His mother was too preoccupied with a combination of grief and mundane domestic duties to notice Walks Alone’s eyes roll back in his head. The Eagle came to him in waking now as well as in sleep, and he had no control over its presence or the insistence of its messages. The small boy slumped in the gloom against the pile of skins at the edge of the tipi and gave himself up to it.

He was gliding above the edge of the mountain where the white men were making their great hole, and his father was lying far below in the snow.

Hunting Wolf was naked, except for the bone amulet around his neck, his long body lying like a fallen brown nut on the white pillow of a drift. Even from such a distance above, Walks Alone could not help but think how beautiful his father was, how strong and sound his body seemed, making its dark shape on the featureless ground.

The eagle that was Walks Alone dipped its wings and dropped down to land on a rock at the man’s side. Hunting Wolf was conscious, his knife in both hands, the blade pointing at his belly. The great bird and its passenger of a human soul, ruffled its feathers and watched with unblinking amber eyes.

The naked man in the snow was in great pain, although it seemed not to be from his flesh wounds, which were superficial diagonal cuts caused unquestionably by his own hand. It was an internal agony, the cause or result of some fierce concentration. Walks Alone watched with an aching heart and knew exactly what his father was doing. He was cutting himself to prevent himself from becoming unconscious.

This was the black truth his mother did not see. If Walks Alone could speak he would have told her how wrong she was about her husband. How wrong about his beloved father. She feared the man she had loved, and Walks Alone’s heart broke at the injustice of it. He feared that darkness which was in his father too, but he knew his father was apart from it, an enemy of it, an unwilling slave to it. Singing Tree’s thoughts were a mystery to the boy, and he was tortured by the signs that she had pushed her husband away in her heart.

Walks Alone looked on the contorted face of his father and loved him, praying to the Great Spirit that his mother would know the truth and believe what her dreams must surely tell her, even though her head denied it come the thin dawn light.