text: We are sheepherders existing in badlands at the foot of the mountains. In one season we take our sheep, friends we have known since forever, out into prairies bejeweled with carpeting of flowers purple, gold, yellow, white and blue. Everything changes, prairies dry up, then some of us go up different paths with different sheep into the mountains. My older cousin Lucy taught me how to love when neither of us had hair growing "down there." I am now a magnificent, slender, crazy young man. She is somewhat fat, thick hair collected into a piggytail as is the way of our people, popular with the everybody, but not on any boy's list of potential wives. I don't know why that should be, she is absolutely delightful. Her smile makes the wind laugh and her laugh makes the sheep pee. Although my mother and Lucy's father, my mother's brother, and indeed the whole tribe, would not approve of intimacy between relatives, still, since an early age, they have always arranged things for us to be together. When we were told to sleep out in the barn on a cold night when the house was full of guests, what must they have been thinking? Now that I am older, I realized how lucky it is that she did not get pregnant. And now, we are paired together again, to accompany some sheep 20 miles away, high up in a lonely area. There is an icy stream, craggy rocks, we sleep under the stars unless it rains, when we retreat into an ancient cabin full of spider webs. Lucy doesn't care for spiders, but me, I fear nothing! Not really much to do, chasing and controlling sheep is kind of challenging and entertaining. One night, while digesting our simple rabbit-onion-chile-cornmeal porridge, we began talking about the White missionary lady, and her mysterious preaching. I and the other men paid no attention to her nonsense about some White Man's book and ridiculous stories that clearly were impossible. There was this woman who claimed to have gotten pregnant without sex, and her son bragged he was a god! White people are stupid, none of the real humans would ever believe such fantasies. Lucy and a few other women, however, were tricked, and listened to the White woman's lies, and now the infection spread around the village like fleas on homeless dogs. So Lucy couldn't help but ask me, as a way to keep on talking before going to sleep in front of the campfire "Where is God I wonder?" Our shaman has told us the stories of our people. How the stars made love, and sent fairies to earth as raindrops, and the local goddess of the earth woke up, and the fairies grew up as maize. There is no single all-powerful "God," that would be an imbalance of power. What lightning bolt can claim to be "God" when it only exists a moment. What "God" is a fire, that burns out and becomes ash? Still, it is a fair question I suppose. "In the sky, obviously!" I retorted contemptuously. Lucy sighed, looking up at the stars, shimmering and shining magnificently in the cold dark moonless sky. "Where? I don't see him." "Him? No no, all the sky and the stars and the clouds, that is God!" "I just don't see it! I see the Plow, and the Bear and the Dog. But where is God?" I was beginning to like this game. "Ha ha ha, must be Father Sun and Sister Moon then!" Lucy shook her head, and closed her eyes. "No, the White lady said God is always with us. Father Sun leaves us every night! The White Lady said God is unchangeable. Sister Moon grows to a bright happy disk and shrinks to sad blackness, that is not unchangeable." I noticed some eyes gleaming redly up on some tree branch. "Look there, Lucy, there is God!" Lucy snorted. "No, that is only Cousin Porcupine, looking for food in the oak branches." I looked around. Down by the creek there was a rustling noise. "Quick, quick, over there!" I pointed. "Surely that is God!" Lucy stared with a frightened expression, squinting. "Oh, that is only Brother Coyote, following the scent of a rat." "I will show you exactly where God is, then Lucy, but you must promise to keep it a secret." She smiled, dreamily, as I stared into her eyes. "See, God is always there, if you know just where to look.