Copyright 2002 - 2003 by Nicholas6996@hotmail.com The author retains all rights to this story and requests that you do not alter or post this story in any form without his permission. The following is a work of fiction.

This story will contain gifts of love and caring between a man and a boy. If you don't like love, then stop reading now. If love and caring between unrelated men and boys is illegal where you are, then I'm sorry for you. If you aren't old enough to legally read this story, then I hope someone loves you enough to read it to you. If you know of a Finding Place and have stories about it, please give me a gift and share.

My deepest thanks to Rod, I name him friend and what he's given me helps make this story sing.

To Ganymede and Teglin I thank you for the beauty you have shared and hope this reflects a fraction of the light you shine so brightly.

Namaste!

Part Three - Running Deer and Straighthorn

The sun was full up by the time I got to Ogallala. The memories of Straighthorn's cooking and those marvelous morning fireplace bacon and eggs had set my stomach growling too. I don't think I had ever been able to tell Maria how much I loved Straighthorn's range camp cooking. It was a more primal meal than she made at the ranch. While she could make the most delicious smells fill up the house and call me by the nose from out of sleep or inside a book, his was yet another dimension to the senses. An open fire on the hearth, cottonwood providing a quick sure flame, then scrub oak providing coals and settled deep deep heat. The aroma of the bacon mixed with smells of crackling wood. The range of spices he seemed to draw from inside a little magic pouch. Wild sage and thyme spread lightly in the eggs to tease and then caress the tongue. Juniper and mint tossed on the fire arousing secret ancient retrospection from deep within the very core of body's memory. Pine nuts roasted in the bacon grease and served with rounds of Indian-corn frybread to coat the mouth with a profound and satisfying fullness. All created kneeling before the fire, two or three black and aged iron skillets and a sooted blackened coffee pot always on the side.

Cooking and eating at the range line shack had been as much a part of reverence for the earth mother as everything Straighthorn did.

As I grabbed a plastic breakfast from the take-out window and sipped the coffee from an oil based styro cup I mused on the simple natural things that Straighthorn had shown me and Running Deer that summer.

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That night Running Deer asked Straighthorn a question I didn't understand. Hearing the answer he wanted, he grabbed me by the hand and led me running to the tipis. Entering one I looked around amazed. I'd never been inside before and expected it to be just a round wall around a circle in the grass. This tipi was far different. Around the walls the whole inside was covered in hanging skins from just about our shoulder height. They were painted with an amazing array of pictures. At first glance I saw men and horses, buffalo, the moon and stars and a hundred other things I couldn't take in all at once. The floor was completely covered in buffalo robes. I knew what they were because Grandfather had one at the ranch. The thick full dark brown fur made walking seem like floating on a sea of bears, soft and warm beneath my toes.

There was a little hanging place of clothes, they must have been for Running Deer, they looked the size of my own jeans and shirts. But these weren't jeans or poplin, they were deerskin I would guess. I touched a shirt and if I thought the buffalo beneath my feet was soft, this shirt was like caressing the cotton balls from the inside of the pill bottles Grandfather had. I touched it and then stroked it, I'd never felt anything so soft. Then I blushed to realize I had. When holding Running Deer that afternoon, with him against my chest, his back and arms had been this smooth and soft. My penis must have heard my thoughts because he sprang up hard again.

Running Deer reached out his arms and circled round my neck. Looking me in the eyes, he smiled and pulled me close in the mirror of our earlier embrace. This time my arms went around his chest and as my hard little dickie met his softer one, he moaned and wiggled against me. His shot up equal to mine and we ground them together again feeling that warm and fuzzy glow inside our heads as electric sparks seemed to jump between our dicks.

The glow was overpowering and as I thought I'd almost start to pee I pushed away a little. I don't know if Running Deer thought I was falling, but he let one arm come off my back and steadied me by placing it on my chest. I gasped as his fingers touched my nipple. I thought the electricity in my dick was strong, but the shock his fingers caused my tit was like a spike right through me. He quickly drew his hand away, I guess he thought he'd hurt me.

I couldn't let it go! I had to have it back. I grabbed his hand and slammed it back against my chest and held it there, then let it go and moved my own across the inch or so of space and touched him too.

He did lose control as I gently touched his nipple. His legs seemed to crumple and I just followed him down and we were both lying in the buffalo robes, holding each other, one finger each softly touching hardened nipples nub and strident penises demanding thrusts against each other. We must have lain like that for minutes and then I pulled away a bit and began to run my fingers around his chest and over first his left and then his right hard tit. He groaned and moaned so I knew this was as good for him as me. His eyes were closed but his hand against my chest began it's own soft questing exploration. I could have stayed like this forever, watching him smile through pleasure neither one of us had ever known.

The sweet trilling of the meadowlark woke me. I found I was still holding Running Deer, our legs completely tangled up, my cheek against his chest. His left arm around my shoulders and his right cupping my butt cheek like he wanted to never let my penis stop touching against his skin. We both were hard as rocks, I wondered if we had been that way all night. I needed though to make it to the bushes. As I looked at the boy beneath me and saw the beauty of his sleeping face I couldn't help but softly brush a stray lock of hair from down across his cheek. My movement woke him and he opened those deep dark black illimitable pools of eyes. As if we knew somehow what to do, I lifted my head a bit and quietly, softly, gently we touched our lips and kissed.

Maria had tenderly mended a scraped knee or two, or certainly patted my brow and rubbed my chest with vapor rub when I was sick, but this was very different. I'd never felt a mother's kiss. The only arms that ever held me and passed me love were Grandfather's. I'd not ever thought of this as bad, it was just the fact of my young life. I never had a mom or dad, I never needed one. Whatever I was, good or bad that day, Grandfather held me, kissed my brow, hugged me close, settled me in his lap and I knew that I was loved. Completely. Totally. Forever.

Now here among the buffalo robes and in the arms of Running Deer I knew this was another part of that. I could feel it to my toes. This boy I held and who held me was somehow an extension of Grandfather's love. A pure and simple connection to myself, a part of me I'd never known was missing.

From that first moment at the stream and eating Straighthorn's stew buck naked to the world, both Running Deer and I were like reflected mirror twins. Separated all these years yet still reading each other's thoughts and completely in accord. This despite the fact he seemed to have no single word of English and I had but a young child's grasp of Lakota. It didn't matter. We knew the sun, we knew the wind, we knew the touch of water from our stream. We'd laugh and run and play through the tall prairie grass and among our precious cottonwoods.

I managed to get across the idea of our lost and soon-to-be-found treasure and Running Deer would help me as we would make a mad dash around our grove of trees. Rocks were turned and turned and turned again. The banks of the stream were scoured. Running Deer even climbed one of the trees to see if the bird's nest half way up might hold a clue.

We'd soon lose the will to hunt and be off into tag or skipping rocks or some such game. We'd lay beneath the trees and watch the magic animals in the clouds float by. But most of all we'd touch. We'd touch our shoulders and our knees as we sat and wolfed down Straighthorn's wondrous food: we'd sit only side by side. We'd touch by holding hands as we romped in stream and grasses. We'd touch our toes together between Straighthorn's legs as he'd sit on the porch between us and point out and teach us the Lakota stars. We'd cuddle together near the fire on a windy and rainy night and listen to his stories of the earth and Trickster Coyote and Iktomi. We'd touch all night inside our cave of buffalo robes.

Straighthorn changed with Grandfather and Grandfather Coyote away. He physically changed out of jeans, boots and western shirts and into deerskin moccasins with jerkin and breechcloth. He changed in actions too; he took an active role in our everyday life. He seemed to bridge the language gap between us as easily as we. He'd tell an ancient tale of the rabbit people and I'd not know if he told it in Lakota or English but we would both be spellbound as he spoke. Everyday he'd walk with us after breakfast. He'd take us out upon the prairie or maybe back into our stream. He'd speak of the Wakan Tanka and all the gifts they gave. He taught us how to see the quail's nest, full of baby birds striving for their mother's gifts of food yet completely hidden. He made us use the eyes inside our ears and the fingers of our nose to see and feel the life around us while we sat perfectly still holding our eyes tight shut. He'd ask a hundred questions about what we thought that we had seen and felt and heard and smelled. We learned to look and feel and taste and listen more than once.

In all the years I'd splashed around our stream I'd never seen the fish. He showed us where they hid and how to call them out. He had us pet them through the stillness of our waiting hands and the suspension of our doubt.

He'd teach us how to call the crow and where to find the shining little stones and rocks it loved so well. We learned to sit, backs pressed together feet drawn up and hold the shining offerings out. Brother Crow would land some feet away and cock his head and size us up. Then talking just below his breath he'd hop around and look at us from right and left. He'd finally get his nerve, or figure we'd lost ours, and hopping near he'd twist his neck and look at one of us from almost upside down. Then with a caw he'd reach his beak so slowly out and take the offered gift. Next time he came he'd drop a duller stone or piece of string or feather as if a gift-for-gift was part of living. Then he'd pick our other self and take that offered gift.

All this was done as we were fed by food and by the sun. Our bodies glistened from the stream, Running Deer's a honey brown, mine a little more toward gold. I loved to watch Straighthorn unbraid then rinse and rebraid my brother's hair. I wished my silver shock was as long and lustrously as dark.

One day Straighthorn had me take the task and braid Running Deer back up. He sat between my legs my stomach nestling against the hollow of his back. His hair was like the finest threads Maria used as she did her embroidery. It shimmered and I watched the light glint from the edges of each crossing yet be utterly absorbed in the darkness of the thickness above the twining layers. My holding of his hair and the closeness of our touch made my penis rise up stuck there between our bodies. It nestled in itself and seemed to find a crease just made to hold it when we sat this way. I never wanted to move again. But soon enough the braid was made and Running Deer grabbed my hands and pulled them round his chest. He leaned back into me and seemed to move his butt a bit and it squeezed my dick in pulses. He took my hands and ran them down his chest, across his stomach and suddenly they were holding on his rigid pole for the first time.

The tingling running up my spine from my gently squeezed dick and now the soft and steely hard tight and rigid loosely moving skin beneath my fingers seemed to sing a song all of it's own inside my head. I couldn't stand how good it felt to hold his throbbing dick. I could not imagine how anything as good as this had escaped us in our fur lined cave.

Running Deer's hands on mine slowly urged me up and down his silky slender stone hard shaft and then suddenly they became almost frantic in their insistent strokes. He seemed to melt into my chest and as his bottom squeezed my dick, his penis seemed to push against my fingers as if it was growing yet some more. He arched his neck against my shoulder and suddenly he cried out as his whole body seemed to shiver and yet to be rock still all at the very same time. His hands stopped their frantic motions and pushed mine down against the bones of his hips and if anything he dissolved more into me, as if the reflection of ourselves was merged into a single boy for just that briefest moment in time.

I held him to me and kissed his neck where it was near my lips and loved him joining to me by the incredible surge of energy he passed.

Next thing I knew Straighthorn was there beside me gently releasing Running Deer's hands from mine and lifting mine from my brother's lap. His other hand was alternating as it petted down my back and then across Running Deer's cheek near where I had kissed. He was smiling softly to us and humming a deep and rhythmic chant. I knew he was happy for us, for Running Deer. He lifted the boy from against my chest and held him on one hip. Reaching out with his other hand he took mine and led us to our tipi. It was just mid afternoon, but Straighthorn led me inside and pulled aside a pathway deep into our nest. He laid me down and then almost handed Running Deer to me and arranged him so his cheek was on my chest and his body pressed against my side. Then taking one of Running Deer's small hands he led it down my chest into the valley of my stomach and up across and down around my own still straining pole. I thought I'd gone to heaven this touch was so light and yet so strong. It drove a thousand questing tendrils of pleasure deep inside my hips, driving up my stomach and my chest, exploding in my brain. The fingers curled around my dick and my free hand flew down to meet them. I held Straighthorn's hand with Running Deer's inside against my balls and then began to draw them up and down. I'd never known such feelings. I could tell my own butt cheeks were clenching and unclenching with each stroke along my pole. The skin along my penis sliding up and down as if it was completely loose, yet oh so firmly these sensations were attached. Running Deer gave a little moan and I saw his eyelashes flicker open. He smiled a giant peaceful smile and closed them back again. His hand now took control of the motion as if he knew from deep within his peace that now the mirror should shine back. I felt Straighthorn's hand slip from between us and knew he left the tipi chanting as he went.

Suddenly my eyes seemed to fail to see. My breath was caught just beneath my chest. My penis seemed to sing a loud and unfamiliar well known note and my body exploded from the inside out. My mind was full of stars and flashing moons and golden suns all at the same time. My chest was crying out in ecstasy to take a half a dozen sobbing breaths. My penis and my balls were fire and I could hardly stand Running Deer's sweet and loving touch. I grabbed his hand and held it to my bones as he'd held mine and I cried out calling him back in to me, back into my dissolving breast, back into the merging boy we'd touched so briefly. My body too went rigid and shaking all together. I fell in him, into his life, into his being, into our single self.