FRIENDS

"How come I don't get to carry the gun?"

"Cause it's my gun and you're not old enough."

"You going to let me shoot it?"

"We'll see." The boy had heard his father say that so many times that it seemed the only natural response to Jon Jon's pleas. "What's wrong with the bow? You're a great shot with it. Even better than me."

"That was before you got the twenty-two. You'll be able to kill every rabbit before I can even get close enough to shoot."

"I ain't gonna kill every rabbit. We might not even see any."

"We could go over by Old Man Hill's brush pile."

"We got to go get Adunya. And Old Man Hill's brush pile's on the other side of the canyon."

"Steve?" Jon Jon slowed a step.

"Yeah?"

"Why'd Uncle Albin adopt Adunya?"

The boy stopped, buffalo grass tickling his ankle up his pant leg. "You know what happened to his dad. He didn't have no mom. Uncle Albin said he didn't have any other place to go. He had family, but none he ever met before."

"At least he would have fit in with them. He don't belong here."

"Just cause he ain't from here don't mean he don't belong." The boy reached down and scratched his ankle. "You ever seen anyone hunt like him? I know I ain't. Someone like that don't belong here, I don't know who does."

"You're the one who said they should ship him back to Ethiopia."

The boy started walking again, looking away from his younger brother's eyes. "That was before I got to know him. Before I thought about it. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. I don't believe it now anyhow.

"I think maybe you were right. Maybe we'd all be better off if he went back to Africa."

The boy turned, an incredulous look on his face.

Jon Jon's tone almost equaled a whisper. "I'm afraid of him."

"Afraid? Why?"

"He sometimes looks at me like I'm the one who chopped his dad."

"Why would he look at you like that? You're just seeing things." The boy tried to sound convincing, but he'd seen that same look.

"Remember when he killed one of them guinea's Uncle Albin keeps for bugs? That was spooky. And he looked at me like I was next."

The boy did remember. He remembered Adunya hitting that tamed guinea with a rock and then pouncing on it. While twisting its neck, he sat on it to keep it from scratching at him. It's wings slapped the ground, it shuddered, it's beak opened, and then it died. Adunya showed no reaction. He merely lifted the limp bird by the neck, carried it behind the cabin, and began plucking its feathers while the cats waited for a scrap.

"How's that different from shooting a cottontail? Sometimes they don't die right away and we got to finish them."

"We don't strangle them," Jon Jon said.

"Dead is dead."

The boy kicked a rock and watched it roll. Uncle Albin's cabin was just on the other side of the rise. Adunya would be waiting by now. He'd be waiting for his friends.