"Your father wore circles of glass like these. To see the marks on the talking paper."
"Yes. These are the same ones." He closed the case and pressed it into her hand. "Now you have something that was close to Star Arrow."
She said, "He was with me for five summers only, but in spirit, ever since. Now I will feel even closer to him." She slipped the ribbon over her head and dropped the case down the front of her doeskin dress.
He saw the tracks of more tears on her smooth brown cheeks in the fading light. This time she did not wipe them away.
"Tell me all that has happened to you," she said.
As White Bear talked, he deliberately made his voice loud enough to carry, so that Redbird, in the wickiup, might hear.
When he was through telling his story, he felt weighed down by guilt.
"I fled, Mother, even though I promised my father I would care for the land. And smoked tobacco with him to seal the promise. Should I have stayed?"
She put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. "You kept your promise as far as you were able. That is all the calumet requires. Your father would not want you to die fighting for that land. It is better that you come back here and be a Sauk again."
White Bear looked down, unable to meet Sun Woman's eyes. Feeling an ache deep in the center of his body, remembering the great stone and log house, the blizzard of blossoms in the orchards, the fields of green corn and golden wheat, the herds that darkened the hillsides, he wanted to clutch his chest where it felt as if it had been torn open. He could not so easily forget Victoire.