lanket, all he needed on this warm September day,
was tucked around his chest, leaving his arms free. He had begged to be
taken outside; the weather was so fine. As soon as the servants had
carried him out and left him and White Bear alone, he had fallen asleep.
These days, Pierre slept most of the time, as a baby would. But a baby
slept to build up its strength, Pierre because he was losing strength.

White Bear--he did not think of himself as Auguste now--laid out the
objects from his medicine bag on the unrolled blanket and contemplated
them. They represented the seven sacred directions. First, East. He
picked up a sparkling white rock and placed it on the east side of the
tree. The color of East was white and therefore was White Bear's own
color. Next was South. He took up the green stone on which the mound
builders had long ago carved the figure of a winged man. This he laid on
the earth next to the mattress on Pierre's left side. The ground under
the maple tree was bare, and an early morning rain had left it damp and
soft.

Now West. The spirits of men and women went West when they died, and the
color of West was red. He set the red stone, with dark honeycomb
markings that looked as if they had been painted on its highly polished
surface, on the ground at Pierre's feet. By the north side of the
mattress he placed a black stone, itself from the North, that Owl Carver
had engraved with an owl image. The fifth direction, Up, was blue, and
he put a blue stone, the color of Nancy Hale's eyes, on the pillow
beside Pierre's head. He set a piece of brown sandstone for the sixth
direction, Down, beside Pierre's blanket-covered feet.

Now for the seventh sacred direction--Here. He picked up the last and
largest item from his medicine bag--the claw of a grizzly bear that had
been killed by Black Hawk himself many years ago. After White Bear had
come back from his first spirit quest with the prediction that Black
Hawk would do deeds of courage and that his name would never be
forgotten, the war chief had made him a gift of the grizzly claw. White
Bear laid the saber-shaped claw on Pierre's chest, over his heart, with
the brown tip toward the cancerous lump in Pierre's belly that was
killing him.

He went back to his blanket and took out a dried gourd painted black and
white. Slapping the gourd against the palm of his hand to make it
rattle, he danced in a circle around Pierre and the maple tree, sunwise
from east to south