He started to laugh, after a moment of silence. Quietly, but it was real laughter.

“How did you guess?” he asked. She snuggled a little closer.

“Because it happens to me, every time I have a profound Medicine experience,” she confessed in turn. “I go on really good behavior for a while, then, well, I start to slip back to being a bitch. Not as big a bitch as I was before, but—still, there it is. I’m human; so are you. I guess humans can only be perfect for so long.”

Her confession left him quiet for a moment.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said, finally, as she hoped he would. “If you give me a little slack when I’m being a bastard, I’ll cut you some when you’re being a bitch.”

She smiled, into the darkness. “It’s a deal,” she replied softly.

Mooncrow seemed neither surprised nor displeased when they both came out of the same room in the morning. He simply greeted them both in a very preoccupied way; Jennie sobered completely, forgetting her own faint embarrassment, when she caught his mood. Whatever he expected to learn today, it was far more important than who had slept in whose bed last night, or any other night for that matter.

They all three piled into Mooncrow’s car, although David was the one who drove, following the old man’s brief instructions. Jennie perched in the back seat, leaning forward so she could listen to both of them. Mooncrow guided them out past the airport, following I-169 toward Catoosa, but on the local roads and not the highway. They seemed to be tracing the course of Mingo Creek. …

“Here—” Mooncrow said, suddenly. “Take the next turnoff.”

That proved to be a graveled county road; in pretty good shape, actually, better than she had feared it might be when she saw the gravel. It looked as if the county had managed to get most of the roads graveled after the washouts of spring. Mooncrow sat tensely on the front seat beside David and peered ahead through the windshield. It was obvious now why he had wanted David to drive; he was looking for something. Or perhaps, he was watching for “landmarks” not visible to the ordinary eye.

A crude, one-lane, timbered bridge crossed the creek ahead of them. Jennie’s guess about the creek was borne out when the old man told David to stop at the bridge.

“We’ll have to leave the car here, off to the side where it won’t obstruct anyone,” Mooncrow said, finally. “No one will be along to bother it.”