"Do you have anything to give a person who has been very cold for a long time?" Redbird asked urgently.
"Ah." Sun Woman went to the back of the wickiup and came back with a bundle of long, dark red peppers.
"These peppers are grown far to the south, where the sacred mushroom and the bright blue stones come from. The longer you boil them, the hotter the water will get. He is to drink the water, but not swallow the peppers. If he is very cold, give him one pepper to chew on. That would bring the dead back to life. If you meet him before I do, this is how you can help him."
She thinks I mean to try to meet him when he comes back.
"I will go to him," Redbird said abruptly.
Sun Woman stared at her. "You must not. If you interrupt his spirit journey it might kill him."
"He has been in a cave for a night and a day, and this is the second night, colder than any night I can remember. My father watches for him, but he does not come. He could still be sitting in that cave. He has no fire. He has no food or water. The wind blows in from the river. The snow here at the camp is so deep that in some places the drifts are over my head. The cave could be full of snow. When he is suffering all this, how can you say that I am a danger to him?"
Sun Woman sat cross-legged on the rush mat floor and stared down at her hands folded in her lap. After a silence she looked up, and her grave, dark eyes held Redbird's.
"You are a good young woman, and you love my son. But you must understand that the greater danger to Gray Cloud is not from the cold. If you try to wake Gray Cloud's body when his soul is gone from it, his spirit will never come back to his empty body. It will set its feet on the Trail of Souls and walk west, to the land of the dead."
Sun Woman's eyes shone, and the shadows and firelight gave her the face of an angry spirit. Redbird drew back.