“Koracoo?” Gonda leaped to his feet and trotted back toward them carrying something.
“What is it?”
Gonda lifted the scrap of cloth into the air, holding it high enough for her to see. “It’s a fragment of a girl’s dress, I think.”
Koracoo’s face suddenly turned to stone, and Sindak wondered if she feared it might be from her daughter’s dress, as the copper circlet had been.
Koracoo wet her lips, seemed to gird herself, and walked out to meet Gonda. “Let me see it.” She held out her hand.
Gonda draped the soft doehide over her palm. Red-and-yellow quillwork decorated the lower half. “It isn’t from Tutelo’s dress; don’t worry about that,” Gonda said, alleviating her fear immediately.
As relief shot through her, she seemed to deflate like an air-filled bladder. The hide in her hand quaked softly before she clenched her fist around it. “The quillwork is exquisite,” she remarked; then she lifted the fragment and smelled it. “Is this what you smelled last night, Sindak?” She held it out.
Sindak leaned close enough to get a good whiff of the putrid odor. “Yes. But the taint on this fragment is faint. I could not have smelled this from thirty paces away behind the hickory tree.”
“No,” Koracoo replied softly, and turned the fragment of dress in her hand to study the quillwork. As though something horrifying had occurred to her, she suddenly seemed to go rigid. Softly, she said, “No, I suspect our friend with the herringbone sandals was carrying another dead body.”
Gonda’s head jerked up. Panic tensed his round face. “Herringbone sandals? You found something. Where?”
With her eyes still on the quill pattern, Koracoo instructed, “Show him, Sindak.”
“Yes, War Chief.” They stepped two paces away and knelt.
Towa stopped beside Koracoo. His long braid had come loose from its rabbit-bone skewer and hung over his cape like a black glistening rope. He squinted at Sindak and Gonda. “What are they looking for?”
“Another piece in a great mystery,” she said. “Towa? The sandal tracks you found yesterday—did you see any evidence that the man was carrying something?”
Towa’s handsome face went blank for several moments while he thought about it. “It’s possible. There were several tracks where he’d slipped in the mud and had to regain his balance. He might have been struggling to balance something heavy.”
Sindak and Gonda stood and returned.
Gonda said, “I swear those are the same sandal tracks we saw at the midden and the cornhusk doll meadow.”
Koracoo nodded. For days now, she’d had the uneasy feeling that it was they who were being hunted. She’d dreamed last night that she was a snowshoe hare, running with a bursting heart, trying to reach a burrow before the wolves caught her. Were the Spirits trying to tell her something?
“Towa, you’re a thinker. Think this through for me. If these tracks, and the tracks you found yesterday, as well as the tracks Gonda and I found at the shell midden and the meadow, were all made by the same man … what is he up to?”
Towa shrugged, but his eyes began darting over the sky and trees as he tried to figure it out. When he seemed to be having trouble, Sindak said, “Give Towa time; he’ll figure it out. He really is a genius when it comes to analyzing information.”
Towa gave Sindak a for the sake of the Spirits, don’t tell them that look, and Sindak added. “Watch this. Towa, which of these things doesn’t fit? A wolf, a fox, a dog, and a pile of shit in the middle of the plaza?”
Towa immediately answered, “The dog.”
“The dog?” Gonda growled. “That’s idiotic. Why?”
“Because dogs are the product of generations of careful breeding. Wolves, foxes, and the person who shit in the plaza, obviously are not.”
Gonda and Koracoo stared at them.
Finally, Gonda said, “You know, these warrior things seem awfully complicated for you two. Maybe you should just trot along home and let us unravel the intrigue necessary for finding the children.”
“You didn’t think Towa was brilliant?” Sindak asked in genuine disbelief.
Gonda propped his hands on his hips. “Promise me something, will you? If you see somebody behind me with a bow, do not try to analyze the situation. Just yell. I’d rather learn about it through an incoherent cry than by choking on my own blood.” He stalked away, back to kneel beside the sandal prints.
While Sindak and Towa muttered to each other, Koracoo concentrated on the sounds of the day. A riot of birdsong filled the trees, and the wind sawed lazily through the ice-crusted branches. Far in the distance, through a weave of trunks, Koracoo saw movement. She kept watching. The way they swayed, the bob of their heads, told her they were men.