Emaline turned away and walked on shaky legs to Charlie’s car. She slid into the back seat and Calla rode with Charlie up front and as they pulled out, Jim was still standing there in the driveway, holding his hat and looking positively stricken. She rode back to the city with her face buried in her hands. She thought of asking Charlie to take her around to the farmhouses of every one of those women who had taken Velma’s things, but she didn’t have the stomach for it. She didn’t even know who they all were. It was almost worse than the day Velma died, as though she had now vanished forever. Except for the bundles of letters Velma had written over the years, there was nothing left.

The Burning Man came to her in her dreams that night, as he had so many times since she was a girl. He was an Indian warrior, tall as a lodgepole pine, with coppery skin and black hair down to his waist and hair that burned day and night with a celestial light, without harming him or causing him pain. She imagined that he was the spirit of a great Lakota warrior, perhaps Crazy Horse himself. He wore a fringed deerskin shirt with fur cuffs made from a beaver hide, a bear-tooth necklace and deerskin leggings and he carried a lance decorated with eagle feathers. Emaline followed him in a soft white antelope-skin dress decorated with porcupine quills, with wolf skins over her shoulders and deerhide leggings. She wore snowshoes as they trudged across icy rivers and frozen lakes, under bare aspen trees, poplar and pine, past rocky outcrops tall as a dozen houses, through canyons where she could hear water flowing under the ice, across snow-covered prairies where there was no other soul for a thousand miles save her and the man with his hair on fire. On and on they traveled under a splash of stars, with no sound but the crunch of the snow underfoot. When she faltered, he would pause and wait patiently, long coils of flame dancing around his face. Sometimes the fire in his hair would leap to the stars, to the edge of the universe, shimmer in all the colors of the rainbow from the mountains up to the Milky Way.