White Bear turned his back on the declining sun. The ceremonial bearskin swung heavily on his head and shoulders as he trotted out of the camp toward the trail that ran along the river's edge. As he entered the woods, another pair of eyes, hostile, suspicious, caught his. Wolf Paw again, standing with folded arms.
Wolf Paw still loves Redbird. And hates me.
He felt much stronger than he had when he arrived at the camp. Alternately walking and running, he moved quickly and surely down the Ioway River, and he remembered the way to the bluff of the sacred cave. Several times along the way he met Sauk and Fox warriors. They recognized the sacred bearskin, with the bear's skull covering his own as a partial mask, and stepped aside with eyes averted as he passed them.
The sun had sunk behind him by the time he had come to the end of the almost-imperceptible trail to the top of the bluff. He stood there a moment, looking out across the clear blue sheet of water that was the Great River. He stared at the Illinois shore, the rich, flat bottomland at the river's edge, the wooded bluffs, much like the one he was standing on, forming a wall, beyond which rolled the autumn-tan, endless prairie.
A beautiful and fertile land, from which his people—and he himself—had been exiled. Would his vision show them a way back?
He scrambled down the face of the bluff to the cave and swung into the entrance.
In the shadows he could barely make out Owl Carver's wooden owl standing over the row of skulls with their stone necklaces; or the white bear statue guarding the unknown depths of the cave.
He settled himself facing the entrance and chewed some scraps of sacred mushroom Owl Carver had given him. Nothing to do now but sit and wait. Surely no watch made by pale eyes could measure the passage of this kind of time.
He heard a scraping and a grumbling from deep in the cave. He felt no fear now, only a warmth, as at the approach of an old friend. The White Bear, he now understood, was himself in a spirit form.
The huge snuffling Bear was at his side, and confidently he rose to step out of the cave, the Bear accompanying him with its rolling walk. He stepped on clouds, violet and gold and white and soft as snow under his feet.