiously by the dim light of a camping lantern. "So he wanted you two to go with him, and you agreed, hoping to find your grandmother?"

"Parker wasn't taking no for an answer." Braden's reply comes through clenched teeth. "He had a paper signed by my grandma. He said he didn't want us to be scared or worried, and it was all legal. Sydney was crying and having a fit. I dragged her off to the bedroom and made her pack a suitcase and said, ‘If we're going to get Grandma Budgie back home, this is what we've gotta do. We have to go along with it.' I asked Parker if I could grab my fishing stuff out of the barn, and I called Rachel from the barn phone and told her what was going on."

"That's when we started trying to figure it all out." Rachel shifts a few photos closer to the lamp. "Braden told Parker he wanted to quit school and go to work for Parker Construction to make money for an apartment, and I came down here and got busy driving around towns and campgrounds, and hospitals, and nursing homes, looking for the Chevy Suburban that Jade left the ranch in when she took Miss Budgie away."

I stop writing, look at Curtis. "The hotel in Poteau," he says.

"That's why you were there," I add.

"Not at first," Rachel replies. "I tried Antlers, then Hugo. No luck. Jade was really laying low, but I figured if she showed up anyplace, she'd be looking to party. I ended up in Poteau after I started going to bars at night."

Curtis coughs like he's got gristle stuck in his throat. There are some rough backwoods hangouts in the area. This college girl doesn't belong in any of them.

Rachel treats him to a death stare. "I'm eighteen. I can't buy drinks, but I'm legal to get in."

"There's legal…and there's just not a good idea," Curtis remarks.

"I can take care of myself. And I did spot Jade, so it worked." The response comes with a haughty chin wag. Rachel will not be cowed. "So, I'm in this middle-of-nowhere dive, and there she is, living it up with some guy. They leave the bar in a brand-new Ford F-150, so I follow them all the way back to a junky little duplex across the street from that hotel in Poteau. Next day, the guy leaves in a log-hauler truck, and later on, I follow Jade to a food drive-through, then to a big old white house outside town. When she leaves, I drive back past the old house, ask some dude down the road about that place on the corner. He tells me the lady there runs an adult-care home. So I go knock on the place's door, say, ‘My car broke down. Can I use your phone?' They won't let me in. After that, I follow Jade a few more times. Every day, morning and evening…to that same house with a takeout meal."

"To feed my grandmother more drugs, so she wouldn't have a clue where she was," Braden adds.

My alarm level ratchets up. "Is your grandmother safe now?"

"Yes, ma'am, but it took my great-aunt and a lawyer to get her out of that place, day before yesterday. The owner said Mama had checked Grandma Budgie in with all the right paperwork, and they had copies in their files. But our lawyer put the fear of God in those people and they wheeled Grandma Budgie to the door and we left."

"Why didn't you call the police?" I demand again. "County sheriff? DHS? Somebody? When we were combing tens of thousands of acres looking for you, why didn't you come to us?"

Braden's countenance turns ominous. "Parker knows everyone. You cross him, you're likely to wind up under the asphalt of some new driveway. He wanted the timber from my family's land, and he needed us out of the way."

I stare at my notepad, read, He needed us out of the way…

Parker was after a small fortune in timber. And the parcel allowed hidden access to federal land, a bonus opportunity too lucrative to ignore.

"Parker arranged it all. Jade was his accomplice," I whisper. Jade, who was shacked up with a log truck driver. Jade, who was suddenly cruising in a new Ford pickup. Jade, who didn't stand to gain by inheritance, but who could cash in by helping to steal a half million dollars or more in timber. "So your grandmother is the one who looks after that land? But it belongs to a family member?"

"It's a long story. We always took care of that land, so I thought it was Grandma Budgie's. I didn't know the whole truth till my great-aunt came down from Tulsa to help us get Grandma Budgie to someplace safe." Peering over the tumbledown wall, Braden indicates the woman in the shawl. "She can tell you."

Reluctantly, we leave the evidence cache and return to the fireside as Braden apologizes for the trouble he's caused and for the fact that Parker's men shot at Edwin's patrol horse. "We didn't mean anything like that to happen. We just…we had to get proof on Parker—pictures of him or his business trucks at the logging site. I crossed him, you know? The only way to keep us all safe was to have proof. No telling how many people he does this stuff to. Old folks or people who've got land they don't live on…Parker's crew comes in, takes their timber, and gets out. The trucks and equipment he uses are all painted over."

"The spray tanker that hit the ditch on Holson Valley Road," I mutter. "I knew something was off. Nobody needs that many gallons of glyphosate to spray weeds for a landscaping business." I'm angry to the core of my being. Incensed. I want to be back at my desk with the photo evidence, and on the phone bringing back that ISB special agent, the FBI, OSBI, and every other applicable means of breaking this thing wide open. Aside from state and local, we can go after Parker on the federal level, where he doesn't have political friends to rely on.

Potential charges spin through my head as the old woman offers stew in wax paper coffee cups, which she regards with a disdainful frown. "These things you use and then toss in the rubbish. It is very bad, don't you think? When I was small, if we found a tin can, we made a cooking pot, or a bowl, or a bucket to gather berries, or a toy to play in the dirt. If a bit of sweet syrup was left in the can, we ate it. If we had a glass jar, we filled it with fireflies to create a lantern. Now, people just throw it all away."

Braden and Rachel accept their disposable cups sheepishly.

My stomach has tied itself in so many knots I wave mine away. "No, thanks. I can't eat."

Curtis runs interference on the cup, hands it to me, mutters, "Eat," and gives me the eye.

I take the cup. It's warm in my hands, which feels good. "How did you get here? To this place? Braden, how have you been coming and going to get photos developed?"

Braden's mouth is full, so his great-aunt answers instead. "The old wagon trace. Those of us who traveled it when it was a road are still able to find the way here. But you don't even know where here is. Where you are."

I fight the urge to get defensive. "I haven't been with the park very long, but roughly I do, yes."

"You couldn't possibly." Her tone is gentle, even slightly blithe. "All these years, it was a secret."

"What, exactly, is the ownership situation on the inholding where they're cutting the timber? Braden said you would explain the details. It's important." I move to set down my stew cup again. Curtis nudges it back toward my body, gives a little shrug that whispers, Eat the stew already.

"No one else knew about Shelterwood," the woman says.

Pushing my ball cap back, I rub itchy, tired skin. Shelterwood is an obscure forestry term for older, larger trees that protect the smaller, younger growth beneath. I know the word. I can quote the definition, but it won't help me build a case.

Curtis seems as bewildered as I am.

"A long time ago," the woman begins, "three girls lived in an attic. Two of them were little Choctaw girls, Hazel, who was thirteen, and Nessa, who was six. Hazel and Nessa were orphan wards of the parents in the house, and they shared the attic room with Olive, who was eleven. Ollie lived there with her mother and a new stepfather, the ranch foreman of Mr. E. Niles Lockridge, a man whose name you will find on the facades of buildings and in the history books. Perhaps you know of him already? But one must never believe what can be read in the history books about powerful men. The wealthy have the privilege of writing their own stories as they like. Tonight I will tell you what is true. What was lived by these three young girls, if you would like to know."

Her gaze catches mine and tunnels inward. I think of the packet from Mr. Wouda—of the corrupt probate courts of the statehood era and the children whose land and mineral rights were stolen. "I know about the guardians and the grafters…the whole filthy system," I say.

A long breath settles through the woman, as if she means to drink her story from the night air. "Then you know this was a dangerous time for landowners among the Five Tribes. With local probate courts now in charge, in came grafters by the score, seeking to build their fortunes through leases and guardianships. Children were especially prized, as dominion over the child meant dominion over the child's land and proceeds. In this way, Hazel and Nessa came under the control of people who were not their relatives. The first were kindly people who lived in a high-mountain valley, but the man was murdered, and the wife married Tesco Peele. The two sisters and Ollie found themselves in a house filled with fear and shouting and hitting and yelling. Yet even there, Hazel and Nessa still had one another.

"?‘I will always take care of you and protect you,' Hazel promised, and Nessa, being very small, knew no better than to believe it. ‘One day, we will go back home to our family,' Hazel said, but the longer Nessa was away from her blood relatives, the less she could remember of the little farm where she had lived with them. But she clung to her sister, and they played and laughed and tried to be children when they could. Sometimes they allowed Ollie to join their circle, but Tesco Peele did not much permit such things. Ollie, who still grieved the death of her own father, had no one…not even her mother, who had taken to the opium powders, as did many women in that place and time, when doctors encouraged it as a tonic for nerves and melancholia.

"For this reason, the house wasn't a safe place for little girls…even ones who were not orphans or Choctaw. Do you see? Tesco Peele was a very bad man, in the employ of another bad man. Niles Lockridge had, through the courts, gained guardianships over dozens of Choctaw children, and thereby control over a king's ransom in land, oil, and timber. He built grand homes, commissioned private railroad cars, purchased fine new automobiles, dressed his wife and daughters in fashions from Paris. In the young state of Oklahoma resided thousands like him, their wealth built at the expense of people who were, quite frankly, often more easily managed dead than alive. The three little girls in the attic did not understand any of this, of course. How could they? And then one day, Hazel disappeared…"

The old woman's words hit like a physical slap, and both Curtis and I jerk upright as she goes on to weave the narrative of two runaway girls, a calico pony, and elf children who scavenged food from passing trains, and a farm wife who helped them, and Ollie using Hazel's name to disguise her own identity, and more children joining them.

The night around us deepens as the storyteller plaits her tale together, bringing the children to Talihina, where Ollie comes upon a newspaperman with blue eyes.

"Oh," the old woman laughs. "Ollie was quite taken with him! She would have told you she wasn't, but she was. She brought him to meet the elves. Amos, and Nessa, and Tula with little Pinti and Koi, shared their stories, and he told them of Miss Kate Barnard, the first woman elected to office in the new state, who would take on the land grafters. Miss Kate had been to speak in Talihina, invited by the Oklahoma Federation of Women's Clubs. The railroad brotherhoods, the coal and asphalt miners, the workingmen, the clubwomen, had come to Talihina by the thousands. All sorts of people—the Choctaw and the freedman, the Oklahoma boomer, and the immigrant still speaking a language from a homeland across the sea. Miss Kate had words for each of them, and with those words came hope. The people cheered so loudly the sound could be heard for miles. Perhaps all the way into these mountains."

She sweeps a hand to the air around us, where an audience of fireflies glitters in the trees, and the pines whisper as if they already knew the story, as if they've been telling it all along, we just couldn't hear them.

"It was grand to think this tiny woman would rescue all the friendless children of Oklahoma," she goes on. "But little ones must eat while newspapermen write and politicians debate." Her smile fades quickly, and the story takes on a darker hue. She tells of a woman with a garden hoe and a boy with a gun, and a terrifying flight in a storm, and a friend being shot.

"This is where they came when Amos could travel no farther. Ollie knew of this place, an old dugout hideaway where she had camped with her father. Here the little ones began to build a world of their own. A world for a tribe of children who could trust no one."

Pointing into the darkness, she locates the schoolroom, the horse corral, the bank, Ollie's Lookout Tree. She talks about voting for leaders and making firefly lanterns. She tells of an old soldier searching for a lost love.

"The children lived here all summer." A smile overtakes her and she stirs the fire, watching the crackling embers. "The bigger ones worked in town for money, and the younger ones gathered wood and wild foods. After dark, they sat here in this very spot and told tales around the night fire. All sorts of tales…for every orphan has a story."

Overhead, night breezes comb the branches, stirring thin shards of moonlight that dart about like forest spirits raised by an alchemy of moonlight, wind, and story.

"They were more than just a word, orphan or elf child, all those little citizens of Shelterwood Camp—that is the name Ollie, being the elected commissioner of names, chose for this dugout. But Shelterwood Camp was only meant to be a temporary place. The children planned to climb high into the mountains, come autumn, to the little cabin constructed by Ollie's father in a beautiful hanging valley. There they would build a new home, with a church and school, and call it Shelterwood Town. It was a dream. A beautiful dream. They believed these things as only dreamers can. As only a child would. It sounds so very fanciful, doesn't it?"

Staring into the flames, she's hypnotic, yet also hypnotized. "But do not let the fairy tale name mislead you. Children abandoned by the world live a hard life. Bellies were often empty, and the longer the elves remained in Shelterwood Camp, the scarcer the wild foods and firewood became. The young ones ranged farther and farther each day in their work, searching for edibles and wood to burn. Yet, being children, they even made a game of the labor, dividing into teams and trekking off to see who could return with the best goods. They were often tired, carrying their wood bundles miles through the forest on weary legs."

I stare into the woods, imagine children here alone, struggling to survive in this place with all its dangers.

"But it is an eternal truth…and you young people remember this, if you remember nothing else I say." The storyteller locks eyes with each of us, one by one. "Your burden will often become your salvation. It was only for this reason, the burden of a remarkably heavy load of wood, that those two girls from the attic, Ollie and Nessa, were not separated forever the evening Shelterwood was destroyed. On that day, Nessa was yet making her way home with little Koi in tow, both of them bending beneath their wood bundles, when they heard horses, and dogs, and screams. Men had come to round up the elves and take them away. Nessa and Koi crawled under a fallen tree and hid themselves in the leaves. There they remained all night, afraid to come out.

"In the morning, they heard Ollie calling to them, but Shelterwood Camp was gone. All the work, ruined. All the dreams, destroyed. Yet there was not time to cry over it. An orphan soon learns that crying does not benefit."

Gathering the shawl closer around her shoulders, she shudders. "Ollie, Nessa, and little Koi simply gathered what they could—an upturned cookpot, a wooden spoon that Dewey had carved, a walking stick, a few fishhooks and matches, and together they started north over the mountains, not knowing where they would go. ‘Far from here,' Ollie told the little ones. ‘Away from the Winding Stair, where those men can never find us.'?"

The air falls silent, and we sit frozen, staring into the dichotomy of night and fireflies, darkness and light. I think of the skeletons in the cave, realize the alternative to Shelterwood was far worse. The man-devil of Myrna Wambles's story existed. He walked this territory in myriad forms.

I imagine Charlie, off in the world alone. My heart wrenches.

"They traveled a long distance," the woman explains. "But it was difficult on foot with nothing. In the woods, they scavenged. At farms or cabins, they begged. The more they traveled, the more ragged they became. The more ragged they became, the fewer people were inclined to help them. The fewer people helped them, the more ragged they became. The more ragged they became, the colder they were, because the weather was changing."

Beside me, Curtis rests his elbows on his knees, slumping forward. I glance over and see him staring at the ground. The world we left only hours ago seems far away. I ache to take those three little children by the hands and say, You're safe now.

"Isn't it true that life can turn a circle at times?" The old woman looks my way again, and I meet her eye. "That all things, all people, move within the circle, unaware?" Her face fills with empathy, as if she feels the need to apologize for the sadness her story stirs in me. Ssshhh, her expression seems to say. Listen, now.

"That winter of 1909, Miss Kate Barnard received a report of elf children living in a hollow tree, begging for food at farmhouses nearby. She came to see and found them sleeping, curled together against the wind on a cold November day. They trembled when she touched them and were so frightened they were thought mute when Kate asked who they were.

"?‘This little boy is Koi,'?" the oldest girl finally found the courage to say. ‘And this girl is Nessa Rusk, and I…I am Hazel Rusk.'?"

"So Ollie continued using Hazel's name?" My mind sharpens again.

The woman smiles wryly. "Nessa knew this was not true, of course. She knew Ollie wasn't Hazel, but she would never tell. Ollie had saved Nessa once, and this was Nessa's chance to save Ollie from being returned to that very bad house. They became sisters in every way that mattered, Ollie and Nessa. And they pleaded that Koi be reunited with his sisters. Miss Kate was a venerable woman of good heart and great power in that year of 1909, and with the help of Mrs. Grube, Tula and Pinti were found. Together with Koi, Nessa, and Ollie, they were transferred to the Whitaker Orphanage at Pryor, Oklahoma, with a group of Cherokee orphans Miss Kate had taken there for safekeeping. In that place, the children drew a circle around a new tribe, where, twice each year, Mrs. Grube rode the train all the way from Pushmataha County to see that they were well taken care of."

Laughter slips softly from her, as if there is more to that portion of the story, but she'll forgo it for now. "On occasion, they also saw Miss Kate, who came to make inspections of the facilities or to gather information about the children and their rightful land holdings. Her Department of Charities and Corrections began prosecuting the grafters and guardians, as well as the lawyers and probate judges who enabled them. Some men were reported to have more than one hundred court-appointed guardianships. Many children had disappeared, been housed in asylums, or chased into the woods…or murdered. Some were spirited away as soon as they came of legal age, forced into marriages, or plied with drink and drugs, held prisoner until they could be coerced into signing away their fortunes."

The old woman pauses to draw breath, and I stare in the direction of the bone cave. What did those three little girls own that was worth killing them?

I barely hear the story continue at first. My mind is across the hills.

"Hazel's land parcel was among the cases in which Miss Kate was successful," the woman says. "As was Nessa's, and one of the Dawes parcels inherited from their parents. The lands with oil were gone to the wind. Miss Kate fought the good fight as the years went on, but digging too deeply into what the clubwomen spoke of as The Indian Concern would eventually be Kate's undoing. The oil kings drummed her out of office and left her broken by the failure of her life's work, tormented at the thought of all the young ones she could not help. But she made a difference to many, including Hazel, and Ollie, and Nessa."

"Kate Barnard found Hazel?" Curtis asks before I can. "The real Hazel Rusk?"

A smile twists the old woman's lips. "Quite the opposite. Hazel found Ollie and me. My sister came home." For the first time, she places herself within the story. She is Nessa. "But not until I was a college student and Ollie a married woman. Hazel had fled all those years earlier to save herself. At only thirteen, she'd become pregnant with Niles Lockridge's child after going to him to plead for relief from Tesco Peele's indecencies. She ran away in shame and fear and eventually came to a wayward home run by the Methodists, who took her in. She joined the missionary service when she was old enough, leaving behind the torment of her past. Many years went by before she could bear to come home and search for me. Even then, she couldn't stay, and so when she left, I followed her into the mission service overseas. I do not think Ollie could fathom at first why I would abandon her for the sister who had once abandoned me. She worried that I loved Hazel more, but it was only that I loved Hazel, also."

Taking Braden's hand, she pats it gently, as if to reassure him that his Grandma Budgie is as dear to her as her sister by birth. "Over years, and visits, and letters sent home to Ollie from the far corners of the world, I think she understood. Had she not been a young married woman with a dashing husband she adored, ranchlands to manage, and political goals of her own, I do believe she would have come along with us. Inside Ollie and me, there was always this forest, that one summer in the wild, and the vision of building a new place, a better place, a place where children could be safe. The monies Budgie produced through our land here, from cattle grazed on the meadows and timber thinned in the forests, allowed Hazel and me to help the little ones we found in our work."

Moisture gathers at the corners of her eyes, glitters in the uneven light, as if tiny fires burn there, also. "So you see, the small dream that was born among the children of this forest did not die here. It grew as the dreamers grew. Its branches stretched through air, to places far and near, to forests and deserts, across rivers and oceans. Evil could not poison it. Men could not cut it down. Floods could not wash it away. It grew into a tree of life, of lives."

A log snaps in the fire. Watching the sparks spin up, and up, and up, Nessa smiles as she finishes her story, and Ollie's. "Many have dwelt beneath it…labored, and rejoiced, and rested, and lain down to watch the sky through its magnificent shadow and light. Through a thousand eyes of a thousand colors, we have seen our Shelterwood."