“Wyakim?” I asked. I rose to my knees and started picking the leaves and brush out of Hawk’s hair. I couldn’t have explained what just happened, but something had changed. He made no objection.

“Guardian spirit. One who watches.”

I thought about the Crow army scout in the canyon. I suppose he could have killed me and Catherine, scalped us both and called it a well-rounded day. But that didn’t happen. Wyakim. I doubt my Episcopalian priest would have been impressed, but I was.

“I don’t believe in things like that,” I told him, belying my own thoughts.

“Do you believe in God and Jesus and the…the wyakim that no one sees?” he asked.

I hesitated, my fingers in his hair. I believed in the Holy Trinity, One and Inseparable, on McDermott Street, but out here I wasn’t so certain. If there was a God, no matter in how many pieces he found himself, he certainly wasn’t smiling on the Nimiipuu. And weren’t they his creations, too? This was too much theology for me on an empty stomach.

“I thought I did,” I answered slowly, “but now I am not so certain.”

He took my hands from his hair, squeezed them and released them. “You need more faith.”

How strange to hear that coming from a warpainted man. He must have gone to church in Vancouver with his father. Maybe he went with Catherine. I realized how little I knew about this person who had saved my life only this afternoon. I wanted to ask so many questions, but nothing came out except, “I am so tired.”

“You and all of us,” he said. “Look away.”

I did as he said, knowing he was removing his loincloth and crawling under the buffalo robe. For a moment that luckily passed – should I even write this, if my children are going to read it? Oh, why not. – I didn’t want to look away. I did, though, then looked back before I moved to my side of the shelter, the safe side. “Hawk, is your wyakim Kaya?”

“Yes. Hawk. I had an earlier name, a Christian one from my father. I haven’t used it since my vigil when kaya swooped down and carried me to another peak.”

I didn’t laugh, although I might have a few weeks ago, when I was only Miss Elizabeth Ann Everett of Omaha, Nebraska. I suppose a hawk swooping down was no stranger than a virgin birth or three people being one person.

He touched his chest. “My medal has strong medicine, too,” he said. His voice sounded drowsy, and I knew he would soon sleep.

I knew he meant the copper-colored medallion he wore on the rawhide strip about his neck. He always wore it.

“Tell me.”

“It was given to my great grandfather, father of Meopwits, by Meriwether Lewis.”

Lewis and Clark. My goodness. I recalled the stories of the Nez Perce aiding the starving Corps of Discovery as they struggled toward the Western Sea. Why should they not be held in honor in their own valleys, and not hunted through Montana Territory now?