``Its back,'' the doctor said.
The woman warrior already knew that. She looked down her great nose at the doctor. Eyes like obsidian chips. Cheekbones like the Hoover Dam.
``We will fight,'' she said.
And she endured the radiation, withstood the chemotherapy. Sat in the sweat lodge day after day. Drank the root infusions.
The woman warrior had never learned to write, though she could read well enough. She did not do beadwork or weaving. She was no silver smith or potter. As a girl she watched the stars and learned their movements in the sky. Then one winter night she felt them sucking out her soul. She turned her eyes back to the earth.
When she was very young the warriors had invited her to join their society. The honor was great, though she knew it was an act of desperation.
Alcohol assisted her in meditations. Then alcohol became her drug and she bore five children in that time.
And her children grew and alcohol and heroin became their drugs and their children grew and alcohol and methamphetamine became their drugs and her home was filled with darkness and beer cans.
And her children and her children's children began to die because there was no place to go. And the woman warrior began to fight.
She went into rehab once, twice, three times. When they wouldn't take her back a fourth time she did it on her own. Got clean. Took her great grandchildren and fought to keep their lives.
A son in law became her friend. Husband to a long dead daughter. But still he took her money. There were social workers, priests, the long house. There was help but nothing helped.
One winter night when the sky was filled with stars, the bitterness in her trailer forced her outside as it had so often done. She sat on a kitchen chair in the dog shit dirt and she held her purse tight in her hands as she always did and a soft wind blew her hair across her face. She turned her face to the sky and allowed the stars to suck out her soul.