She’s always suggesting books like a literary marriage broker, wedding readers to the titles just right for them.

A year is plenty of time to fit in, right? Like a square peg is going to fit into a round hole if you just give it time? You could say that when I arrived here in the middle of my seventh-grade year I settled into a well-defined niche that was purely my own and remains so in eighth grade. The niche of a minuscule, mouthy Mohawk misfit. And nothing is going to change that.

But I didn’t care. I just wanted to be close to them and feel their presence. I felt as if I were in there with them, looking out of their eyes, sharing their thoughts.

If it wasn’t for good,” my mother says, “we human beings would have been wiped out a long time ago. Either the monsters would have gotten us or we would have killed each other off with greed and jealousy and anger. So we have to believe in good. We have to look for the good in ourselves.

That story I loved so much as a child has become all too real to me now. But I’m not the boy in that old story who could run forever without tiring. I don’t have a bow and arrow. No weapons at all.

There is a kind of certainty that seems to characterize Jared Smith’s best work, an understanding about place and the flow of spirit that makes you think of Thoreau along with a commitment as fierce as that of Pablo Neruda.

He’s taken courses on things like animal tracking, making a fire with a bow drill, building survival shelters in the forest. Now, my being an Indian, you might imagine I would know about all that stuff. But most Indian kids, even those on the rez, are not learning those things anymore. They’re too busy doing all the things other kids do – watching DVDs, playing Xbox games, and downloading rap music on their iPods.

Perhaps this creature had once been a human, but his lust for power had been so great that he had done the things needed to transform him into a monster bear.

My story is both strange and true. I was born in the year the English call 1590. My family were leaders of the Patuxet people and I, too, was raised to lead. But in 1614 I was taken to Spain against my will. Now it is 1621 and I am again in my homeland. My name is Squanto. I would like to tell you my tale.

Like most of those who seek to harm the weak, he’s a coward at heart.