Afterward, I asked my wife if she had been frightened.
"When I saw my big baby," she said, "getting its inside wet, I told my secret helper to swim quick. And the woman-beaver dived."
"So you were frightened?"
"If you died, Big Baby, you'd have to come back to me to be comforted. And when I die I shall look after you. And when we're both dead, we shall ride the Wolf Trail together, because you are me and I am you for always. Nothing else matters, and there isn't anything left to frighten us."
Rain would be teaching me quaint dances, or setting our household in a roar with imitations of my face as I played the flute. She mocked, flouted, caressed all in a breath, and chaffed me with make-believe flirtations, pretending to fall in love with Left Hand or Bearpaw, our young warriors. Yet while she crooned and twittered over her household work, for all the world like some fussy bird at nesting time, I began, vaguely at first, then with a growing sureness, to feel that the play was forced, that my fairy woman was in pain, trying to hide some illness which sapped her strength. Then once, by accident, I saw, when she thought herself to be alone, agony in the poise of her body, desperate fear in her eyes.
That summer, a certain attentiveness of the traders, a disposition to ask needless questions, gave us a sense of being watched by the authorities. Traveling with horses, and leaving tracks, we were liable to be followed and interfered with. For that reason, we built birch-bark canoes which, swimming upside down as a rule, gave us more bathing than we really needed. At least, we left no tracks.
Our river, without disclosing its name, went bubbling affably, capsizing us at rapids through hundreds of miles of alpine wonderland, northward at first, then west, then southward—in black pine jungles now, which yielded us no food. Beyond that, the river took to evil courses, plunging as one long riffle, broken by cascades into an ever deepening abyss whose walls were mountains. Our web-foot-tribe—for so Rain called us—began to be afraid.
From our next camp, I climbed a hill to see what became of the river; and on my return found a white man seated beside Rain's fire. He was a great gaunt frontiersman, whose mouth had been large for a dog, and in his eyes the smile of heaven's own sunlight. Owl's two little girls were climbing all over him, the dogs were adoring him, and Rain had given him the very last of our coffee.
At shrewd sight, this visitor addressed me in English, with a soft Texan drawl.
"How much do you want for the bunch of babies?"