Navajo boy in school

In jeans and T-shirt, signatured ''Navajo Power,'' he sits, arms folded, a miniature, inscrutable mountain; listening to a young man with long hair, read from Longfellow's Hiawatha; outwardly he is attentive, inwardly, he wraps the invisible striped blanket of the Dineh about him. He hears the uneven music of mountain stream making its way over violet rocks, the faint, far sound of sheep bells, listens for the wary crunch of brush, breaking beneath a bear's descent, until a swish of Brother Wind whispers in through the school window and teases his papers. The teacher smiles with understanding, thinking, as the boy fingers his headband, believing, as she sees the dreaming in his eyes, he has heard his own poem.