Then he stood and looked squarely at me with his nocturnal eyes.
"Perhaps you are not a good friend. Perhaps you have lied to us. Why
are you saying we should leave this safety?"
"You will be happier. There will be more game."
He continued to stare directly at me. "There will be men. One has
already shot one of us. We have forgiven him and are friends. But one
of us is dead."
"You are friends with _another_ man?" I asked, stunned.
He nodded and pointed up the valley. "He is up there today with another
family."
"Let's go!"
He had the advantage of short glides, but the volpla chief couldn't
keep up with me. Sometimes trotting, sometimes walking fast, I got way
ahead of him. My hard breathing arose as much out of my anxiety about
the manner of handling this stranger as it did out of the exertion.
I rounded a bend in the creek and there was my son sitting on the grass
near a cooking fire playing with a baby volpla and talking in English
to an adult volpla who stood beside him. As I approached, my son tossed
the baby into the air. The tiny planes opened and the baby drifted down
to his waiting hands.
He said to the volpla beside him, "No, I'm sure you didn't come from
the stars. The more I think about it, the more I'm sure my father--"
I yelled from behind them, "What business do you have telling them
that?"
* * * * *
The male volpla jumped about two feet. My son turned his head slowly
and looked at me. Then he handed the baby to the male and stood up.
"You haven't any business out here!" I was seething. He had destroyed
the whole store of volpla legends with one small doubt.
He brushed the grass from his trousers and straightened. The way he was
looking at me, I felt my anger turning to a kind of jelly.
"Dad, I killed one of these little people yesterday. I thought he was a
hawk and I shot him when I was out hunting. I wouldn't have done that
if you had told me about them."