We three ate our handful of partly cooked beans in silence that night, and prepared ourselves for sleep as soon as the stars were out. I wondered if I would ever get to sleep. My stomach felt like a washcloth wrung out and wrung out and still twisted again to squeeze out the final drop of moisture. As my middle continued to tighten, the only benefit I could see about this adventure was having the smallest waist in Omaha, if I ever found my way home.

I know Hawk liked to tease me about my naïve approach to geography, but even I knew that Montana Territory wasn’t really that far from Nebraska. What he didn’t understand, and what I didn’t know how to tell him, was that the distance was more than miles. It ran from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, to the Iron Age and on and on to what the writer Mark Twain dubbed “The Gilded Age,” with railroads and timetables and watches and calendars – my world.

Did I miss it? I considered the matter. I didn’t miss corsets, or which fork was the correct fork, or worrying that my dance card wouldn’t fill up fast enough, or that it wasn’t ladylike to sprawl on the sofa and read magazines.

I knew my career with The People wouldn’t last forever. We would get to Canada, and I would find a policeman who would telegraph my father to come and get me. (Heavens, but I was naïve, as if Canada had well-laid-out towns and constables!)Then it would be back to the usual round of corsets, correct forks, dances, and turning into someone I wasn’t, all to secure the right husband with the proper career, living in the best neighborhood.

I would have to leave the freedom of my deerskin dress behind, and Fair One, too. That would be hard. Harder still would be saying goodbye to Blue Mountain Woman, who had burrowed into my heart and wouldn’t be dislodged easily. I lay there in the cold and the dark and realized that I loved her as much as my own mother.

That wasn’t all. How in the world could I leave Hawk? I rehearsed in my mind the whole wretched, splendid journey from Yellowstone Park to the Bear Paws. At every turn, he had been my protector and my friend. We had laughed together, cried together, fought together, suffered together. I glanced in his direction. He lay close to me now, which had been a mutual decision arrived at with no discussion. I wanted to stay with him, even though it was surely the worst wish of my entire life. We had nothing in common. Stone Age doesn’t meet the Gilded Age and dissolve into happily ever after. Did it?