The hare stopped laughing and seemed to sniff the air, and from its very core there came a deep bubbling sigh of delight. The hiss of a whisper again, this time with an air of purpose.

‘Ah Jamesss. Our friend sleeps.’

She ran after him, gasping with the effort as the deep snow sent her tumbling with its hidden holes and branches. But panic kept her moving, her mother’s heart beating in panic for her only remaining child. The only thing she had left.

‘Walks Alone! No!’

She watched his tiny frame leap nimbly over a fallen trunk and dart behind another tree. Great Spirit, why was he pursuing the man Henderson? The boy was running in the tall white man’s tracks, and she, like a fool, was running behind like a wolf after a hare.

She would not lose her son. No. Not after Snowchild. She would die first. And she sensed great danger. What instinct had made her follow Walks Alone as he pretended to go out for firewood? A mother’s? Perhaps, she thought with a tiny spark of hope in her aching heart, a wife’s.

How she longed for Hunting Wolf. But it had been Walks Alone who had made her doubt him. His unaccountable, mute fear of his father tore through her like a summer fire in the trees. And when the braves were slaughtered and the bereaved pointed to him, with his unexplained absences and his bloodstained body, what was she to think? She had a son to protect. She had been strong in making Hunting Wolf go, making him a fugitive. Though she longed for him still. Ached for him. But she would not lose her son: she would follow him to the edge of the world.

Singing Tree pulled her legs from the deep hole and stumbled back into the tracks that the boy was following. They were heading for the white men’s hole in the mountain.

So be it. She ran on, and her voice that continued to shout his name was muffled and deadened by snow and the thick solemn pines.

Walks Alone gasped to regain his breath and whirled around in search of his father. The hole in the snow marked where he had lain, but he was no longer there. The man Henderson must have helped him up. Where would they shelter? He looked towards the tunnel entrance yards away and narrowed his eyes.

There, only feet from the arch was a man-shaped curve in the snow, black fabric showing through the mound. Walks Alone gasped soundlessly and sprinted forward. The thick snow had all but covered his father’s immobile face and the boy swept it off, almost crying with relief that he swept it from a warm face. Hunting Wolf was alive.

Alive, but dead to the frenzied shaking that Walks Alone employed on his shoulders. He put his face to his father’s breast rising and falling and wept.