Winter In The Blood

The narrator brings a bottle of wine to visit Yellow Calf. As they share the wine, the narrator tells Yellow Calf that the old woman has died. Yellow Calf does not seem to be listening. The narrator wonders what he and First Raise talked about when they visited all those years ago. He asks if Yellow Calf knew the old woman, but Yellow Calf demurs, saying that she was a young woman and he a youth. The narrator begins to understand that Yellow Calf is not of the Gros Ventre nation, as he’d thought, but one of the Blackfeet that the old woman had joined when she married Standing Bear.

Yellow Calf tells the narrator that the old woman had been very beautiful, but that the tribe had turned on her after Standing Bear’s death. While they’d previously been proud of her beauty, in the wake of their chief’s death they began to associate her arrival two or three months prior with the bad luck they’d been experiencing the arrival of the white men, the need to flee their winter camp, the starvation, and then Standing Bear’s death. Though she was a young widow, she was ostracized by the tribe and had to fend for herself.