Grandfather often pointed out the success of the sparrow hawk as an example—the sparrow hawk, who like the rabbit had moved out of the meadows and into the suburbs. That was not the original way of the Osage, who had been more apt to construct deeper and more complicated layers of ritual around the core of their traditions when those traditions failed them. Grandfather—and, she suspected, his father before him and his own grandfather—had changed that. They had begun to change, to move as quietly into the world of the Heavy Eyebrows as they once had through their beloved forests; to hide themselves under the camouflage of jeans and workshirts, of square wooden houses and neat yards. With that change, they had changed the Medicine, until it began to work well again, as it had worked when it was concerned with hunting and fishing, stealing horses and averting danger, winning brides and conquering enemies. Adapting the Medicine had worked with other tribes—but the Heavy Eyebrows were different, so different that an adaptation would not work. It had to be change, much as the Little Old Men disliked change.

That had been what Grandfather had said, at any rate, when she had asked him.

“Well?” he said, looking up at her, his bright black eyes shining with some secret amusement. She didn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about.

“You know very well I got it, Grandfather,” she sighed. “There’s no point in pretending you don’t know. I might have believed that a raven cawing at me from the wires was just coincidence, but not one that landed on the roof of my truck and stared me in the face, then laughed at me.”

Grandfather shook his head, mockingly. “Damn,” he replied. “I must be slipping. I shouldn’t have tipped my hand that way.”

“So why were you following me?” she asked, kicking off her shoes, and reveling in the feeling of soft, well-varnished and blessedly cool wood under her bare soles. She walked around the living room, picking up the little bits of popcorn and empty cups that told her he’d had the kids inside today, probably during the afternoon. He seldom let them into the house in the morning, teaching them instead the Osage games his father had taught him, and running the fat of too much television watching off them. But even he agreed that when the temperature climbed above ninety, there was no point in courting heatstroke. These were kids raised in air conditioning, born to parents with health insurance, not tough little Osage brats who never saw a doctor and ran around mostly naked in the Oklahoma heat. Toughening took time and required the parents’ cooperation and participation—perhaps when the children were older, he might teach them the way of the Warrior, if not Warrior’s Medicine. Grandfather agreed; the seed was planted and he took the long view of any of the gentle Tzi-Sho gens. Let the seed sprout and mature in its own time; these children would at the very least be a little less credulous, a little less inclined to let others run things for them, a little less prone to give up and go with the system, a little more likely to fight for themselves and their world. And of course, they would not be content to accept the stereotype of the “lazy, drunken, ignorant Indian.” For him, that was quite enough.