they blended into each other, blues stretching to the empty horizon, and then again blues rising vertically to the beginning of time and space. It was the only place for their house so Joe had asked the Tribal Council for that land. It would make an inviolable aerie where he and Becky would dwell with all the spirits of the lake and sky and there paint magnificent pictures for them. Joe pulled himself up over the top of the cliff and stood in icy aloneness alongside the river as it plunged down the water-smoothed stone and ran wildly away towards the lake, churning and flashing against the iron red rocks of the river bed, a fantasy of sunlight and water that sparkled brilliantly in his eyes and made them tear. He stepped tentatively onto a wet rock. It would be simple if he just slipped. But he didn't slip. Perhaps it wouldn't work anyway. Perhaps it would only be an accident. Broken legs or hips or backs were not on the agenda. He might use the small revolver he carried for protection to end abruptly all thoughts, all hatreds, all disappointments and all possibilities. This was his land, the land of his grandfathers, an eternity removed from the white civilization of the city where he had to go to sell his art. He did sell his art. His last canvas had sold for almost $200,000. He was doing well. They were doing well. Their house, the one he had dreamed, before he commissioned an architect had been in the most prestigious architecture and home magazines. “A triumph of design and function,” one writer called it when first designed. Tourists had come in such numbers to see it and hopefully meet the great man that Joe finally put up No Trespassing signs to keep them away and a gate to ensure they didn't ignore the signs. Becky didn't like the gate or the signs. She liked company because it distracted her from her painting. Visitors kept her from recognizing that her work was not going well. Joe took her things with him to the Twin Cities and tried to get his agent interested but he wasn't. Sometimes in the summer when tourists streamed through the area Becky would sell her paintings to tourists who were looking for souvenirs of their trip. She got $100 for one portrait of an old woman doing bead work. So far that was the monetary zenith of her work. From the top of the cliff Joe could see the lake. It was calm and still. From here there was no hint of the ugliness of Duluth and Two Harbors or Silver Bay where the ores wrenched out of the earth up on the Mesabi were loaded into the boats that would sail the Great Lakes, through the Soo Canals down into Erie and the great steel mills of Pittsburgh. Here, on the height of Tettegouche the lake was what it was, a tear drop from the Great Spirit. One might even try walking across it today, a glistening sapphire and then just slip away into its great icy depths to be at one with it. But it was too cold to pursue any thought more than