nting in the last moments
before nightfall.

_Hawk spirit, help me to live through this testing. Help me to see a
great vision and grow to be a mighty shaman._

The tiny spot of black dwindled in the sky, till he could no longer see
it.

_Perhaps it flies over the winter silence of Saukenuk village._

He sheathed the knife. Turning his back on sky and river, he looked
westward over the way he had come. A prairie of waving tan grass almost
as high as his head stretched as far as he could see. Killed by the
cold, the grass yet stood, held up by the stiffness in its dead stalks.
Like a fur cloak, the brown covered the hills that rolled away to the
west.

He could not see his people's winter hunting camp from here; it nestled
back among those hills, sheltered in a forest that grew along the Ioway
River. Looking in its direction, he saw Redbird in his mind. Her eyes,
black as obsidian arrowheads, shone at him. He felt a powerful yearning
just to see her, to speak to her and hear her voice, to touch her cheek
with his fingertips. The thought that he might never see her again,
never go back to his people, chilled him more than the winter cold.

_O Earthmaker, grant that I live to return to Redbird._

He knelt and peered over the edge of the bluff, the bearskin cloak
bunching around him. Gray limestone, wrinkled and pitted like the face
of an old man, swept down to dark masses of leafless shrubbery at the
river's edge. His eyes searched out and then found an especially black
shadow in the bluff wall. If he had come any later on this day, he might
not have been able to find the cave mouth in the dark.

Then he might have had to wait till morning. Or, trying to climb down to
it, he might have missed the way and fallen to his death. A cold hollow
swelled in his belly. It would be so easy to slip.

Enough of what might have been. It was what would be that frightened him
now. He might die, not of falling, but of what he found in the cave.

Or what found him.

Forcing that thought, too, out of his mind, he lowered his body over the
edge of the bluff, dug his toes into footholds and carefully climbed
sideways and downward. In places, the path along the bluff face widened
out and was almost as easy to walk on as a forest trail. But then the
crumbling stone would slant steeply, so that he had to grip hard with
his buckskin-shod feet, feeling as if he were clinging to nothing at
all.

A wide ledge spread before the entranc