Pierre was in North Dakota two years ago and bought a pair of well-made tomahawks at an Indian wares store. Though he never intended to return to North Dakota, and while it never crossed his mind to emulate what a non-native might think is the genuine way the Chippewa used their tomahawks, Pierre no sooner had the hatchets home than he began laboring with a whetstone and oil to put a keen edge on both blades. He then began making practice throws against the side of his garage; he made a point of practicing at least twice a week, and he always practiced at an hour when the noise of his activity would attract as little attention as possible. Once he had succeeded in getting the tomahawks to slice into his garage and nearly always penetrate to a depth where they really held fast, Pierre then black-chalked on the splintery white clapboard the silhouette of a standing person, and within two more months, he was rapid-throwing both hatchets into the center of the target. And though he’s kept practicing and practicing and sharpening and re-sharpening his tomahawks for nearly two years now, the wonder may really be that it’s taken all this time for Pierre to actually employ one or both of his souvenirs.


But that just happened on the parking lot of the North Point Shopping Mall here in Baltimore, where presumably, a guy named Curtis did something (or evoked something) strong enough to piss Pierre off big-time, and it was something sufficiently maddening to position Curtis on the silhouette-duplicating end, so to speak, of the first of Pierre’s two thrown tomahawks.


Curiously enough, a witness might have deduced something quite similar concerning the fate of a bystander who almost had the second tomahawk (after it completely missed Curtis) wedge into the area of her scalp where her left pigtail began. Importantly for her, however—though it meant zero, of course, to Curtis, and not really much to Pierre—the second tomahawk never found a sticking place and wound up sparking along the ground and skidding to a stop against a curb a rather far distance from where Pierre had originally let it fly.