It was cold, thick rain, the kind that turns to snow. I was soaked through in no time. The prospect of getting either warm or dry that day looked extremely bleak. I complained about the weather to Blue Mountain Woman, who favored me with an indulgent smile, the kind you use to humor toddlers.

“You talk talk about what you cannot change,” she reminded me. (Dear reader, she said “talk talk” to emphasize whiners, of which I appeared to be the chief offender. If it was “cry cry,” I knew it was time to dry up.)

I guess I did talk talk. She was correct. What good did it do to jaw about it? I might have looked skeptical – who knows – because she continued.

“This is time of rain. It rains. Mother earth is still our mother. This is our circle.”

“Don’t you get tired of riding in rain?” I persisted.

“If no rain, I mourn,” she said firmly, in that motherly tone I recognized in coming years when I urged my children to eat that spinach because it was good for them. I decided not to complain complain about the weather anymore.

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.