He had the advantage of short glides, but the volpla chief couldn't keep up with me. Sometimes trotting, sometimes walking fast, I got way ahead of him. My hard breathing arose as much out of my anxiety about the manner of handling this stranger as it did out of the exertion.
I rounded a bend in the creek and there was my son sitting on the grass near a cooking fire playing with a baby volpla and talking in English to an adult volpla who stood beside him. As I approached, my son tossed the baby into the air. The tiny planes opened and the baby drifted down to his waiting hands.
He said to the volpla beside him, "No, I'm sure you didn't come from the stars. The more I think about it, the more I'm sure my father—"
I yelled from behind them, "What business do you have telling them that?"
The male volpla jumped about two feet. My son turned his head slowly and looked at me. Then he handed the baby to the male and stood up.
"You haven't any business out here!" I was seething. He had destroyed the whole store of volpla legends with one small doubt.
He brushed the grass from his trousers and straightened. The way he was looking at me, I felt my anger turning to a kind of jelly.
"Dad, I killed one of these little people yesterday. I thought he was a hawk and I shot him when I was out hunting. I wouldn't have done that if you had told me about them."
I couldn't look at him. I stared at the grass and my face got hot.