The fire was low, hickory popping slow and stubborn, shadows stretched thin as sinew across the clearing. Children sat with knees tucked to chests, watching sparks whirl upward like impatient spirits. Women stirred stew. Men stripped sinew from bows. Someone hummed, soft and off-key, the way people do when nothing is wrong.
It was an ordinary night on the banks of Muhheakantuck, the river that was always there.
A tall stranger at the fire's edge, hair in two long braids, still wet, dripping river-dark down his shoulders. Buckskin clung to him like bark after rain. Beadwork shimmered—turtle-shell diamonds, river-lines—catching the firelight as if it recognized him. And he was grinning, wide and wolfish, like someone who'd just gotten away with something and was daring the world to notice.
A hunter's hand found his spear—more reflex than fear.
An elder's breath caught, then released.
One of the children—braver than most—leaned forward and whispered, "Who are you?"
He bent closer, firelight carving sharp angles into his cheekbones, and said it like he was stating the obvious. Like the question was the strange part.
"Me? I've always been here."
He reached for a bowl of stew and ate like he'd been invited. When the drumming started, he hummed along, perfectly off-key, like he already knew the song and didn't care if he got it right.
Someone laughed—short, surprised, not quite sure why.
Meanwhile, the moon kept watch, its borrowed shine catching on the river. Same way the firelight caught on the stranger's teeth.
The firelight flickered as the medicine woman—Nikànataemixkwe—leaned forward. Her voice was gentle but insistent, the way roots are gentle: patient enough to split stone.
She asked the first important question: "Who is your mother? Who is the man who wed your mother?"
He didn't hesitate. Didn't even look up from the stew.
"The earth. And the sky."
A few people shifted. Unimpressed.
(The aunties especially. "Cheeky," one whispered to another, not unkindly. "My heart goes out to them, really.")
"That's everyone's mother, and that's everyone's father," Nikànataemixkwe said, one brow arched like a question mark that had learned patience the hard way. "But who is the one who birthed you?"
He looked up then. His grin sharpened, teeth catching the light, and he shrugged like this was the simplest thing in the world.
The silence stretched—half-frustrated, half-intrigued. Because he wasn't wrong. But it wasn't right, either.
The fire crackled louder, like it was listening. And from the dark beyond the circle came the sound of water against the banks—something that usually meant alarm, but here felt like punctuation.
A few heads leaned closer, drawn in despite themselves.
Pwètuwiyus, one of the younger hunters, was brave enough to ask the second important question: "So where is your actual village?"
His voice was careful, deliberate—the tone of a man determined to get a straight answer out of someone who had never given one in his life.
The stranger tilted his head, braids still dripping, eyes bright as river-glint.
Nikànataemixkwe would deny her mouth twitched, so she folded her arms instead, patient but pointed. "…But we're along the river."
The stranger lifted one hand, gestured lazily upriver—then downriver—then let the hand fall like it had made its point.
The night went very, very quiet—only the current audible now, as if even the animals recognized this was someone worth listening to.
And the stranger continued to grin.
"Exactly," he said, like it explained anything.
In the same way tributaries don't explain themselves to the source—they just flow.
Pwètuwiyus would disagree.
His frustrated scowl was edging toward something committed now—the kind that comes from being outmaneuvered by someone who won't even pretend to play the game. He was not going to be the one who gave up first.
He pressed on with the third important question: "Then what clan do you belong to? Wolf? Turtle? Turkey? Which lodge is yours?"
One of the older hunters muttered under his breath, half-laughing: "Look at that grin. Wolf clan, no question."
A few others nodded, grateful for the joke, grateful for something familiar to hold onto. Easier to name him than to leave him floating.
The stranger's eyebrow lifted, amused. "Lodge?" He flung his arms wide, gesturing to everything and nothing—the darkness beyond the fire, the trees, the water, the sky. "I've got miles of lodge! Walk a day, walk a week—still mine."
"That's not—" Pwètuwiyus started.
"Still mine," the stranger echoed, his wink like the skip of a stone.
Murmurs moved through the circle like current.
A few laughs—uncertain and delighted both, though the uncertain half swallowed itself quick. Someone glanced toward the dark water beyond the firelight, then back at the man still dripping onto their dirt, and decided this was not a night for arguments.
Nikànataemixkwe, who was not that someone, tried again. Patient. Stubborn. The kind of stubborn that outlasts mountains and grinds them into valleys.
"Wherever the banks are soft."
"Wherever the water provides."
"Where are your clothes from?"
"The hands of the people who made them."
Ebb, and flow. Incoming, outgoing.
Every question met with an answer that only raised more. Each time, the stranger pulled the circle in with his grin, like there was a joke no one else had been let in on. Each time, they pushed back, trying to find the man inside the mystery.
(They wouldn't. He's more than the shape they were looking for.)
For the rest? It felt like watching the tide watch them back. Because there was something familiar in the way he spoke—constant, present, whether you needed it or not.
Someone passed the stranger another bowl of stew. He accepted it with a nod, easy as breathing, like he'd been part of this fire his whole life.
Nikànataemixkwe set down her stirring stick. Folded her hands. Met his eyes across the fire with the look of someone who had decided, somewhere in the last few minutes, that this was no longer an interrogation.
Finally, she asked the final important question: "And your kin?"
The stranger paused. For the first time all night. Not solemn—just present. Like he wanted this answer to land right.
He set the bowl down. Looked around the fire, deliberate and sure, meeting eyes one by one.
He gestured around the circle, casual as breath, casual as current. "The men who dive for mussels. The women who gather rush and reed. The children who splash in the shallows. The elders who remember when the banks ran different."
His hand came to rest against his chest.
"And the fish who journey from the sea. The reeds that hold the wetlands together. The canoes that carry you home."
He let that settle—heavy as a truth lodged in the chest.
Silence again. But not the uncomfortable kind.
Pwètuwiyus, unyielding to the end, muttered: "…That's not an answer."
The stranger only shrugged, grin gleaming alongside his beads—shell and bone catching the light like small, patient witnesses. "Sure it is."
But it was fonder, somehow. He raised his bowl in Pwètuwiyus's direction. A toast. A dare. A thank-you for playing.
And that was the moment the tension broke—the circle exhaling as one body, half-exasperated, half-bewitched. Because he wasn't going to give them the answers they wanted.
He was only going to give them something honest.
By dawn, the whispers had already started to shift shape, the way a river shapes the land it has always belonged to.
They already know the answer.
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