The Power of the Dog

by Thomas Savage

And thus do we excuse our failures, by admitting them.

How does one man, how does one man get the power to make the rest see in themselves what he sees in them? Where does he get the authority?

The agent was not a bad fellow, but against the arrival of the men from the Department of the Interior, he thought it expedient to sometimes enforce the rules of the reservation. No liquor sold or consumed. All the world knows Indians do not drink so well as white people. No leaving the reservation without a permit. The whites could not be bothered with wandering Indians. Permits were granted only for some pressing reason. As the Indians had no place to go and no friends to shelter them, the question seldom came up. No firearms. There was no need for firearms. Once the Indians lived on the reservation, all meat was doled out to them at the government store. But Edward Nappo had a gun, a twenty-two rifle that had belonged to his father and the last

Sometimes you don’t have to know, to remember.

it resembled one of those story-and-a-half bungalows that sprang up in California around the First World War;