Shaman, Robert Shea [new ebook reader .txt] 📗

into his arms.

She turned back to him, her fists clenched at her sides, her nostrils flaring in fury.

"Now you want to know what his name is. Now, five winters after he was born."

He turned to Sun Woman. "Does she have a husband?"

Sun Woman raised her eyebrows. "There were many braves who wished to marry her. Wolf Paw was most insistent. He offered Owl Carver ten horses. Little Stabbing Chief of the Fox sought her. There were others, besides."

Wolf Paw had wanted to marry her. That must have been the[194] meaning of that strange encounter outside the camp. Wolf Paw probably wanted to kill him.

"Please, Sun Woman, do not talk to this man about me," Redbird said. "You are his mother, and a mother to me. But you cannot make peace between us."

"True," said Sun Woman, picking up her basket of herbs and bark. "Only you can do that, daughter."

She turned to White Bear. "If Redbird does not welcome you into this wickiup I share with her and Eagle Feather, I cannot invite you inside."

With that Sun Woman turned abruptly and trudged off toward the river.

Eagle Feather!

Redbird threw an exasperated look after Sun Woman.

Redbird's anger made White Bear feel as if one of the long knives' cannonballs had crushed his chest. Perhaps if he could put his arms around her she would remember how she had loved him. He took a step toward her, reaching for her.

She stepped back quickly, bent down and picked up a rock. "Go away. Now!"

How graceful all her movements are.

The rock was gray and somewhat larger than her fist. It had sharp, irregular edges and looked as if it had been used to chip arrowheads.

He said, "You would not be this angry at me if you did not want me back. Why did you refuse every man who asked for you?"

Her face twisted with rage, she threw the rock.

For an instant he was blinded as it hit his cheek, stunning him, and his head snapped back.

He felt a pounding pain in the back of his skull as his vision cleared. The ache from being hit with a rifle butt had come back.

He heard gasps of dismay from some of the watching women, laughter from others.

Wind Bends Grass called out scornfully, "I am ashamed to call this fool my daughter. I cast her out of my lodge because she would accept no suitors. At last comes the one who ruined her for all the others, and she drives him away with a rock. I think we should throw rocks at her."

The crowd's laughter was louder, although White Bear saw that Wind Bends Grass did not mean to be funny.[195]

His left cheekbone throbbed, the cheek Raoul's knife had scarred, and he felt a trickle of blood. But he would not let himself lift his hand to wipe it away.

Redbird's hand went up to her own face, as if the rock had hit her. Her slanting eyes widened with a look of horror.

She whirled and ducked through her dark doorway.

"Go in there after her, White Bear!" one of the women called.

He would not do that. He would not go into her wickiup until she invited him. And in spite of the heaviness in his heart, in spite of the ache in his cheekbone and the pounding in his head, he believed that sooner or later invite him she would.

He turned his back on the empty doorway and sat down again.

The blue-eyed, brown-skinned boy was standing before him. A golden glow filled White Bear's chest.

"You are hurt," said the boy.

"It is nothing, Eagle Feather. A man must endure pain without complaint."

"Did my mother do that to you?"

"She wanted to punish me for staying away from you and her for so long. My name is White Bear."

"I know what your name is."

When he heard that, he was sure that he would win her back.

The boy darted around him.

Resting his hands on his knees, White Bear closed his eyes and let his mind dwell on a vast white-furred shape. Owl Carver had said that when a man wished to send his spirit on a journey in the other world, he need only think of his other self.

He saw the huge golden eyes, the massive, long-muzzled head, the towering body.

Soon he and the Bear spirit were walking together toward the sun.

Redbird did not understand herself. She hated White Bear, but when she saw blood running down his face, she had hated herself. She sat in darkness, biting her lips to keep from screaming.

She crept to the doorway and pushed the curtain open a crack. She could see him sitting again with his back to her, his shoulders broad in his green pale eyes' coat.

She drew back into the wickiup and saw the small steel knife she[196] used to cut up food gleaming near the embers of her fire. She picked it up and held its edge against her feverish cheek.

The last light of day fell on her as the doorway curtain rose. Startled, she almost cut herself. She whirled to see Eagle Feather staring at her. She threw the knife down on the straw-covered floor.

Eagle Feather gave her a questioning look but said nothing.

She drew him down beside her and started telling him the story of why the leaves change colors and fall to the ground in autumn.

It was dark outside when Sun Woman came back from the river, where she had been washing the plants she had gathered. Redbird was afraid Sun Woman would ask her to forgive White Bear, but the older woman said nothing.

They passed what seemed like an ordinary evening, talking and telling stories and singing. But Redbird could not forget that figure sitting like a tree stump just beyond the buffalo-hide curtain.

Much later she went out, and by the light from tonight's full Moon of Falling Leaves, looked into White Bear's face. It was motionless, as if carved from wood.

He did not seem to see her. He must be on a spirit journey. Hot with rage, she kicked at his knee. What right had he to go on a spirit journey leaving his body to haunt her wickiup?

The impact of her moccasined foot shook him slightly, but it was like kicking a bundle of pelts.

Redbird's breath came out in a cloud, lit by the full moon. She gathered up some twigs, brought them into the wickiup and added them to the fire. Sun Woman went out carrying a blanket. Redbird saw her draping it over her son's shoulders.

He does not need that, Redbird thought, remembering how White Bear had come back, seemingly frozen, from his vision quest in the Moon of Ice.

Tightly wrapped in her own blankets with Eagle Feather curled up in the shelter of her body, Redbird lay awake, thinking that she had never in her life slept with a man. That was White Bear's fault, and she ground her teeth in the dark as she thought of the wrongs he had done her.

He left me in the Moon of First Buds, and he returns in the Moon of Falling Leaves—six summers later.

One afternoon they had been lovers. And then he had gone to live with the pale eyes. For nine moons she had carried his son and[197] then given birth to him. He had not been here to give the baby a birth name. Owl Carver, the baby's grandfather, had to do that, embarrassed at the necessity, complaining that the people were laughing at their family. She knew Star Arrow had required that no messages pass between White Bear and the tribe. But if White Bear really loved her, could he not have broken that rule—even if he had smoked the calumet with Star Arrow—at least once? For six summers White Bear had been as silent, as absent, as if he were dead.

Even the dead sometimes send a sign.

The next day the sky was cloudy, and the air warmer than last night. All morning long women walked past Redbird's wickiup, looking curiously at the man who sat there motionless. Like Redbird herself, they had never before seen a man while his spirit had gone to walk the bridge of stars. When men went on spirit journeys they always retired to the forest or to caves.

In the afternoon He Who Sits in Grease, a Fox brave, came to Redbird as she and Sun Woman sat before their doorway plaiting baskets, a short distance from White Bear. The brave was carrying a stout bustard with feathers striped brown, black and white. He hunkered down facing her and laid the bird before her.

His thick lips worked nervously. "This is for White Bear," he said. "When he wakes up. It is the fattest of the three that I killed this morning. Tell him that He Who Sits in Grease gives him this gift. I want him to ask Earthmaker to make the animals come to me more willingly when I hunt them."

Before Redbird could protest, the brave stood up and backed away, his eyes timidly averted from the figure outside the doorway.

He thinks White Bear is holy! The thought made her more angry at White Bear than ever. She wanted to kick him again, but women were watching from a distance, and she knew they would make fun of her.

"Get up," she said softly to White Bear. "Go away," she said, grinding her teeth.

She wished Owl Carver would come back from visiting the other camps to put a stop to White Bear's torturing her like this.

But he might force me to accept White Bear as my man.

Amazingly, she felt a lift in her heart at this thought. She herself could never forgive White Bear, but if Owl Carver, her father and[198] the shaman of the British Band, ordered her to, the decision would be made for her.

Then, at least, this torment would end.

Sun Woman silently picked up the bustard, sat down and began plucking the feathers, piling them in a basket to use for adornments and bedding.

To escape from being rubbed raw by White Bear's presence, Redbird went out into the woods along the Ioway River, as Sun Woman had done yesterday, to gather herbs. The medicine plants were at their most powerful now, because they had been gaining strength all summer long.

Late in the day the sky darkened rapidly. The purple-gray clouds seemed to hang so low that she could reach up and touch them. She heard the first drops pattering on the branches above her. As the rain started to fall faster, it drummed on her head and shoulders. Sighing at having to give up this comforting work, she put a lid on her basket, stood up and started back for the camp.

Her doeskin shirt and skirt kept the rain off her body, but her hair was soaked and her face was streaming by the time she got back to the wickiup. She would build up the fire and dry herself off. Its heat would feel so good. She hoped Eagle Feather and Sun Woman were already inside.

She stopped before the silent, sitting figure outside the wickiup. The brown blanket was pulled up over his head. Sun Woman must have done that. The blanket was sodden with rain, and he looked like a rock growing out of the ground.

The beating of rain filled her ears.

She squatted down and looked into his face. Water ran in rivulets down from the blanket into his half-closed eyes. He did not even blink.

She shivered. The cold rain was coming down so hard she could not see most of the camp. A lump blocked her throat.

"Come inside," she said. She had to raise her voice to hear it over the drumming of the rain.

White Bear neither spoke nor moved.

"Come in. It is raining. It is cold. You will die out here." She realized she was screaming at him.

"Oh!" she cried helplessly.

She sat on the ground, looking into the rain-slick, light-complexioned[199] face with the strong nose and the long jaw that she had loved long ago, the face she had thought about so many times and had seen so often in dreams. A black crust of blood had dried over the place where her rock had gashed his cheek. On the same cheek a raised white line ran from just under his eye to the corner of his mouth.

To try to wake a man on a spirit journey could be dangerous for him.

But her hands seemed to have a will of their own. She had to touch him. She reached out, clutching his shoulders through the sopping blanket, heedless of the rain pouring down her own face, running under the collar of her doeskin shirt down her back and chest. She shook him.

"Get up! Come in out of the