"Forgive me for speaking so to you," she said timidly.
Sun Woman smiled, but Redbird saw that there was much sadness in the smile. "You know you can."
"Yes, you are different," Redbird said.
Even though the pale eyes killed your husband, you took a pale eyes into your wickiup.
This had happened more than fifteen winters ago, and Redbird knew it only as a story that her mother and other women liked to repeat while they did their work together. Sun Woman's husband, a brave named Dark Water, had been killed in a quarrel with pale eyes settlers. In spite of that, when Gray Cloud's pale eyes father came to live with the Sauk, Sun Woman had come to love him.
"I am different, too," said Redbird. She wondered if Sun Woman knew how different she was. Most women lived from season to season, while Redbird sometimes thought about what the tribe might be doing, where they might be, ten summers from now.
Only two kinds of people thought the kind of long thoughts that came often to Redbird—chiefs and shamans. She sometimes imagined what it would be like to be a shaman. To live in accord with the gift Earthmaker gave her. She thought so often about it that it became a longing within her, even though she knew that such a thing could not be.
This, Redbird thought, was the most she could hope for—to become a medicine woman, like Gray Cloud's mother. A medicine woman had an important place in the band, but she was not listened to, as the shaman was.
Sun Woman reached out and laid her bare hand on top of Redbird's, which was still in a mitten. "That is why I would be pleased if you and my son shared a wickiup."
Redbird was startled and, amidst her fear and grief for Gray Cloud, delighted. Truly, no mother ever spoke like this before words between parents had been exchanged. And to know that Sun Woman would accept her as her son's wife—wondrous!