The Only Good Indians

The game is 15-15, and Denorah is sweaty and winded. She sneaks by Elk Head Woman for 16, who asks Denorah if basketball is the most important thing to her. Denorah responds, “And you think you can take it away from me?” (266). She sinks an impressive two-point shot through Elk Head Woman’s guard. Elk Head Woman gets the ball and crashes into the pole as she makes a shot, causing Denorah to think of her as animal-like in her playstyle. Denorah wonders why no one has returned, but she’s too caught up in winning the game to investigate.

When Elk Head Woman begins backing her down again, Denorah notices Elk Head Woman is bleeding. She tries to stop the game, but Elk Head Woman charges past her, smashing into the pole again and falling to the concrete, screaming. When she rises, her eyes have changed and grown. Denorah stumbles back, asking who Elk Head Woman is. She tells Denorah she’s not Crow but Elk and is there to because of something Gabe did. Denorah is afraid for her life but asks what happens if she wins the game. Elk Head Woman says she won’t win.

Denorah gets ready to resume play, thinking of her dad encouraging her to play and of her coach chiding her for showboating. Desperate, she tries a flashy move that she’s been practicing at home and hardly ever makes, cutting the ball past Denorah and into the corner. She gets to the ball just in time to lay it up past Shaney and crashes to the ground with blood in her mouth.

There’s a gunshot, and Denorah sees Victor, nearly dead and taking aim at Elk Head Woman. He shoots her in the shoulder, and she collapses to the ground writhing and transforming. When she rises again, she has returned to her true form.

Denorah runs to Victor, who tells her to run. She does, but when he fires again, she collapses in fear onto the sweat lodge, which she realizes has been piled with the bodies of the dogs, Cass, and her father. She rises again and turns to face Elk Head Woman, who has killed Victor. Denorah thinks of the drill her coach would occasionally run in which every girl charges for the ball. Only the one who wants it most wins.

Denorah runs toward a neighbor’s place, but she’s stopped by a steep rise she can’t get down safely. She looks back and sees Elk Head Woman walking toward her unrelentingly. With no other option, she heads through deep snow toward Duck Lake and the houses that her father told her Ricky got arrested in when he found a dead body. She keeps low, knowing that it’s several miles to the lake houses and there’s not likely to be anyone there in winter.

She comes across an abandoned house with several train cars around it put there for storage and to serve as a snow break. Elk Head Woman is close behind her. Denorah decides to try going under the boxcars, thinking Elk Head Woman won’t follow. She crawls through the deep snow and emerges out the other side; when she looks back, she sees that Elk Head Woman has frozen in place. Despite her instinct to run, Denorah climbs the train car to see what has happened, then realizes that Elk Head Woman is afraid of trains. Denorah realizes that she’s more elk than person, and she recalls the story her father told her of hunting elk by the trains—the same legend that Elk Head Woman recalled earlier from the elks’ perspective. Denorah descends from the train car and heads toward Duck Lake, knowing that Elk Head Woman will keep coming after her soon.

Denorah is lost in the deep snow and wilderness and cold and exhaustion are catching up to her. She sees an elk face in the woods in front of her and prepares to fight for her life, but it’s a mule elk staring at her. The mule startles, and Denorah looks behind her and sees Elk Head Woman a quarter mile back.

Denorah resumes running, encouraging herself by assuring that no Crow woman will beat her at anything. In her exhaustion she thinks she is seeing a vision of tribal art, but it’s Nathan Yellow Tail on one of the missing horses. He is delirious from blood loss, and she wakes him.

Elk Head Woman isn’t far behind them. Nathan tries to lift Denorah up, but he’s too weak—she tells him to go to town instead to find her stepdad Denny Peace, that she will lead Elk Head Woman to the lake. Elk Head Woman considers Nathan and the horse speeding away, but Denorah calls out and taunts her to follow.

Denorah is losing the last of her energy, falling and sputtering even as Elk Head Woman picks up her pace. Denorah knows she won’t make the lake, so she hops a fence gate and heads down that trail. She stumbles down a ridge, realizing when she rises that the trail curved around when she went straight. She thinks that she is dying and apologizes to Gabe, but then she notices she is surrounded by bones, which brings her to her feet again. She has arrived at the site of the hunting incident.

She never quite believed the story that she heard from Denny Pease, but being here, she knows that it’s true and that her father was the aggressor in this story. She apologizes to the elk bones and lies down with them to die.

She opens her eyes moments later to see Elk Head Woman, who ignores her to find an icy patch of grass. She briefly sympathizes with Elk Head Woman before remembering all the people she’s killed. Elk Head Woman begins digging in the dirt. She brings up a newborn calf and holds it to herself.

Gunshots ring out; Denny Pease has arrived, and he puts warning shots into the snow around Elk Head Woman, who only wants to protect her calf. Denorah knows what she does next will become a tribal story: She puts herself between Elk Head Woman and Denny, telling him to stop. Elk Head Woman transforms back into a cow elk, and she and her calf disappear into the woods. The narrative ends with the tribal elder telling the story of all of this and relating it to Denorah’s high school basketball career, relating this moment to an image of her later, when she balled up her fist in a sign of respect to the Crow team that beat her team in the high school state championships.