know. These warriors dress like the whites, but their skin was like the people and their hair was long and black and braided in the proper way.
All the white soldiers travel in groups and carry large guns, like the ones in the forts, and so we let them pass. We might have let the gray men pass, as well, but they brought our enemy into our territory. So we attacked. I have had many coups in battle. This I would say first. But in this fight, I was unseated and one of my horse’s hind hooves struck me here.” He pointed to the back of his head.
She drew air through her teeth at the image of him being kicked by his horse. “May I feel this place?”
Instantly she realized the problem with this request. She had touched the wounds of countless men and women in her tribe from the very old to the very young. But never had she anticipated the contact with such a yawning need. Eagerness, yes, that was what she felt.
He nodded his consent and she fairly leaped to her feet to close the distance that separated them. She knelt beside him and began as she had been taught, with a gentle touch to his arm. It was not right to immediately grope a place that might cause pain. She worked from the strong column of his neck to the base of his skull, trying to ignore the tingling awareness her fingers relayed with the contact of her flesh to his flesh. Her physical enjoyment of the contact ended when she found the place where he had been kicked. There was no lump. Rather, she found a shallow depression.
“Were you kicked or stepped on?” she asked.
“I was struck here with a war club.” He pointed to the tiny red scar that sliced through one of his eyebrows. How had she not noticed that before?
“This was a glancing blow. But it caused me to lose my balance. Then our horses collided and I fell backward.”
She examined the scar, her awareness of him now mixed with the need to solve this puzzle.
“Do you remember the blow or the fall?” She released him and sat at his side, turning toward him as he spoke.
“Neither. My friend, Two Hawks, saw the blow and watched me become unseated. He said I killed the man with my lance, but he hit me before leaving his horse. Two Hawks said that I did not fall like a man who knows he is falling. He said the horse’s rear foot hit me here and that after they had chased away the intruders they came back for me, surprised to find me alive. I did not wake until late in the evening and I do not recall the battle or the blow or the fall or even the days that followed.”
“I am not surprised. The bone of your skull was crushed. The swelling from this break should have taken you from this world and into the next.”
“Perhaps it did,” he muttered.
“Yet here you are,” she countered. “How can that be?”
“I think I walked the ghost road and then came back.”
They stared at each other. Owls...a death, his death, and then his return to this world. She drew up her knees and hugged them tight. Her heart beat in her throat as she resisted the urge to draw away from him. Had he walked across the sky to the spirit world? Had he stopped on his own or had the one who guards the road set his feet back to the world of the living?
Was that why he heard the owl?
She shivered against the clammy chill that took her.
“My shaman said he sang me awake,” said Night Storm.
“Did he give you anything to bring down the swelling?”
“He called on the power of the spirit world to heal me or take me.”
“But no medicine?” She could not believe his shaman had not given Storm something for pain and to bring down the swelling.
“You said that someone close to you died?” she said.
“Yes. My friend and cousin. We were raised together. We went on our vision quest together, and we were inducted into the same medicine society.” He shook his head and looked truly miserable.
She did not ask the name of his cousin because it was both impolite and dangerous to speak of the dead. To do so was to disturb their rest and risk inviting them to return to haunt the living. But some souls did not rest because they refused to walk the ghost road to the spirit world, lingering instead among them. These ghosts could cause havoc if measures were not taken to send them away.
“We can look into this possibility. Did he die a good death?” She was asking if he had fought bravely or, if captured, if he represented his people and himself with pride and dignity under torture.
“His death was good, quick. The gray white men shot him with their rifles.”
“And his body was recovered?”
“Yes, and he was sent on a scaffold with his things.”
“That is good. You said that you have seen things that were not there. Will you tell me of them?”
“Not tonight.”
She pursed her lips at this delaying tactic and thought to remind him that he said he would be forthcoming. But he rubbed his forehead again, as he had done earlier when he said he had pain. She did not want to cause another fall by her questions.
“These wounds look recent.” She laid an open palm on the scarred flesh at his chest. There were two ragged, raised places on each side of his upper torso that could mean only one thing. This man had tested his devotion and bravery in the most sacred of all ways.
“I have the honor of success in the sun dance,” he said, his voice humble.
This was no small feat. She had watched the sun dance in her tribe. Young warriors volunteered to have wooden spikes inserted through the skin of their chest or upper back. The spikes pierced in and then out at a different place, like a bone awl through a buckskin. From these dowels, long rawhide tethers were tied. The other ends of these ropes were fixed to a tall pole, set deep in the ground solely for this purpose. Then the men would dance as sweat streamed down their bodies. They would dance and chant and blow whistles made from the bones of an eagle’s wing. All the while they would stare at the sun and try to tear free of their bonds. This might take a day or more. Some men passed out during the dance only to revive to try again. Not all tore free. To voluntarily submit to such an ordeal was a true test of courage. And this man had succeeded.
“I was the first to free myself.”
“The first?” It was a great coup. Skylark did not think she could be more impressed. “That is amazing.”
“It was not. I tore free only because I fell.”
Unease prickled.
“Your second fall.”
Beyond the circle of their fire and past the open ground now fading with twilight came the hoot of a great horned owl. She stilled as the chill of night seemed to seep into every pore.
Night Storm did not seem to be bothered by the nearness of the owl, while she was completely
