She dialed the number quickly, and waited while the phone rang, glancing at the clock on her desk and hoping Mark Sleighbow hadn’t gone home for the day. It wasn’t quite five—where is this area code, anyway? If it was just in this time zone, or even west—

Someone picked up.

“Mr. Sleighbow?” she asked, trying to sound businesslike and brisk. “This is Jennifer Talldeer, returning your call.”

Mooncrow concentrated his outer awareness on the video game—the only one he ever played, something involving small odd-shaped blocks dropping down from the top of the screen—and pondered the many problems his beloved granddaughter was coping with. He watched her constantly, and he was well aware how she must be feeling right now. After all, he had gone through his own version of her particular balancing act.

That must be exactly what she felt like; as if she were a tightrope dancer. When one was very young, the balancing between life among the Heavy Eyebrows and life as a shaman was not particularly difficult. There simply were not many points of intersection, and no real points of conflict that could not be resolved by appeal to a parent to intercede with authority outside the family. But as one became older, the responsibilities became greater, and the number of conflicts increased. And there was no one to intervene on an adult’s behalf.

No one could remain forever in the Spirit World, not even in the long-ago days. The Little Old Men had also hunted and taken the war trail, raided and planted, until they grew too old. Then they remained behind to guard the village when younger men went on the hunt. But they did not sit always in the Lodge of Mystery, speaking to the spirits; they had their outer lives as well as their inner ones. But in these days, it was much more difficult to balance the secular life with the sacred—perhaps more so even for Kestrel than it had been for him. He had been a man with a simple job, one which began at seven in the morning and ended at three in the afternoon. It did not follow him home, disturb him in the sweatlodge, ring his phone at odd hours.

He understood her better than she knew. She must pay for this house; she must earn the money for food and clothing. She was the hunter, and the quarry was far more capricious than any buffalo. And yet she must also be the shaman-in-training. The clock must drive her—and yet, she must learn to let things come at their own time, to ignore the clock and the calendar and the demands they made on her concentration.