People of the Fire(110)

He walked around the stone circle, sighting down each of the transecting spokes. "So you always know when the seasons break? I never knew it was that easy."

"Bah!" She waved it away while the wind flapped the skirts of her dress. "Most of knowing how the world works can be figured out by just watching it. For instance, which way is really north? Point."

He did, picking the mountain he'd always thought lay north.

She hitched around the circle, picking a line of rocks. 'There. Come stand here and look and you'll see straight north.''

"And how do you know that?"

"Simplest thing in the world. I sat up here and marked where the stars appeared on the horizon. Then I marked where they set. A person just sits there in the same place all night long marking the star paths; the place in the middle is north. That's how you prove the north star is really the north star. Must be pretty Powerful not to move in the night like the others."

"That or it's dead."

"Maybe, but I doubt it. It twinkles like all the others. It just doesn't move." She tapped her walking stick against the rocks to make a clicking sound. "Yes, all it takes is watching long enough and you can figure out how things work. Of course, I still haven't figured out what the sun burns. Can't be wood, there's no smoke up there. And the light's too bright. You ever noticed? Not like firelight, it doesn't have that yellow cast to it. And then there's the moon. Whatever it burns, it doesn't put out heat—and no smoke there, either."

"But I remember you saying everything has a spirit of its own."

She nodded. "It does. Spirit Power lies in everything, it's just a matter of opening parts of your soul to feel it. Animals, of course, have souls, but so do trees and mountains, and streams and the clouds in the sky. It's all pulsing and throbbing around us all the time. It's just that humans are always throwing mud in the waters of their lives to muck it up. They're not happy unless they're floating along in dirty water so they can't see where they're going or what the channel looks like."

He laughed, shivering despite his warm sheep-hide cloak.

She saw and hugged herself. "Come on, let's get off this hill. I'm about frozen to the bone."

"No, you're not cold. It's all illusion!" he teased, helping her down off the steep trail. He had to grip her hand to keep her steady on the treacherous parts. Rocks rolled underfoot and ice had packed the shadows. "How long did it take you to make the wheel up there?"

"Couple of years. Sometimes it's cloudy in summer and you need to wait another year to get the rocks placed just right. The hardest part is the winter. Lots of clouds then. And it takes a certain amount of dedication—or idiocy—to sit up there in the dark waiting for morning while the wind blows snow up your skirt and your skin turns blue. Ice freezes in your hair and you get to shivering so bad you're not certain if the sighting you took on the top of the rising sun was correct or not because your teeth were clattering so hard as to jar your eyeballs in the sockets. It reminds you this world might be illusion—but it's a cursed powerful one!"

"What gave you the idea for the star wheel? Did you Dream it? Just think it up one day?"

She shook her head and wobbled out onto the flats at the bottom of the trail. Snow crunched under her moccasins. "Dung and flies, no. I saw one up on a butte overlooking Big River one time when I went up there with Cut Feather to see some of his relations among the White Crane People." She paused, seeing it again in her mind. "I remember going up there one night because the White Crane thought it was a Power place. I lay down to sleep between the spokes and had a wonderful Dream. I woke up just at dawn. I got up and was rolling up my bedding as the sun was coming up. I noticed a spoke pointed right into the red eye of the sun. That set me to thinking, so I watched that star wheel for a while. The whole time we were there I watched where the sun came up and set. Watched it move around the wheel.

"No, I didn't make it up. I don't think there's much to make up in the world. That's the beauty of the Spiral, you see. Everything comes around and happens all over again. Like life. A baby is born, learns to walk, learns to talk and play, and gets to be a young person. Then the young person learns to be an adult. A penis finds a vagina and another baby is born and learns to walk and talk and do everything over again. Circles within Circles, but all connected: the Spiral."

He paused to take a swipe at a snow-heavy branch. "And where do you think Heavy Beaver fits into all that?"

White Calf ran her tongue along the insides of her cheeks, a determined look on her face as she walked. "The problem with Heavy Beaver is that he's found Power without knowing how he did it."