C Box - Blood Trail

“It’s a good thing there ain’t no smart game wardens around here, huh, Benny?”

“Yeah, that’s a good thing. Otherwise, he’d know we were killin’ and poachin’ fools!”

“Ha-ha,” said Joe, and the boys broke up into self-congratulatory laughter.

AS THE halls thinned and cleared he found himself looking at the framed photos of the Class of 1991, which had graduated seventeen years before. There she was, Alisha Whiteplume. Her beauty was striking, and intelligence shone in her eyes. But there was another female student two rows up from Alisha who was familiar as well. This girl exuded brash self-confidence. Her eyes seemed to challenge the photographer to take the picture, and she had an inscrutable smile of self-satisfaction. Joe knew her now as Shannon Moore, Klamath’s wife.

“THAT DIDN’T take long,” Mrs. Thunder said when Joe returned to the office.

“I was hoping you could give me some background on another student I saw in one of the photos in the hallway,” Joe said.

“I’ll try,” Mrs. Thunder said. “I’ve been around this place for thirty years. If it’s before that I might not be able to help you.”

“Class of ’ninety-one,” Joe said.

“That”-Mrs.Thunder beamed-“was a very good year. That’s when Alisha graduated.”

Joe nodded. “And the other student I think I recognize. Her name is Shannon Moore now, but I don’t know her name at the time she graduated.”

Mrs. Thunder sat back, puzzled. “Shannon?”

Joe’s heart sank for a moment. Had he screwed up and mistaken one face for another? Then: “Maybe I can point her out to you.”

“Show me,” Mrs. Thunder said, plucking the 1991 high-school yearbook off a shelf behind her and opening it on the counter.

Joe used his index finger to guide him through the photos of graduating seniors. It settled on the one he’d seen in the hallway. As he read her name, Mrs. Thunder said, “So she goes by Shannon now, huh?”

“It says here her name was Shenandoah Yellowcalf,” Joe said. “Do you know her?”

Mrs. Thunder snorted. “Do I know her? She was only the best girls’ basketball player we’ve ever had here. I’m surprised you don’t know her.”

Joe explained he’d only been in the valley for eight years.

“Here,” Mrs. Thunder said, flipping through the yearbook pages, “let me show you.”

Joe looked at countless photos of Shenandoah Yellowcalf in the activities section of the yearbook. There were action photos of her on the court, at the foul line, and in the lane, another of her cutting down the net at the state championship.

“You’ve never seen a girl play like Shenandoah played,” Mrs. Thunder said softly, caressing the photos with a stubby fingertip as if drawing memories from them. “She had a blinding crossover dribble as good as any great NBA point guard as she brought the ball down the court, and she left her opponents flailing at air in her wake. She made us gasp the way she played. There has never been a player here with so much determination. She was so fierce . Shenandoah led our team, the Wyoming Indian Lady Warriors, which was made up of only seven girls, to win the state championship game.”

Joe read from the yearbook. “She scored fifty-two points in the championship game?” he said. “Good Lord!”

“Oh, she was good,” Mrs. Thunder said, shaking her head. “Alisha was on that team too,” and pointed her out in the team photo.

“Was Shannon-um, Shenandoah-recruited by colleges?” Joe asked.

Mrs. Thunder nodded enthusiastically. “She was offered full-ride scholarships to over twenty universities, including Duke and Tennessee, all the national powers. We were so proud of her.”

“Where did she go to school?” Joe asked.

“She didn’t,” Mrs. Thunder said sadly.

Joe shook his head, confused.

“Shenandoah’s grandmother got really sick, so she stayed on the reservation to take care of her. I think she was scared-there was so much pressure on her-and I told her that, but she said she would go to college and play basketball when her grandmother was better. Like all those schools would just wait for her.”

She looked up at Joe, moisture in her eyes. “I get disappointed to this day when I think about the potential she had and the opportunity she missed.”

Joe nodded, prodding her on.

Mrs. Thunder looked down, as if she didn’t want Joe to see her eyes, didn’t want to see how he reacted to an all-too-common story on the reservation. She said Shenandoah did, in fact, nurse her grandmother for a year, then two. Her devotion was extraordinary for a girl her age, she said, but didn’t entirely mask the fact that part of the reason she stayed was because of her fear of leaving the cloistered reservation for the punishing high-profile world of big-time college sports-or at least that’s what Mrs. Thunder surmised. Plus, there was the pressure from those she’d grown up with, her friends and family and coaches. Too many people lived vicariously through her, saw her triumphs as their triumphs. When she failed, they failed too.

“Kind of like me,” Mrs. Thunder said. “I’m guilty of that as well. I think of a lot of these kids as my own, and I wanted her to do so well, to make us all be able to say, ‘I knew her when.’”

“Where did she go?” Joe asked gently, knowing where she ended up but not how she got there.

“Nowhere, for way too long, I’m afraid,” she said. “The time away from sports didn’t do her any good. She gained a lot of weight the way kids do when they’re used to playing sports all the time and they just stop. It was pretty obvious after a couple of years that it would be tough if not impossible for her to get a recruiter interested, even if they still remembered her. But that’s me speaking… I don’t even know if she tried.”

Shenandoah started running with the wrong crowd, she said, a bad mixture of Indians and town kids. She got involved with alcohol and drugs, and was arrested for dealing crystal meth, the scourge of the reservation as well as small-town Wyoming. Her grandmother died and Shenandoah drifted back and forth from the res to town. Mrs. Thunder said she’d hear of Shenandoah from time to time, that she worked as a barmaid, a waitress, even as a roughneck on a coal-bed methane crew. She hired out as a cook and a guide for elk camps as well, Mrs. Thunder said, raising her eyebrows as she said it.

Joe grunted. While there certainly were legitimate cooks for elk camps, there were also “cooks”-mainly younger women-who provided other services for well-heeled, mainly out-of-state hunters. Joe had seen and met some of the camp cooks in the mountains, and it was obvious few knew anything about making breakfast. He felt the same irony and sadness Mrs. Thunder conveyed as he imagined the scenario and looked at Shenandoah Yellowcalf ’s bold face and eyes in the yearbook. Those hunters had no idea that the chubby twenty-year-old Northern Arapaho “camp cook” they’d hired was once one of the greatest basketball players in the state of Wyoming, he thought. He searched his memory; there was something familiar about the story. Something about a young female Indian camp cook. Something he’d heard years before when he was a trainee working under the former game warden Vern Dunnegan…

But he’d sort that out later.

He asked, “Do you know if Shenandoah and Alisha were friends?”

Mrs. Thunder smiled. “They were best friends. I think Alisha did everything she could to help Shenandoah.”

“Did they keep in touch?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I assume they did.”

Joe said, “Hmmmm.”

“What?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “But I can tell you that Shenandoah is back and doing very well. I saw her recently. She looks good and she has a little baby. She’s married to a guy named Klamath Moore.”