Coyote smiled as if he had read Sam's thoughts. "What do you want, Samson Hunts Alone?"

Sam didn't even hesitate to think. "I want my old life back to the way it was before you fucked it up."

"Why?"

Now Sam was forced to think. Why indeed? Every time Sam hired a new agent he glorified his and Aaron's lifestyles. He would take a bright, hungry young man for a ride in the Mercedes, buy him lunch at the Biltmore or another of Santa Barbara's finer restaurants, flash cash and gold cards and expensive suits — plant the seed of greed, as Aaron called it — then give the kid a means to pursue his germinating dream of material bliss while Sam collected ten percent on everything he sold. It was part of the show, one of the many roles he played, and the car, the clothes, the condo, and the clout were merely props. Without the props the show could not go on.

"Why do you want your life back?" Coyote asked, as if Sam had forgotten the question.

"It's safe," Sam blurted out.

"So safe," Coyote said, "that you can lose it in a day? To be safe is to be afraid. Is that what you want: to be afraid?"

"I'm not afraid."

"Then why do you lie? You want the girl."

"Yes."

"I will help you get her."

"I don't need your help. I need you gone."

"I am very good with women."

"Like you're good with cats and couches?"

"Great heroes have great horniness. You should feel what it is like to pleasure a falcon. You lock talons with her in the sky and do it while you both are falling like meteors. You would like it; they never complain if you come too fast."

"Get out of here."

"I will go, but I will be with you." Coyote rose and walked to the door. As he opened it he said, "Don't be afraid." He stepped out of his office and closed the door. Suddenly, Sam leapt to his feet and headed after him. "Stay off my secretary!" he shouted. He ripped open the door and looked into the outer office where Gabriella, her composure regained, was typing up a claim form. Coyote was gone.

Gabriella looked up and raised a disapproving eyebrow. "Is there a problem, Mr. Hunter?"

"No," Sam said. "No problem."

"You sounded frightened."

"I'm not frightened, goddammit!" Sam slammed the door and went to the desk for a cigarette. His cigarettes and lighter were gone. He stood there for a moment, feeling a flush of anger rise in him until he thought he would scream, then he fell back into his chair and smiled as he remembered something Pokey Medicine Wing had once told him: "Anger is the spirits telling you that you are alive."

CHAPTER 12

Cruelly Turn the Steel-Belted Radials of Desire

Crow Country — 1973

In the six years since his vision quest Samson had endured almost daily interpretations of the vision by Pokey Medicine Wing. Again and again Samson insisted that it wasn't important, and again and again Pokey forced the boy to recall his experience on the mountain in detail. It was Pokey's responsibility as a self-proclaimed medicine man to bring meaning to the symbols in the vision. Over the years, as Pokey read new meanings, he tried to change his and Samson's lives to fit the message of the medicine dream.

"Maybe Old Man Coyote was trying to tell us that we should turn our dreams into money," Pokey said.

With this interpretation, Pokey dragged Samson into a series of entrepreneurial ventures that ultimately served no purpose except to confirm to the people of Crow Country that Pokey had finally gone full-bore batshit.

The first foray into the world of business was a worm ranch. Pokey presented the idea to Samson with the same blind faith with which he told Old Man Coyote stories, and Samson, like so many before him, was captivated with the idea of turning religion into money.

Pokey's eyes were lit up with liquor and firelight as he spoke. "They are building that dam up on the Bighorn River. They tell us that we will prosper from all the people who will come to the reservation to fish and water-ski on the new lake. That's what they told us when they put the Custer Monument here, but whites opened stores and took all the money. This time we will get our share. We'll grow worms and sell them for fishing."

They had no lumber to build the worm beds, so Pokey and Samson went to the Rosebud Mountains and cut lodgepole pines, which they brought down by the pickup load. Through a whole summer they hauled and built until the Hunts Alones' five acres was nearly covered with empty worm beds. Pokey, convinced that their success depended on getting a jump on other prospective worm ranchers, instructed Samson to tell everyone who asked that they were building corrals to hold tiny horses that they were raising for the Little People that lived in the mountains. "It's easier to keep a secret if people think you're crazy," Pokey said.

With the beds finished, they were faced with the problem of filling them. "Worms like cow shit," Pokey said. "We can get that for free." Indeed, had Pokey asked any of the ranchers in the area, they would have let him haul away all the manure he needed, but because most of the ranchers were white and Pokey did not trust them, he decided, instead, that he and Samson would steal the cow pies in the dead of night.

So it began: sunset, Samson and Pokey driving the old pickup into a pasture, Pokey driving slowly along while Samson followed on foot with a shovel, scooping piles into the bed of the truck, then the two of them stealing away with their reeking load to dump it in the worm beds, then out again. "The Crow have always been the best horse thieves, Samson," Pokey said. "Old Man Coyote would be proud of the trick we have played on the ranchers."

Pokey's enthusiasm mystified Samson, who couldn't muster the same self-satisfaction at stealing something that nobody wanted. Nevertheless, after a month of pasture raids the beds were full and they drove to the bait store in Hardin to buy their breeding stock: night crawlers and red worms, five hundred each.

Pokey burnt sage and sweet grass and prayed over the beds and they released the worms into the beds of manure. Then they waited.

"We shouldn't disturb them until spring," Pokey said, but many nights Samson spotted him sneaking out to one of the beds with a trowel, turning over a patch, then skulking away. One night Samson was sneaking out with his own trowel when he saw Pokey on his knees with his face pressed to a bed. He stood up when he sensed the boy behind him.

"You know what I was doing?" Pokey asked.

"No," Samson said, hiding his trowel behind his back.

"I was listening to the sound of money."

"You have shit on your ear, Pokey."

From that time forward they were both more careful about their nocturnal progress checks, but neither found worm one. They waited through the cold Montana winter, sure that come spring they would be waist deep in worms and money. Never mind the fact that Yellowtail Dam wouldn't be completed for two more years.

After the thaw they marched to the beds together, shovels in hand, to turn over their squirming horn of plenty, but shovel after shovel turned up empty. Into the third bed they began to panic and were wildly slinging shit in the air when Harlan pulled up.

"Digging for horses?" he asked.

"Worms," Pokey shouted, lifting the veil of secrecy with a single word.

"Where did you get the manure?"

"Around," Pokey said.

"Around where?"

"The ranches on the res."

Harlan began to laugh and Samson was afraid for a moment that Pokey would brain him with the shovel. "You were trying to grow worms?"

"Old Man Coyote told us to," Samson said defensively.

"We let go a thousand worms in here to breed so we could sell 'em to fishermen."

"I guess Old Man Coyote didn't tell you that cattle ranchers put a wormer in their cattle feed, huh?"