“Snow Without End”
The snow was quiet—too quiet for what it carried.
Tayanita pressed forward, each step sinking into the white, each breath a prayer he couldn’t finish. He held his walking stick tightly and kept his eyes low. Beside him, his wife rode slowly on their last remaining horse, the reins loose in her hands. She had not spoken since the morning they buried their daughter beneath frozen earth.
Behind them, their people stretched like a faded thread—wrapped in blue and green blankets, walking without songs. Somewhere in the whiteness, a family paused to kneel beside another lost one. No time for ceremony. Just earth, tears, and snow.
They were Cherokee. And this was not a journey—it was a removal. A forced march through ice and heartbreak, ordered by a government that called it relocation. But the people called it by its true name: Nunna daul Isunyi—“The Trail Where They Cried.”
Still, they walked. Because to stop was to die.
Tayanita’s grandmother had once told him, “We are the roots of the trees. Even when cut down, we grow again.”
And so he walked. Not toward a new home, but toward the promise that their stories would not be erased. That even if the world was blank with snow, their footprints would remain.
Each step was a declaration:
We are still here.
.
.
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