Richard sat up suddenly, startling Nathaniel out of his thoughts and fully awake. His hair stood out in a mane, his beard caked with grime. In the firelight his blue eyes blazed with fever and the madness of wanting and a clear, focused fear.

"What?" Nathaniel asked, even as he heard it himself. But he asked again, "What?" hoarsely. He reached for his rifle, the cold metal of the barrel as familiar to him as any part of his own body. His hands shook as he cocked the trigger. The sound was lost in the crackling of the fire.

Fear was commonplace in the bush. Once, deep in concentration as he aimed at a running buck, he had lost his footing and begun to slide over the edge of a cliff. As a young man, he had seen a panther drop out of tree onto a boy's back and reach around to lay his throat open with a casual swipe of a paw. More than once, he had capsized in icy white water. But this fear was colder, because he could put no face to it, beyond the ones that Joe had described. No face that he wanted to see.

With his bad hand cradled against his chest, Richard was holding up his left palm toward Nathaniel. Wait, he mouthed. Wait.

Against the first gauzy light of dawn the huge form materialized in the door all at once. Nathaniel's nostrils flared: sweat and tobacco and beaver musk and bear grease, and all the other smells together that made the Kahnyen’keháka smell. Fear gave way to relief so suddenly that Nathaniel broke into a running sweat. He lowered his rifle sights to wipe his face with one sleeve.

The man in the doorway came forward. The firelight picked out his rough—cast features: an old tomahawk scar ran from his scalp down the left side of his face; one ear was mangled. Nathaniel didn't recognize him, but that didn't matter. He would be related somehow, through Sarah. And a Kahnyen’keháka out hunting or traveling wouldn't be alone.

It took three heartbeats for Nathaniel to realize that something was wrong with Richard, who crouched motionless on the other side of the fire. All the wariness and anger in his face had disappeared. Above the beard, his face had taken on the look of a child, blank with fear.

The man's eyes were narrowed and fixed on Richard. Suddenly, unexpectedly, they widened in surprise. The large mouth broadened into a smile, splitting the tattoos on his cheeks with deep dimples, turning him from a warrior into a boy.

"Irtakohsaks," said the man to Richard Todd. "Etshitewa'kenha, kariwehs tsi sahtentyonh."

Cat—Eater, Little Brother. You have been gone a very long time.

Chapter 37

Such a warm and excessively sunny morning seemed improbable after the night of storms, but Elizabeth woke to just that. She might be wet through, every muscle might protest at the need for action, but the early morning sunlight was welcome on her face.

And there was a rabbit, fresh killed, bleeding into the grass at her feet, and evidence on Treenie's muzzle that she had indulged herself first.

"Very generous of you," Elizabeth praised her. "but how am I going to start a fire?" She hauled herself into a sitting position and stretched arms overhead, wincing slightly. She was not quite hungry enough to eat the flesh raw. But eat she must.

Eventually, she found a cranny between some boulders where the accumulation of autumn leaves was thick and deep enough to provide some dry under. This she fed carefully until there was enough of a flame to cook the rabbit on an improvised spit of green wood. In the end she burned both her fingers and her mouth and ate it near to raw anyway, while Treenie made short work of the odds and ends.

She wished desperately for the time to sit quietly and dry out, even as she sorted through her things and made ready to set off. In the bottom of her pack she found a forgotten store of nuts, which she cracked between her teeth while she surveyed the damage. The gunpowder was damp, but she was only a morning's walk from Robbie, if she didn't lose her way. For that long she could do without the musket. The knife was easily dried and oiled. Finally, Elizabeth changed into the spare hunting shirt, which was not quite so damp as the overdress on her back, loosed her hair so that it could dry in the breeze and the sun, pinned her hair brooch to the inside of her shirt to keep it safe, checked the compass, and set off with her moccasins cold and wet on her feet.

She found herself humming after a bit, and stopped, surprised and a little shocked at a disquieting truth: she was no longer panicked. The thought of Nathaniel made her walk faster, but somewhere during the storm she had lost the kind of breathless fear which had threatened to overwhelm her since the shooting. Under clear skies washed into brilliance, panic was replaced by a calmness of purpose.

The forest thinned by mid—morning into something approximating a meadow, or as close to a meadow as she had ever experienced in the great northern woods. About an acre in diameter, it was predominantly knee—high grasses and blueberry thickets. Recognizing the place as the one Nathaniel had described to her, Elizabeth stopped and took her bearings again. She was to leave the river and turn due south, here, and make her way over the hill before her. There would be a deer trail, Nathaniel had said, that crossed a brook with an abandoned beaver dam.

With a start Elizabeth found herself nearly tripping over a fawn hidden in the grass, a tiny thing with huge round eyes that looked up at her without fear or interest. Treenie pushed forward eagerly.

"Mind your manners," Elizabeth said to her sharply. Dejected, the dog loped ahead in search of an uncensored meal. Elizabeth was hungry, too, but on the other side of this hill she would come to the lake called Little Lost, at the foot of Robbie's mountain. The thought of delay was unbearable.