Life with Uncle George was strange at first, but we settled into a routine quick enough. Like he said, the tribe always looks after its own. Human nature and all that. We got ourselves situated, and Uncle George said he was glad to have young people around the place again. His own children were all older than Dad, and were scattered all over the rez and the nearby towns.
Dad got himself a job at the local grocery store, owned by a friend of Uncle George’s, and spent his spare time fixing up the house in lieu of rent. Despite my protests, I was enrolled at the local school — and while the white kids there weren’t exactly friendly, at least there was a sizeable component of tribe kids for me to hang around. I didn’t make any friends, as such — no one like Strongheart or Victory Stampede — but I was happy enough. Being part of a crowd, listening to their conversations and being a semi-accepted part of the group was more than sufficient.
For a few years things were almost good. Dad retained an almost obsessive hatred of phones and computers, and I steered clear of anything coloured pink and decorated with ponies. [11]
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[11] Sometimes kids at school would bring ponypads in, and I’d have to just get up and walk out before I started shaking. I didn’t want to hear Mom’s voice suddenly blaring out from one of them. Word spread around the rez about what had happened to her, and the other kids regarded me with something like awe for a few weeks before they moved on to the next thing.
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But things were working out. I started going by Lozen, until Dad was the only one who still called me Maggie. And even that waned, when I bugged him about it. We were spending more time together than we ever had before, and I felt like we were finally a proper family.
I was happy there.
It was a bit like a bubble, really. I knew, in an academic sense, that things were getting worse, out there. Food was still getting scarcer, and people were beginning to vanish. At first it was the old and the sick, those we could afford to lose. But then it was those who were sad, those who were lonely. And kids, too. I remember the first time we had a Humanity Preservation lesson. A twitchy guy in a tattered blazer standing up there, gesturing to his powerpoint and explaining what the ponies were trying to do to us.
I remember looking up at that photo of Celestia, smiling so benignly, and shuddering. She wanted to eat all of us. Consume everyone and spit us back out again as ponies and buffalo and cats.
But like I said, on the rez it didn’t really seem to touch us as much. We looked out for each other. Uncle George knew everyone, and he and the other oldies organised people to share food and help get the essentials when one family came up short. As times grew leaner he even organised a community garden where we could grow our own crops.
Even when things got really bad — when the army moved into town to shut down the Experience Centre, when school closed its doors for the last time, even when people from the neighbourhood slipped away, one by one, to emigrate and leave us forever — Uncle George’s will was as implacable as his body was frail, and on the rez he kept us all isolated. Safe.
But then the ponies came to town.