People of the Fire(105)

"I worry about you," she whispered. "Tomorrow, Little Dancer, let's go for a walk. We've . . . well, I think I know something that will stop the Dreams. Tomorrow . . . we'll talk about it."

"What?"

"Tomorrow," her strained voice promised. "Tonight, just hold me. Hold me like it was the last time."

He pulled her against him, reaching to run her long black braids through nervous fingers. "Shhh! Sleep now, I'll be fine."

She hugged him with all her strength until her arms shook. A warmth rose to fill him. Yes, let the Dreams come and do as they pleased. So long as he had her, he could stand them. Why had she sounded so lonely, so desperate and frightened?

The afterimage of the fire burned behind his eyelids. He stared straight overhead, memorizing each of the angles of rock, noting which had the thickest soot, listening to the night wind beyond the hangings that kept the shelter warm and moderately protected.

In the darkness, a wolf howled, the sound cutting like a quartzite blade in his heart.

He looked toward the back wall of the shelter above where the children slept, and his soul chilled. There, the wolf effigy watched him with burning eyes.

"How much more of this must I stand? This . . . human treats me like a bit of dung. Each time my anger grows. I weaken, yet you tell me to remain helpless! Power leaks away like heat from a winter lodge and I can do nothing? I would break him, twist his bones like grass stems. I would sear his soul in his body! You seen, felt, yet you do nothing but torment his little finger!''

"Patience," Wolf Dreamer soothed. "The boy is walking into our net.''

"I haven't much patience left."

"We need the boy desperately. Humans live with time. They Dream the future as well as the past. "

“My patience has limits. I see no progress with the boy. Heavy Beaver plans to send his warriors to the mountains with the spring thaw. What are you going to do?"

“I know my options. I have another gamble to make.''

"Like the last one?"

"Wait. The Watcher follows the boy."

''As I wait, desperation grows. I must act . . . or die.''

"Wait! Or you will destroy it all."





Chapter 18




Hip aching, White Calf hitched her way through the snow. A pack of firewood hung from a tumpline pressed into the parchment skin of her forehead. Her breath puffed in a white wreath with each laboring of her lungs. White hair hung in straggles from under her fox-hide hood.

She worked her way out of a thick stand of timber she'd hesitated to harvest at first. For one thing, it sat on a steep slope, which increased the risk of her falling in the dense, interlacing tangle of deadfall. At her age, alone, in winter, a broken leg meant death—but then so did freezing from lack of firewood.

She stopped, grimacing at the pain in her hips and the trembling of her exhausted legs.

"Getting too . . . too old . . . for this kind of thing." She swallowed, bending over to brace birdlike hands on thin knees, easing the strain on her back.

She hadn't realized how much simpler life had been with Little Dancer to carry wood and water. And what a joy it had been to talk to Two Smokes around the night fire. In the company of the berdache, she could sit by the hour and reminisce about Broken Bill and old Has No Sense and Eats Too Fast. All gone now; they lived only in her memory. Did that constitute the sum and total of existence? Only to live on for as long as someone remembered you? And what then? Did that fragile link between this world and the Starweb break? If only the ghosts could speak instead of just haunting the quiet, green-shaded places and the hidden crevasses under the snow. If only they'd give tongue to their musings instead of silently watching the ways of the world.

Her lungs made a wheezing sound as she tried to get her breath. A trembling had begun in her leg and the joint of her hip burned as if someone had dropped a small ember from a smoldering fire down inside. She hadn't realized how much she'd aged in the last five years since her final return from Heavy Beaver's camp.

She growled to herself and squinted up at the sky. Worse, she, White Calf, who had always chosen to reject the ways of people for the solitude of a Dreamer, missed the company of others. "Sour old excuse for a Dreamer you are, girl," she mumbled to herself.

Taking a resigned breath, she hitched her pack up and began breaking a careful trail down toward the path. Despite the newly crusted thickness of spring snow, the elk had used the route through the winter and beaten down a track. With that footing, travel wasn't as horrible as it could have been. Spring, despite its sunny days, made traveling far more difficult. The snow, loose and crumbly in winter, melted and froze while new water-rich spring snow covered the old ice. It never froze hard enough to support a person's weight. Sooner or later, her foot punched through the thin ice, leaving her wallowing and cursing as she fought to get back up. Nor did snowshoes help much, for each ridge had been blown free of snow, leaving gnarled brush, rocks, and sticks and other irregularities to puncture the webbing or break the willow hoops.