he snow a bit apart from the others, on the north side of
the camp.

The skinned quarters of small animals hung frozen from a rack outside
Sun Woman's doorway. Redbird went up to the flap of buffalo hide and
called, "It is Redbird. May I come in?"

Redbird heard Sun Woman undoing the sinew laces that held the flap down.
She bent and entered.

In the firelight within Sun Woman's wickiup, Redbird saw agony in the
tightness of the older woman's wide mouth and the clenching of her
strong jaw. Gray Cloud's mother was built big, with broad shoulders and
hips and large hands, but there was a helplessness now in the way she
stood staring into the fire. Hanging from the curving bark wall behind
her were her craft objects, a medicine bundle of deerskin, the carved
figures of a naked man and a naked woman, clamshells to mold maple
sugar, a horse's tail dyed red, a small drum and a flute.

Redbird spoke in a rush. "If he dies I do not want to live." She feared
that if she tried to address Sun Woman properly, her voice would be
choked by sobs before she could say what demanded to be said.

She should not even suggest to Gray Cloud's mother that he might die.
And she should not even hint to his mother of her love for Gray Cloud,
when neither Sun Woman nor Owl Carver had spoken to each other of plans
for their children. The band would be appalled at such rudeness.

"Forgive me for speaking so to you," she said timidly.

Sun Woman smiled, but Redbird saw that there was much sadness in the
smile. "You know you can."

"Yes, you are different," Redbird said.

_Even though the pale eyes killed your husband, you took a pale eyes
into your wickiup._

This had happened more than fifteen winters ago, and Redbird knew it
only as a story that her mother and other women liked to repeat while
they did their work together. Sun Woman's husband, a brave named Dark
Water, had been killed in a quarrel with pale eyes settlers. In spite of
that, when Gray Cloud's pale eyes father came to live with the Sauk, Sun
Woman had come to love him.

"I am different, too," said Redbird. She wondered if Sun Woman knew how
different she was. Most women lived from season to season, while Redbird
sometimes thought about what the tribe might be doing, where they might
be, ten summers from now.

Only two kinds of people thought the kind of long thoughts that came
often to Redbird--chiefs and shamans. She sometimes imagined what it
would be like to be a sha