One of the men wounded in the Canyon Creek skirmish died last night. He was an old one, strictly a noncombatant, who had fallen off his pony during the retreat and suffered a blow to the head. Colonel Sturgis probably claimed him as a victim of the canyon fight, and I suppose he was right.

The young men wrapped the body in a blanket and carried him away for burial. I watched them go through the grey scrim of rain until they vanished. Why go so far to dig a grave? I asked Hawk about it when he returned from wrapping the body.

He was scraping mold off a piece of camas root bread. “They must do that, Liz. They must find a secret place.”

“Why?”

“If they do not, the Crows or Bannocks or other scouts will dig him up, scalp him, and his spirit will wander.”

I was shocked. “Surely they wouldn’t desecrate a dead man. Would they?”

Hawk gave me a sour smile and returned to doctoring breakfast.

Blue Mountain Woman found me a piece of moldy bread, too, and I scraped at it with my fingernail. We had reached the bottom of the barrel, so to speak. The blue slime felt like the side of a fish pond and smell like an old closet, but I was too hungry to care.

“Hawk?”

“H’mm?”

“Are you a good hunter?”

“When I have time.”

“Oh.”

The prospect of anything else to eat today was discouraging in the extreme. I closed my eyes and held my breath and popped in that disgusting morsel. It went down like a raw oyster, so it could have been worse. My stomach protested, but I reminded it that this was all part of the great circle.

I nearly told Hawk about the many-course dinners that formed our usual gluttonous habit in Omaha, but figured he wouldn’t believe me. When I think about all the food we wasted in one sitting, I don’t believe it even now – steak, fowl, venison, pork, and that was just one course.

I used to dabble with this and poke at that, then slide it all away and settle for a nibble of vegetable cloaked in a white sauce, with maybe a macaron to finish it off. I had set myself a determined goal to achieve the appropriate sylph-like thinness for fashion’s sake. And now here I was, getting thinner by the minute, surrounded by slim people and babies crying because they wanted more. I don’t know what The People looked like when they began their flight in western Idaho, but here in Montana Territory, there were no plump Nimiipuu.

We made slow travel in the rain. I will always remember the suck and pull of the horses as they stumbled through the glop. Every moment we expected for the troopers to ride out of the mist. Hawk rummaged around and found me an antique musket that was probably made especially for the War of the Roses. He loaded it and handed it to me carefully, telling me not to shoot anyone who looked like one of The People.