THAT NIGHT, WHEN Angie retired for bed, she looked for her yarn to hold it to her as she usually did, but couldn’t find it. She looked all through the teepee for it but to no avail. Angie became frantic and began to tear her bedding apart. Halona stopped her and began rambling off in the Shoshone language that Angie had been ignoring for over a month, except for learning a few words from Kimana. Realizing that Halona had done something with her yarn, Angie knew that the only way to find out what happened to it was to learn to speak Shoshone, and that is exactly what Angie set in her mind to do.
Angie had a fitful night and couldn’t sleep… worrying that Halona may have thrown away her yarn or left it behind in the mountains. The next morning she searched all around their campsite, inside the teepee and outside, but still no sight of her yarn. She had to find her yarn, and she set her jaw just as she saw her father do so many times before.
I won’t give up, she told herself. It has to be here somewhere!
Angie listened to every word that was spoken in the village, and with Kimana and Chocheta’s help, she began to catch on to the language at a feverish pace. Every day and night she thought about her yarn, almost obsessively and it drove her to the point of practicing her new language exclusively, letting her English fade with the days, weeks and months.
Halona was amused at Angie’s grasp of her native tongue, but only called her a “silly girl” and criticized her pronunciation of the language.
Angie soon became fluent in the Shoshone language. Every day Angie would ask Halona for her yarn, but the old woman would say, “Cannot understand you.”
One day Angie told her in her best Shoshone wording, “You can understand me. You are choosing to ignore me, I will keep asking every day until you tell me where it is. I will not stop asking, ever!”
After a long silence, Halona relented and said, “The colored string is mine. Everything in teepee is mine. It is put away. If you want it, you must earn it. Then I will give it to you.”
“What do I need to do to earn it?” Angie asked.
“I will know, and you will know,” she answered. Halona refused to discuss it any further.
Angie was frustrated, but at least she had the hope of getting her yarn back.