Frances Washburn (Lakota) is emerita professor of American Indian studies and English at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Elsie’s Business (Nebraska, 2006), The Sacred White Turkey (Nebraska, 2010), and The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band. Her new book, An Endangered Species, was published by Bison Books in July.

Tom Warder, born on the Pine Ridge Reservation, works at the LaCreek refuge, which hosts the nation’s last remaining trumpeter swans. The refuge manager assigns Tom, who owns land adjacent to the refuge, to be the swans’ day-to-day caretaker. Tom’s land isn’t productive enough to make a sole living from it, so he leases grazing rights to white rancher Bart Johnson.

Bart has fallen into debt and is unable to pay the lease he owes not only on Tom’s land but also on land he leases from other Native landowners. As he sinks into debt his wife, Betty, becomes more extravagant and resistant to pleas for economy, while their son, Brian, becomes fascinated with hunting and begins stalking the trumpeter swans for the thrill of killing one. As his finances and his family fall apart, Bart takes to drinking. Meanwhile Tom’s wife, Anna, and three daughters struggle to make ends meet, though their eldest daughter, Bit, who often assists her father in the care of the swans, is bright and determined to become something. Where Bit is the hope of her family, Brian is the disaster of his.

An Endangered Species is a tale of two families, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, bound to circumstances largely beyond their control, and struggling to survive on the upper Great Plains during the 1960s.

Bill and Martha were not supposed to be outside their pen, but they escaped for an early morning walk, searching the watery ditches for their breakfast of arrowhead roots and tubers, speaking their one-word vocabulary: hoo-hoo. Martha tugged with her black beak at a particularly tough root, bracing her flat feet, her long neck stretched as the root resisted. The slanted rays of the rising sun turned her white feathers a soft shade of gold as Bill stumped over to help his mate. When the shot came, Bill raised his head in time to see the red flower blossom on Martha’s breast, watching as she slumped and fell, the puddling blood darkening a patch of gray-brown road dust. Bill stepped aside, avoiding the spreading wet, looking for the source of the sound, and when he heard no further shots, he tentatively moved closer to Martha, poking at her with his beak, poking again, then again, nudging, silently pleading for her to get up, but she was still and silent as a light breeze ruffled her feathers. He lifted his head, stretched his long neck, fluttered his wings as he strutted back and forth, back and forth and around Martha crying out, “oh Oh, oh Oh, oh Oh.”

When he heard the sound of footsteps crunching in the coarse dirt and pebbles of the road, he moved away from the body, stepped sideways, his cries intermittent. The kid walked up to Martha, shoved her with his boot and said, “Huh.” He looked over at Bill, less than ten feet away, yelled “Boo,” and laughed as Bill stepped away, six foot wide wingspan fluttering as he continued to cry out, “oh Oh!” The kid leveled the shotgun he carried at Bill and said, “Boom!” Bill faced the gun.

The kid leaned over, grabbed Martha by the neck and hoisted her twenty plus pound weight so the body hung over his back, blood dripping from the wound in her breast. He cradled the shotgun in his other arm. Without looking back at Bill, the kid walked away down the road. For a hundred yards or more Bill followed, crying out, louder and louder, until the kid leaped the borrow ditch, awkward with the heavy trumpeter swan over his shoulder, caught his balance, and walked off across the field.

Bill paced on the road side of the ditch, calling and calling, flapping his wings.