Apache Dawn, - [little bear else holmelund minarik txt] 📗

Salmon Falls, Idaho

Denoyan Tecumseh pulled his flat gray 1996 Ford 150 4x4 into the driveway of his small ranch house and parked the old truck. It had close to 200,000 miles on it, but was in pretty good shape despite its age. He turned the key and sat patiently as the engine fell silent. Denny got out of the cab and grabbed his worn messenger bag that served as a briefcase of sorts and strolled to his front porch.

Standing there at his front door, he admired the darkness in which his world had been enveloped with the setting of the sun. It was only the end of September and he could smell the cold wind of winter just around the corner. The warmth of the summer sun had faded fast this year. He savored the sounds of the newborn evening, the insects frantically singing their eternal love songs, and the birds settling in for the night in their communal roosts among the lofty pines that lined the mountain town’s streets.

He took a deep, long, calming breath of cool autumn air, held it, then released and felt calm for the first time that day. He relished the tangy smell of someone in the subdivision burning wood in a fireplace. Denny glanced up the street from his house at the end of the cul-de-sac. No lights glowed in windows. He sighed. Another quiet night.

It'd been the same every night since the year of the H5N1. The Bird Flu, the Bloody Flu, the Brisbane Flu—it had been given many names, but the biological nightmare that had toppled the 1918 Spanish Flu from the top of the “most killed” record was known officially as The Great Pandemic.

He snorted in derision, exhaling a small puff of vapor into the chilly evening air. The Great Pandemic. There had been nothing great about it—other than the staggering number of its victims. In his mind, it would always be the Blue Flu, the disease that starved its victims of oxygen.

Denny looked around the gloomy cul-de-sac. Most everyone in his neighborhood had been affected by the Blue Flu when it swept through town like an avenging angel a decade ago. For such a small, isolated town, Salmon Falls, Idaho had been hit especially hard. Entire families had been wiped out of the hundred-house subdivision. On his street alone, about two-thirds of the houses had lost at least one or two people in those first few terrifying weeks. The survivors lingered on and eventually moved away to start over or join what little family they had left elsewhere in the country.

Eventually, the banks that had survived the flu-triggered global economic catastrophe had reclaimed most of the neighborhood. But there weren’t enough people willing to buy in a ghost town, so the neighborhood had sat empty, year after year.

Then the Mormons came.

An entire ward’s worth of survivors had moved up from Utah over the course of a year and put down roots in Salmon Falls. They bought up a whole block of houses down the first cross-street from Denny’s place. The house next to his had been bought just two years ago by John and Ruth Anderton, an older couple with grown children of their own.

Denny welcomed more people on his street. Nearly every house was still for sale, except his and his neighbor’s. The rest stood empty and neglected, silent witnesses to the wrath of H5N1.

He sighed and put the key in his front door, chiding himself for thinking of his neighbors solely in terms of their religion. They were quiet, kept to themselves, and were decent people. They genuinely cared for him and even tried to set him up with a few women from their congregation. He smiled and shook his head at the thought of the last date. The poor woman must have been thinking she was sitting across from Geronimo, by the way she reacted to his appearance.

He flipped on the hall light switch and caught his reflection in the small mirror there. He was handsome enough, he thought. At 43, he still held the strength of youth and was starting to gain the wisdom of age. As far as he was concerned, it was the best of both worlds. He was trim, inheriting a naturally high metabolism from his ancestors. He also had the high cheekbones of his people, glossy-black shoulder-length hair that he kept in a ponytail to comply with the dress code of Salmon Falls High School. The brown eyes that looked back at him from the mirror were so dark, they looked like coal. His skin was a copper-tan that during the summer drew looks of envy from most Anglos he met.

He rubbed the smooth skin of his strong chin and grinned. He’d never shaved in his life and didn’t miss having facial hair. His colleagues at school mostly wore goatees or beards and were forever scratching at the hair on their neck, or complaining about how their wives nagged them to keep it trimmed.

He dropped the keys next to his mail into Emily’s little ceramic bowl on the side table in the hall and headed into the living room. He was a creature of habit and after a long day at school, he needed to unwind. He flopped into the Lazyboy recliner that had been Emily’s favorite spot to relax. Denny swore he could smell her soft, sweet fragrance, even after all these years. He looked to the mantel and saw their wedding picture in a silver frame. The dark-skinned Shawnee and the snow-white Anglo with flame-red hair.

He grinned, thinking about how Grandfather had reacted when he’d announced his marriage to an Anglo. The old man had nearly had a coronary, carrying on about how Denny, scion of the house of the blessed Tecumseh himself, could not mix his blood with a mere Anglo woman. It would be blasphemy! But then, he had not yet met Emily.

Denny closed his eyes and smiled, remembering the sunny day when Emily stepped into Grandfather’s house in Oklahoma, on the “Reservation” as the old folks often called it. Red Eagle was stiffly polite at first, but when he realized that Emily was a Native American historian and part Cherokee herself—granted, a very, very small part—it was like she was already part of the family. When she started a conversation in Red Eagle’s native Shawnee tongue, Denny thought Grandfather would try to marry Emily himself. Grandfather had become fiercely protective of Emily and for the rest of his life, if anyone mentioned anything against Emily, they had to deal with old Red Eagle himself.

Denny let his eyes wander over to the portrait of his wife on the wall next to the fireplace. They’d come together over his ancestry. She’d been attracted by his looks and lineage. Outside of her passion for Native American history and culture, they’d been complete opposites in everything in life.

He smiled again, remembering his wife. She had been Lutheran; he was a not-uncommon blend of Christian and tribal custom. He was just as apt to mumble a prayer to Jesus as he was to listen to the wind or patiently wait for a grove of pines to give him a message from Mishe Moneto, the Great Spirit. She liked to travel to the big cities like Chicago, New York, or Dallas, and dreamed of visiting London and Paris. He, on the other hand, would have liked nothing more than to grab a sleeping bag and head out under the stars and commune by the fire with Kokumthena, his people’s mythical Grandmother.

Emily had not really liked and indeed, preferred to avoid most things to do with the outdoors. Denny loved every second he could spend hunting, camping, fishing, or hiking. His family, for generations, had grown up deep in the plains of Oklahoma on land they owned but still referred to as The Reservation. The tribe had been cut off from the forests and hills and streams of their past for over 150 years. As a hotheaded youth, Denny had sworn to old Red Eagle that one day he would lead his people back to the land of their ancestors, where they belonged, away from the dry, dead flatland of their communal imprisonment.

Grandfather Red Eagle had smiled and placed his bronzed, wrinkled hand on Denny’s shoulder. His face had been genially crinkled with mirth and age. Grandfather never spoke at length—as was proper for the clan chief—for he listened much. In that way, Red Eagle had earned the respect of his people. But that day, he had told a very young Denny that he believed him and would ask Mishe Moneto to send him assistance on his quest. He had said the ancestors would be proud.

Denny shook his head to clear such morose thoughts from his mind. He turned on the TV and reluctantly got out of his chair to get some well-earned dinner. A local news channel came on, the three anchors chatting about the weekend’s upcoming football games.

He smiled, thinking of how his students had been bragging about taking on