Author’s Note
The places in this story with the exception of Phoenix, Tucson, and other actual cities are all fictitious. The InDinay do not exist in the real world, although I envision them as an Athabascan people combining traits and customs of the modern Navajo and Apache. Their hypothetical reservation occupies a chunk of northeastern Arizona, where the actual Navajo, Hopi, and White Mountain Apache reservations exist.
The characters are also strictly figments of my imagination, although people who knew me long ago might see similarities between Mari’s character and mine at the same age. I, too, trained horses so everything in this story about such work is based on my actual experiences. I had a much easier time than Mari did though, eventually went off to college, and radically c
