ing and exciting. She had looked forward to lying
down with White Bear.

But now she was going to lose him. How could Sun Woman send her own son
away from the tribe?

_And send him away from me._ Redbird felt more hurt than if her own
mother had turned against her.

And did White Bear truly mean to go with the pale eyes? He had smoked
the calumet. He must.

The current carried her canoe through the water, brown with silt caught
up in spring flooding, almost faster than she could paddle. Ahead the
river divided, flowing around an island near the right bank, thick with
trees. White Bear turned into the narrow channel that ran between island
and shore, and she backpaddled to slow herself and watch.

His canoe rounded a huge fallen tree, whose exposed roots clutched at
the island's shore like the fingers of a drowning man, and disappeared
behind the trunk.

She let her paddle drag in the water, first on one side then on the
other, holding her canoe back until he had time to land. Then she glided
into the narrow channel and around the dead tree.

He had drawn his canoe up in a small sandy cove, and was gone. She
landed on the patch of sand beside his canoe and pulled her canoe
partway out of the water.

She listened, and for a moment heard nothing but the wind in the trees.
A redbird, her namesake, trilled long and loud, and another answered
from a more distant tree.

Then she heard a human voice. No words, just an outcry. A cry of pain.

She plunged into the forest that covered the island, pushing her way
through the shrubbery toward the sound of his voice.

He was sobbing so loudly that she was sure he could not hear her coming.
She had heard a man sob like that once before, a dying hunter whose leg
had been torn to shreds by a bear.

She moved through some trees and saw him. He was sitting with his back
against the big black trunk of an oak. He was in a grove of trees so big
and so old that little grew in their heavy shade, and there was an open
place to sit. The season was so young that their branches were still
almost bare, and she could see White Bear clearly in the afternoon
sunlight. He held a severed tree branch in his lap. His eyes were
squeezed shut and his lips were drawn back from his teeth, and his cries
of pain came one after another.

She stepped out of the bushes into the grove. He looked up, and the face
he showed her was so twisted that she could not tell whether he saw her.
He went on sob