Descending Star

PACK

Everyone called big Sam Uley's log cabin "Emily's place," because she had completely transformed the filthy little den over the past three months.

Sam had been working a menial job at the lumber yard last summer, just a paycheck to tide himself over until he could transition out of his childhood bedroom into an apartment and then focus on settling into something more permanent. Then in early September the strange rapid fever had struck. He'd bought a test kit and had come up negative for the plague, so he had gone to bed for a day, to try to sweat it out. The fever had abated a few times and had returned with a vengeance, over the course of two or three days. The local doc had recommended aspirin and bed rest. The lumber yard's on-staff medic had been flummoxed by it, too. Then Sam's old man had told the Council Elders. That was when Harry Clearwater and Jez Ateara had stopped by to tell him what was happening.

The fever had made the rounds through his body. His head had been the worst. Then his spine. He'd even felt it in his legs and arms. His oral temperature had read a normal ninety-eight point five, yet his feet and ankles had felt like they were burning up.

Then the fevers had abated entirely a few days later. And that had been the strangest of all. He had felt great, like instant recovery, but onto a higher plane. His heart rate had settled down to a slow, steady forty-two beats per second. He had discovered on attempting to dress for work that his shirts and coveralls no longer fit. Puzzled, he ran a tape measure down the wall and marked himself. It had struck him as crazy that he had seemed to have grown by four inches. And weirdest of all, despite an inexplicable and massive growth spurt at nineteen and a half years old, he had lost weight. A lot. He'd gone down from two-ten to one-ninety. The fever had left other, more visible aftereffects. Most strange of all were his fingernails and toenails. It was almost like they'd lost their blood supply and gone dead. His nails had gone white as bone. But they were thicker than he'd recalled, too.

Then he'd gone to a mirror and had started to brush his teeth.

He had dropped everything, bolted out of the bathroom, and called Harry Clearwater.

Harry, Jez and Billy had set him down with his Ma and told him what he'd become, in the course of which Sam had gripped the oak kitchen table impulsively and had sunken his nails so deeply into the board that he'd snapped it lengthwise.

"This is a good thing," Harry had said. "A great thing. We thought this era was over for us. A great thing," he had repeated. "Don't sweat your table, Ma Uley, the Council will pay for it."

Billy had chimed in, "Speaking of the Council, Sam, we have funds set aside. For transitions. We'll set up a stipend. You're now acting Head."

As the Tribal Council Head pro tempore, the modest stipend had enabled Sam to quit his job at the lumber yard and move out, but the last part took awhile. He had picked a half acre tree lot on Reservation land, off the main road, and had gone to work on the construction of a homestead of his own. The Council had offered material assistance and even some spare hands on weekends for the hard labor, but Sam had refused all aid and built the log cabin from local treestock with a gas chain saw and hand tools over the course of September. For utilities, the Council had paid for an Artesian well and power from the street. He had installed a hot tub on the back porch, and he'd built an outhouse at the tree line.

Sam didn't need much else, not anymore.

Leah Clearwater had nursed a crush on Sam Uley ever since middle school. All the Council girls had swooned over him at one time or another. He'd always been the oldest of the boys, always the most courteous, the most mature, the first to notice that Leah and her friends weren't girls anymore. Not that he had ever acted on their overtures. He knew their fathers and mothers, for one thing, and also he'd perceived them as kid sisters, ever since he'd been a kid himself, given they had all grown up together.