She touched his shoulder lightly. He didn’t like to be touched, not since he’d been so badly wounded in the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, where the fury of the Hotchkiss guns of the soldiers had taken the lives of more than two hundred of his people, including his mother and two sisters. But Tess’s touch was different, and, she thought, tolerable to him, since she’d help nurse him through the agonizing recovery from having his body riddled with U.S. Army issue bullets.
“It will be all right,” Tess said, her voice gentle and, she hoped, reassuring. “You’ll like Chicago when you get there.”
“You are so very sure of that?” His black eyes were glittering with humor.
“Of course! After Mama died and Papa told me he was going to take a job doctoring on the reservations, I was scared to death. I didn’t know anybody out here, and I had to leave all my friends and relatives behind. But once I got to the West, it wasn’t bad at all.” She rearranged her skirt. “Well, it wasn’t too bad,” she amended. “I didn’t like the way the soldiers treated your people.”
“Neither did we,” he said dryly. He paused, studying her, finally looking intently into her clear green eyes. “Your father will be relieved when I am gone. He permits me to teach you things, but he grimaces when he sees you doing them.”
“He’s old-fashioned.” Tess laughed. “And the world is changing.” She looked at the distant buttes. “I want to help it change. I want to do things that women have never done.”
“You already do things that few white women do—skin a deer, track a doe, ride without a saddle, shoot a bow—”
“And sign and speak Lakota. All thanks to you, Raven. You’re a good friend and a good teacher. How I wish I could go to Chicago with you. Wouldn’t we have fun?”
He shrugged and began to draw symbols in the dust at his feet.
How graceful his hands were, Tess mused. His fingers were strong, yet lean, and his wrists were so finely boned, they appeared delicate beneath the long corded muscle of his forearm. He leaned forward, and her gaze traveled over his back. Tess winced. Beneath the buckskin shirt his flesh was puckered and pocked with scars, scars that would be there always to remind him of Wounded Knee.
It was a miracle, Tess’s father, Harold, had said, that Raven has survived. Half a dozen bullets had torn into his upper back; one had punctured his lung, causing it to collapse. And that was not the worst of his injuries. Harold Meredith had done everything his medical training had taught him and then some to save Raven’s life, but at last he’d sought the help of a practitioner from a tradition far different from his own: he smuggled a Lakota shaman into Raven’s bedchamber.
Whether it was Harold’s or the shaman’s skill—or the skills of both—they would never know. But soon the Great Spirit smiled, and Raven began to recover. It was a long and painful journey back to health, and through it all Tess was at Raven’s side.
“Will you miss me?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said, smiling easily. “You saved my life.”
“No. Papa and your shaman did that.”
Raven Following was not a demonstrative man, but now he took her small, white hand in his large, dark one and held it. “You did it,” he said firmly. “You saved my life. I lived only because you cried so hard for me. I felt sorry for you and knew I could not be so rude and thoughtless as to disappoint your hopes by dying.”
She chuckled. “That’s the longest sentence I’ve ever heard from you, Raven—and the only one the least bit deceitful.” Her eyes sparkled.
He stood up, stretched lazily, then pulled her up beside him. His gaze slid over her flushed face. She was almost a woman, and she was going to be very pretty, perhaps beautiful. But she worried him. She felt things so deeply…with such strong emotion.
“Why?” she asked suddenly. “Why, why?”
He did not need to ask where her thoughts had carried her. Without hesitation, he said, “Because of what the Lakota did to Custer, I think. I have reflected on Wounded Knee for several months now, Tess. Some of the soldiers who opened fire on us, on the children—” his body stiffened for a moment as if he might be hearing once again the wails of terror and screams of pain from those children “—some of those soldiers,” he went on, “were from Custer’s surviving companies.” He looked at her intently. “I was six when we fought Custer, and I remember how the soldiers looked there, on the battlefield. Many of the women had lost sons and fathers and husbands to those men. My own father died there. The women took out their grief on the bodies of the dead soldiers on the Greasy Grass. It was bad.”
“I see.”
“No. And it is good that you don’t,” he replied, his face curiously taut. “I teased you before, Tess, but truly I would not have lived if you and your father had not been so brave…and so swift.”
“We left for the battlefield the instant we heard there had been fighting and that many were dying on that frozen ground.” Tess shivered and tears filled her eyes. “Oh, Raven, it was so cold, so bitterly cold. I shall never forget it, and I thank God we found you.”
“As I thank the Great Spirit that you and your father rescued me and tended my wounds and hid me in your wagon until we were out of South Dakota.”
“Lucky that Dad was being transferred to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. It was easy to pretend we’d found you on the roadside in Montana near Lame Deer. No one ever questioned our story—well, not to our faces anyway.”
He smiled. “I was not so lucky in my decision to visit my cousins in Big Foot’s band, though, was I?”
She shook her head. “You could have been safe in your lodge in Pine Ridge….”
“And my mother and sisters, too.” His voice had trailed off. Now, suddenly, he shook off his enveloping grief. “Come,” he said, “let us go back. Your father will be wondering where you are.”
She started to protest, but his gaze was even and quiet, and she knew that it would be like talking to a rock. She gave in with good grace and smiled at him.
“Will we ever see you again after you go?” she asked.
“Of course. I’ll come back and visit from time to time,” he promised. “Don’t forget the things I’ve taught you.”
“As if I could,” she replied. She searched his black eyes. “Why do things have to change?”
“Because they do.” In the distance, the sky became misty as the threatening clouds released a curtain of rain.
“Come. The rain will overtake us if we don’t hurry.”
“One more minute, Raven. Please, tell me something.”
“Anything,” he murmured.
“What did Old Man Deer do when we sat up here with him last week?”
Raven’s body stiffened slightly and he glanced away. “He performed a ritual. A very sacred one.” He looked fully at Tess. “It was a way of protecting you,” he said enigmatically. Then he smiled. “And
