Shaman Part 5

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, clamsh.e.l.ls 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 shaman. To live in accord with the gift Earthmaker gave her. She thought so often about it that it became a longing within her, even though she knew that such a thing could not be.

This, Redbird thought, was the most she could hope for--to become a medicine woman, like Gray Cloud's mother. A medicine woman had an important place in the band, but she was not listened to, as the shaman was.

Sun Woman reached out and laid her bare hand on top of Redbird's, which was still in a mitten. "That is why I would be pleased if you and my son shared a wickiup."

Redbird was startled and, amidst her fear and grief for Gray Cloud, delighted. Truly, no mother ever spoke like this before words between parents had been exchanged. And to know that Sun Woman would accept her as her son's wife--wondrous!

But Gray Cloud might already be dead. "How can we talk and smile so?"

she cried. "He is up in the sacred cave, and the snow fell all last night and all day today."

Sun Woman shook her head. "When I gave the boy to Owl Carver, I gave up the right to say what was to be done with him. Like Owl Carver, Gray Cloud belongs to the spirits now."

"But the spirits--" Redbird waved her hands helplessly. "They protect as they like and they let death strike as they like."

A shadow of pain crossed Sun Woman's face. "Do you say such things to hurt me?"

Redbird was shocked. "No!"

"Do you think I feel no pain?"

Redbird felt tears filling her eyes, burning them. She wiped her face.

"I know you do."

Sun Woman brought her face closer to Redbird's, took Redbird's chin in her hand, and said, "I do not show pain because I do not want to make others suffer with me. But you know what I feel."

Sun Woman opened her arms, and Redbird pressed her body against the bigger, older woman's. She felt Sun Woman's strength flow into her and she knew that she had found more comfort here than she ever would in the arms of her own mother.

In the firelit wickiup, Redbird looked around her, thinking that this was where Gray Cloud had been a baby. She looked at the bench where she knew he slept every night. Where he must sleep again.

"Do you have anything to give a person who has been very cold for a long time?" Redbird asked urgently.

"Ah." Sun Woman went to the back of the wickiup and came back with a bundle of long, dark red peppers.

"These peppers are grown far to the south, where the sacred mushroom and the bright blue stones come from. The longer you boil them, the hotter the water will get. He is to drink the water, but not swallow the peppers. If he is very cold, give him one pepper to chew on. That would bring the dead back to life. If you meet him before I do, this is how you can help him."

_She thinks I mean to try to meet him when he comes back._

"I will go to him," Redbird said abruptly.

Sun Woman stared at her. "You must not. If you interrupt his spirit journey it might kill him."

"He has been in a cave for a night and a day, and this is the second night, colder than any night I can remember. My father watches for him, but he does not come. He could still be sitting in that cave. He has no fire. He has no food or water. The wind blows in from the river. The snow here at the camp is so deep that in some places the drifts are over my head. The cave could be full of snow. When he is suffering all this, how can you say that _I_ am a danger to him?"

Sun Woman sat cross-legged on the rush mat floor and stared down at her hands folded in her lap. After a silence she looked up, and her grave, dark eyes held Redbird's.

"You are a good young woman, and you love my son. But you must understand that the greater danger to Gray Cloud is not from the cold.

If you try to wake Gray Cloud's body when his soul is gone from it, his spirit will never come back to his empty body. It will set its feet on the Trail of Souls and walk west, to the land of the dead."

Sun Woman's eyes shone, and the shadows and firelight gave her the face of an angry spirit. Redbird drew back.

"I will not do that," she said. "I promise you." But if she saw that Gray Cloud would surely die anyway, of freezing, would it not then be best to take the risk of waking him?

And what if he did wake on his own, but was too frozen to climb out of the cave and walk back to the camp by himself? Then he would need her help.

She decided that if she got to the cave and his spirit was still out of his body, she would do everything to help him short of waking him. She would build a fire near him. She would cover him with warm cloaks, try to warm his body if she could do that without disturbing him.

She boiled the peppers in a small tin pot set on stones over Sun Woman's low fire. After she had filled a skin with the pepper water, she rolled tinder and a pale eyes fire striker into a blanket. She put her hand on Sun Woman's snowshoes, leaning against a wall of the little wickiup, and Sun Woman nodded silently.

Redbird paddled over the snow with her head down, watching the long shadow she cast under the full moon on the sparkling white surface.

Ahead, the leeward sides of the wickiups were rows of snowdrifts, all the same size. When she looked over her shoulder, their windward sides were like black holes in the snow. She could see her family's wickiup, but Owl Carver was no longer standing outside watching. She lifted her round wickerwork snowshoes high with each step. Even though she could walk over the snow, she would be exhausted, she realized, long before she pushed her way to the sacred cave.

Dogs barked. Fear made the back of her neck tingle, and she stood motionless. They might be Wolf Paw's dogs. But they did not come after her.

She heard no sounds of voices, or of people moving. She felt safe enough to keep walking.

But a feeling grew on her that someone was following her. She stopped again and listened and looked around. The wickiups were silent under their glistening blue-white hummocks. Being able to sense when she was being watched was one of the gifts she, like her father, possessed. But her eyes and ears did not confirm what her inner sense told her. She decided fear was confusing her, and she walked on.

She left the camp behind. On her right was gently rolling, snow-covered prairie. On her left were the woods that grew along the Ioway River. She saw the shadows of the horses among the trees, heard them snort and stamp their feet. Beside the woods ran the long trail leading to the bluff where the sacred cave overlooked the river. This close to the trees, she hoped, the snow would not be so deep.

A shadow appeared on the snow beside her. A bolt of terror stabbed her.

A powerful hand seized her arm. She felt paralyzed, like a rabbit about to be torn apart by a wildcat. She did not try to pull away. She could feel that the grip on her arm was too strong.

She turned slowly.