I’ll never forget that day. It all started out so well, what with Ma cooking us up some nice cornpone and fatback for breakfast. The delicious sizzle of it drew me and my sister out of our pallets up in the hayloft and there we were, little noses twitching at the smells that filled our little cabin in Carolina. It was cold that late winter morning, and a smell had to be powerful good to bring us out of our nice warm blankets. Daddy was already out milking the cows and fetching in the eggs from the chicken coop, so all us kids had to do was just wait while we almost slobbered over the smells Ma was making from the hearth.

Everything changed that morning, so fast I didn’t even know what happened until after it was over and done with. The first clue any of us had that something was wrong was the screaming from the direction of the barn. I didn’t realize at the time that it was Daddy screaming out his last breath because I hadn’t never heard a person make that kind of sound. I thought it was one of the pigs making that awful noise. The next thing I knew momma had turned white as a sheet and she was almost throwing my sister and me up the ladder to the loft while the door was shaking because some men were beating on it and yelling in some words I didn’t know.

Me and my sister hid up under the hay until the men busted through the door waving hatchets and knives and my momma finally got Daddy’s gun up to her shoulder. There was a noise louder than anything I ever heard before and my Ma flew back into the fireplace with a big cloud of nasty smelling smoke. She seemed to just lay there while her clothes caught fire and then she got up and ran around screaming for a while as she burned up and the men who had busted our door down laughed and poked at her with sticks of firewood.

I thought I had never heard a person make a more awful noise when Daddy yelled out, but I learned better real quick. I swear the last thing I ever heard her say was “Please don’t hurt my babies!” I can’t be real sure about that because she was screaming at the same time, so it was kinda hard to tell.

"Colonel, I’d like to tell you that it was my sister that made them notice us with her crying, but it wasn’t. I was the one who gave us away that morning because I was sobbing loud enough to hear, and it’s because of me that my sister lies planted in that little patch of dirt in Ashe County. We tried our best to get away from them, but the men were fast and strong and my sister tried to stand up to them, to let me get away. I never saw what they did to her but I heard her screaming for a long time."

"One of the men who was holding me down cut me and I couldn’t hear her screaming for a while because it hurt so bad I was yelling louder than she was. I didn’t know until a whole lot later than he had done the same thing to me that we used to do to baby pigs so they wouldn’t grow up to taste nasty. When I did finally figure that out, I was worried that they had kept me alive to eat me and had done that so I would taste better."

It was even more years after that until I realized that was pretty much exactly the truth, but in a whole different way that had nothing at all to do with them cooking me and eating me.

Things changed a whole lot for me after that. There was a woman who I decided after a while was my new momma, but she used to feed me things that tasted really awful all the time. She’d say “Good for you, make you grow up right.” Then she would feed me some kind of tea that she made from roots and tree bark until I couldn’t drink anymore of it and would vomit.

It took a long time, but I learned to talk the same language they did. I played with the other children, but there was always something different about me and we all knew it. Two Beavers used to tease me when we’d play in the meadows, holding the yellow flowers under our chins and looking at the yellow color it gave us under there. We had almost the exact same dresses, made of soft doeskin and embroidered with the finest beads and decorations, but her mother always seemed to need to make sure her daughter had the best of everything, so hers always had more elaborate decorations than mine.

I guess it was kind of natural for her to tease me that the yellow from the flowers looked better on her darker skin than it did on my skin because I was so light that the only time there was any color to my face was when I was blushing or when I had spent a lot of time in the sun, and even then I turned red and got blotchy while she just got a deeper golden brown.

I never really thought about trying to escape or anything. If you asked me now, I’d have to say that I had settled in to being considered just another one of the young women of the tribe. Yes, I said young women, because that was the way they treated me and raised me, even though it was a few more years before I realized the difference between women and men. When I did, I was ashamed because I knew that I wasn’t either of those things, and I wondered what Three Bears would think of me when he found out. I wanted more than anything to please him because we had flirted for almost the past 2 summers and he had given me many fine presents.

I was wearing one of his presents that night, the night I was going to find out just what he thought of me, and I was even more scared than when I saw my momma burning up and running around in our little cabin. I’m ashamed to admit it now, but I was afraid that he was going to kill me and eat me, like those baby pigs we used to do the thing to that had been done to me many years before.

I had the breasts and body of a young girl my age(thanks to that horrible tea). Three Bears told me that he knew that I was special and he was so gentle as he laid me down on our marriage furs that night, after we had danced until we were dizzy, drinking Birch Beer. When he leaned down and kissed me, I bit his lip and he bit mine, but so gently it didn’t even really hurt and as we tasted our mingled blood together, he entered me for the first time, the way eased by a liberal application of rabbit fat to my nether regions.

That night was another thing I’ll never forget. I gave myself to him without any thought of holding anything back and he did the same. He brought me to the edge of heaven and then took me over that edge, wrapped in his arms the entire time. I had never even imagined that I could feel like that and I was just happy that I had gotten to feel like that once in my life, but then he did it again and that time I was so loud that I’m sure the entire village heard me crying out his name in the throes of our passion.

We had many happy years, even though the constant wars with the whites who were taking our land and killing our brethren from the other tribes made things harder and the hunting was scanty. Some of the young men from our tribe decided that they wouldn’t tolerate the White Man invading our land anymore and they started a war.

That whole nightmare ended in something that we now call the Trail of Tears. Three Bears died on the Trail of Tears, on our way out to Oklahoma. I watched and cried when a white cavalry trooper stabbed him with his bayonet in the dirty snow, and I cried even more when I wasn’t allowed to stop and give him a decent burial. I couldn’t do anything though, because by then I had 2 young ones to protect. Their parents had died on the Trail and it fell to me to become their mother. Everyone else was busy just trying to survive and I was the only one who seemed to care enough to feed them and care for them.

Those two became my children, even though I did not bear them from my own loins. I somehow managed to keep them alive through that long and awful journey when so many of the tribe just gave in to the cold, collapsing into the snow to die a frozen death in a strange wilderness. They were so young and so helpless, what else could I do? In truth, Running Stag and Willow Blossom were perhaps even more dear to my heart than if they had been my own children. All I really knew was that I was their mother now and I would do anything to ensure their survival and happiness.

We finally settled in the Oklahoma Territories, prodded to our destination by the US cavalry. Things were good for a few years, the tribes that lived there didn’t exactly welcome us, but they were willing to share the land with us. I don’t think it was just because they were nice folks, I think it was partly because they had been so shocked by the way we showed up, tattered, starving and frozen.

There was another big wave of White Men about 10 years after that, and they made the men who had hunted and terrorized us back in the Carolina Territory seem almost nice. Running Stag went out to fight them with most of the rest of the men of the tribe and he never came back. We never stood any kind of a chance, the White Man ran over us with his iron shod horses and his guns and never even gave a second thought to it.

I lived in the back country of the Territory until Willow Blossom’s grandchildren were adults and had children of their own.

“Colonel,” she leaned forward in her chair and clenched her fists in her lap, a determined woman who had seen many years. “My husband signed a piece of paper almost 100 years ago, and I swore to myself that day on the Trail while I watched my husband die spitted on the bayonet of an United States Army soldier that I would live to see that my grandchildren got what the US government promised them. I’m almost 118 years old now, and your government owes my great grandchildren a hell of a lot. Just now, I’d settle for them giving my great grandson his pension from back in Vietnam. His daughter needs the money bad, you see. I can’t pay for her chemotherapy, and she’s in a really bad way right now. Please, Colonel, can you see your way clear to help?"

The old woman leaned back into the embrace of the leather office chair and took her last breath, closing her eyes as she exhaled. A single tear stole its way down the furrows that the harsh years had left in her face. She had done her best, and as the lines in her leathery face collapsed into her final repose, she left her existence with no remorse. That last tear found its way into a crevice in the wrinkles and furrows that her life had bestowed upon her, down to the corner of her mouth and was the last thing she ever tasted, a bitter seasoning to what had been a brutal life.

The Colonel, grown to middle age in the service of his country, buried his head in his hands and wept for the old woman.