Winter in the Blood

Part One

 

1

 

In the tall weeds of the borrow pit, I took a leak and watched the sorrel mare, her colt beside her, walk through burnt grass to the shady side of the log-and-mud cabin. It was called the Earthboy place, although no one by that name (or any other) had lived in it for twenty years. The roof had fallen in and the mud between the logs had fallen out in chunks, leaving a bare gray skeleton, home only to mice and insects. Tumbleweeds, stark as bone, rocked in a hot wind against the west wall. On the hill behind the cabin, a rectangle of barbed wire held the graves of all the Earthboys, except for a daughter who had married a man from Lodgepole. She could be anywhere, but the Earthboys were gone.

 

The fence hummed in the sun behind my back as I climbed up to the highway. My right eye was swollen up, but I couldn't remember how or why, just the white man, loose with his wife and buying drinks, his raging tongue a flame above the music and my eyes. She was wild, from Rocky Boy. He was white. He swore at his money, at her breasts, at my hair.

 

Coming home was not easy anymore. It was never a cinch, but it had become a torture. My throat ached, my bad knee ached and my head ached in the even heat.

 

The mare and her colt were out of sight behind the cabin. Beyond the graveyard and the prairie hills, the Little Rockies looked black and furry in the heat haze.

 

Coming home to a mother and an old lady who was my grandmother. And the girl who was thought to be my wife. But she didn't really count. For that matter none of them counted; not one meant anything to me. And for no reason. I felt no hatred, no love, no guilt, no conscience, nothing but a distance that had grown through the years.

 

It could have been the country, the burnt prairie beneath a blazing sun, the pale green of the Milk River valley,

James Welch was the author of the novels Winter in the Blood, Fools Crow, for which he received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, an American Book Award, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, The Indian Lawyer, The Death of Jim Loney, and Killing Custer: The Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians. He attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations in Montana, graduated from the University of Montana, where he studied writing with the late Richard Hugo, and served on the Montana State Board of Pardons.


Bestselling author Louise Erdrich grew up in North Dakota and is of German and Turtle Mountain Chippewa descent. Her novels include Love Medicine and The Beet Queen.

"A nearly flawless novel about human life . . . Few books in any year speak so unanswerably, make their own local terms so thoroughly ours."
-Reynolds Price, The New York Times Book Review

"For some readers this will be the most significant piece of Indian writing they have yet encountered; for others it will simply be a brilliant novel."
-The New Republic

"An unnervingly beautiful book."
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