I ate my usual tiny portion of camas bread on the half shell with gently braised Methuselah. Not caring what anyone saw, I unbuttoned my bodice and wriggled out of my riding skirt. I waited until it was dark enough before I patted in the last of the moss from several days ago. Last week, I would have been paralyzed by mortification over exposing myself. I didn’t care now, and no one seemed to mind. I sat on Catherine’s buffalo robe – that gave me pause – and tried to untangle my hair.

Hawk came out of the darkness. With a sigh, he took off his moccasins and unbuttoned his shirt. He sat, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, and watched me. He looked weather-beaten in the moonlight, not at all the subject of an elegiac poem about the Noble Red Man on the shores of Gitche Gumee, or something equally stupid composed in Massachusetts by someone who knew nothing about riding with The People and suffering. Hawk had daubed on red and white paint –half white man, half Indian – at some point during the canyon fight.

He must have been dragging brushing on the trail to cover the retreat, because his hair had knotted into tangles of twigs and bits of bark. He began to pull twigs out, flicking the little sticks in my direction. It was an absent-minded, brotherly sort of gesture that for a moment he reminded me of Phil. I felt a huge wage of homesickness over me that left me speechless to offer comfort or commiseration.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. Long pause. “For getting so angry at you in the canyon.” Another pause. I knew better than to interrupt and fill the space with words. “My heart was bad.”

In this narrative, written some twenty-seven years after the event, I have naturally paraphrased conversations. I’m not vain or smart enough to pretend I could possibly remember all that was said to me. I’m not even sure I want to, but I do remember when Hawk said that his heart was bad. His words touched me because he looked so defeated, and also because I remember my own unkind words. His hands trembled as he pitched those silly twigs at me. I knew he was ready to drop from exhaustion, but there he was, telling me he was sorry.

I tried to be rational about the whole situation, but he had caught me in my own backlash of a surge of loneliness and I melted into tears. He quit fooling with the twigs and put his arms around me. Mindful of people nearby, I cried as quietly as I could. I told him how frightened I was and how lonely, as he let me cry all over him.

I finally blew my nose on the hem of my skirt – Miss Sumner, what would you do if your only handkerchief was still in Yellowstone Park? – and sat up straight.

He released me. “Liz, you have strong wyakim.”