"It's not the same," Wolf Dreamer added in a gentle voice. "I knew you'd come to love your wife so. I knew your love for your children would overwhelm you."
"You did?" Little Dancer struggled, mind whirling with the giddiness of fever. "I don't understand. Then why let me live? Why send me wolf to take care of me? Why did he drag me to his den when I couldn't go further? He curled up, warming me with his body. Why did you do all that when you knew I'd eventually fail you?"
The smile warmed him, shooting like bars of golden sunshine through the darkness of regret and suffering.
The words came like balm: "Perhaps it will take a while for you to understand, but I needed your humanity. From Clear Water you got the ability to Dream. From Blood Bear you got strength. Two Smokes taught you endurance. From Hungry Bull you got vulnerability. From White Calf you got wisdom. But the most precious gift of all came from Sage Root; she taught you humanity, that common identity with your peoples. She gave unselfishly of herself, knowing what was coming."
"And it destroyed her."
"So it will destroy you, too—in the end."
"Wait. You don't understand. Fm not the one! I'm dying. And I wouldn't leave my people. Not Elk Charm, or my girls, or Hungry Bull, or Rattling Hooves, or—"
"Or the rest of humanity which needs you?" Wolf Dreamer laughed and clapped his hands together. "Yes, that's right. And family and friends, they all love you, but that's what I need. A lovable Dreamer who's strong and charismatic and vulnerable. You'll do fine, Fire Dancer, just fine
"My name's Little Dancer.''
"You never took a man's name."
He stared down at the rock beneath him. The stone had been stained by his sweat. He rubbed a finger absently in the pecked groove of the Spiral. "After everything I'd seen, taking a different name didn't seem that important."
"I'm renaming you now. You're a man, more so than the greatest warrior or the most cunning hunter."
"But I'm dying. The poison's deep in me. I've seen snakebite. I know die signs, the blackness in the blood, the swelling as the tissue dies."
"Tell me, Fire Dancer, why did you climb up here?"
"To find you."
"And why did you do that?"
"To tell you I couldn't leave my family. That I'd come to love them too much. That I couldn't leave them alone."
"But you could have simply stayed at camp. You didn't need to seek me out at all."
"Wolf was there, watching."
"Did he ever threaten you? Did he ever act to remind you of your duty?"
Little Dancer clamped his eyes shut, trying to think, remembering only the level stare wolf had given him the night the Wolf Bundle had called to him. "No. But I thought—"
"I told you the first time we met that free will couldn't be denied. Did I ever imply that you'd be punished if you failed me?"
"No."
"So you could have run. But you came, knowing even as you did that I might destroy you for saying you wouldn't—"
''But I owed you!'' Little Dancer tried to sit up and gasped at the pain in his throbbing leg. "I couldn't just pretend nothing happened up there in the snow."
"You are a man who accepts responsibility." Wolf Dreamer lifted his face to the sun above, closing his eyes, seeming to enjoy the warmth.
"It doesn't matter," Little Dancer whispered. "My first responsibility is to my wife ... my children. Now, it seems the rattlesnake has used his own free will. I guess it's all without point anyway. I would ask one last thing of you. Please, if you could make things easier on Elk Charm and my daughters, I'd—"
"I have no intention of letting you die, Fire Dancer. Less now than I might have before."
Again, his vision seemed to swim, and his eyes had trouble focusing. "What?"
Wolf Dreamer stood, rising like smoke, and walked closer, settling next to Little Dancer's fevered body. "Oh, you're quite in the right condition. Your mind is wandering, shifting from real to unreal. For four days you've been without food and water. That's the sacred number. Snake venom has lowered your resistance even further. The gates of your mind are open, the thresholds dropped. You're teetering on the verge of losing yourself, ready to touch the One. Once, I had to use mushrooms—as you will one day use another poison. Now is the time to teach you to Dream with the One."
"Even if I've told you I can't abandon my family?"
Wolf Dreamer's smile might have been everything good in the universe. Little Dancer's soul would have sung to see it again.
"I know you love them, Fire Dancer, but I'm going to give you something more powerful. I'm giving you the Dream. I'm giving you the One. With it, you'll Dance the Spiral back into balance. You'll be One with the fire, air, and water . . . with the very Earth Mother. Everything has ties to the One. Even your family.