Two Blankets: A Novel of the West

Trapped in the deadly conflict between two cultures, a young native girl struggles to survive.

In 1850, on the great Columbia River, a ten-year-old Nez Perce girl's life is changed forever. Stolen and made a mistshimus--a slave--to the Chinook, Little Mouse struggles to escape only to be caught and beaten. Tracked and returned a third time, the chief of the local band, Tyee Running Blade, says he will kill her on her next attempt. She knows defeat at last and becomes Girl-With-No-Name, for as a mistshimus, she has no right to any property--not even a name.

When she becomes a woman, her favors are sold to the Tyee's son, Standing Bear. Unfortunately, they develop an affection for each other, something forbidden to a mistshimus and noble-born. She is cut from shoulder to wrist as punishment and sold to a white man, Marshall Johnston, to be his wife. So begin her struggles with a white man who does not care for her and a tribe for respect, earning a place in the history of the Chinook and her own name--Two Blankets.

Two Blankets is a true heroine you can believe in. With only the weapons she possesses, her cleverness, integrity, and honesty, can she hope to prevail against a tribe which owns her, a husband who abuses her, and the oncoming flood of settlers to whom she is only an obstacle.

R. L. Adare has been writing since he was a teenager. Taking a major in linguistics at university, his interest in anthropology and language development has frequently played a part in his writing. While studying linguistics he also took a minor in German, so he could read Hesse in the original as well as obtain a teaching credential. He has taught for ten years and been an accountant for thirty-five. Along the way, he and his wife owned a kite shop on the Oregon coast for ten years and lived on a thirty-six-foot sailboat for ten years, which they sailed down the coast from Seattle to Monterey. Among his favorite thousand authors are Zane Grey, Herman Hesse, D. H. Lawrence, C. J. Cherryh, Lawrence Durrell, Ursula Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Kurt Vonnegut, Jacqueline Cleary, and Diana Gabaldon. He has been published in Wings, Pass the Hemlock, The Whale Song Quarterly, Ariel Chart, The Wyrd, Saddlebag Dispatches and Cobra Lily. He lives with his wife of 35 years and their manx cat, Pixie, in Southwestern Oregon.