“Look, Blue Cloud, I can fly,” Black Bear yells as he jumps from the top of a rock with his arms stretching out to each side. His face is looking toward the sky with a broad and determined smile. Then, to his dismay and disbelief, he finds himself suddenly falling to the ground, with an enormously painful thud.
Laughing, Blue Cloud responds, “I think that you forgot to make your arms move like a bird, Black Bear.” As Black Bear begins to pick himself up from the ground, they both continue to laugh.
“I don’t know why I’m laughing, Blue Cloud. That really hurt!” he said, as he stood rubbing his side to relieve the pain.
“What’s the matter, my tribal brother? You just fell from the sky and hit the ground! With a thud!!! A big thud! The biggest thud I have ever seen,” Blue Cloud says with a lot of expression.
“It was pretty big, wasn’t it?”
Blue Cloud continues laughing. “Your face looked so funny when you realized that you were going down, rather than soaring into the sky. Then, when you hit the ground, you were lucky you hit sand, rather than another rock. You looked like an eagle that had his nose stuck in the ground, his feet dangling in the air.”
Blue Cloud falls to the ground laughing, so hard he has to hold his stomach as he adds, “I think that you got mixed up, my Brother. It was your face that was supposed to be looking at the sky, not your feet,”
Trying to stand up from his blundered flying encounter with the ground, Black Bear painfully says, “Right now, I feel like I am a hundred years old. I hurt everywhere.”
Smiling, Blue Cloud says, “You look like it also, my Brother. But forget about your pain and watch me. I can jump like a rabbit.” Blue Cloud jumps flawlessly from one rock to another.
“You always do everything perfectly Blue Cloud,” Black Bear answers, still holding onto his painful side.
* * *
“Jon, aren’t they cute little Indian boys?”
Walking back down the hall, Daniel sticks his head into their room. “I forgot to tell you that Evan’s name is Blue Cloud.”
“Ah, that will help us to understand what we are watching,” Jon says kindly.