“Just tell her. She understands some.”

“Did your father teach her?” I asked, remembering his absent parent.

“Yes. Some.”

“Who was he?” I knew it wasn’t polite to ask prying questions. I reasoned that since I was forced to cast my lot with this family, like it or not, I wanted to know something about them.

“He was a Scots fur trader from Vancouver, Washington Territory. He lived with us in the Wallowa Valley until I was eight years old, then he returned to Vancouver. It was called Columbia City then.”

That was not enough information. Hawk was going to get tired of me really soon, but I wanted to know more. “How did you learn such good English if he left when you were so young?”

He raised his chin and gave me a down-at-the-nose look that suggested I might be teetering on the edge of his personal commentary. “He married a white woman and talked Mother into letting me go there.”

“Married a white woman? But…but…”

He reached across the space between us and tapped my wrist with one finger. It was an odd gesture, as if he were trying to tell me that he was about through. “Mother was called a Country Wife,” he said, still tapping. “It happens.” He stopped tapping and assumed a position much like my own, his chin on his hands. “The mystery to me is how he convinced her to let me go.”

I thought I’d try my luck with another question. “Did you like it there?”

“For a while, until I began to miss the valley of the Wallowa and the Blue Mountains. Then I hated Vancouver.”

“What did you do?”

“You’re determined, aren’t you?” he asked, not in exasperation, but as if he were my nonexistent big brother tolerating his upstart little sister. (I had no idea how old he was, and still don’t know.) “Really determined?”

“Why, yes, I am,” I said in a perky way that made him laugh.

“He died. I left the night after the funeral.”

“How far was it?” I know I was beginning to sound like the prosecuting attorney in Spanish Inquisition versus Poor Sinner, but Hawk fascinated me.

“You’re a little bulldog, aren’t you?” he asked, but I heard the humor. “You dig in and don’t let go.” He turned over and stared at the burned canvas overhead. “Four hundred miles, give or take. Took me a long time to get home. I followed the big river you call Columbia.”

“How old were you?”

“Twelve summers.”

Twelve years old? When I was twelve, Mother had just begun, under protest, to let me pick out my own clothes. I started to wonder what I had been missing out in life, not that I would have cared to walk four hundred miles. But the idea of it!

“Look away.”

I turned away from him as I heard him get up. There was a rustle of buckskin and a tuneless whistle, followed by a metallic clink and another rustle. I smiled when he swatted my hip with his moccasins. “All right.”