nger you boil them, the hotter
the water will get. He is to drink the water, but not swallow the
peppers. If he is very cold, give him one pepper to chew on. That would
bring the dead back to life. If you meet him before I do, this is how
you can help him."

_She thinks I mean to try to meet him when he comes back._

"I will go to him," Redbird said abruptly.

Sun Woman stared at her. "You must not. If you interrupt his spirit
journey it might kill him."

"He has been in a cave for a night and a day, and this is the second
night, colder than any night I can remember. My father watches for him,
but he does not come. He could still be sitting in that cave. He has no
fire. He has no food or water. The wind blows in from the river. The
snow here at the camp is so deep that in some places the drifts are over
my head. The cave could be full of snow. When he is suffering all this,
how can you say that _I_ am a danger to him?"

Sun Woman sat cross-legged on the rush mat floor and stared down at her
hands folded in her lap. After a silence she looked up, and her grave,
dark eyes held Redbird's.

"You are a good young woman, and you love my son. But you must
understand that the greater danger to Gray Cloud is not from the cold.
If you try to wake Gray Cloud's body when his soul is gone from it, his
spirit will never come back to his empty body. It will set its feet on
the Trail of Souls and walk west, to the land of the dead."

Sun Woman's eyes shone, and the shadows and firelight gave her the face
of an angry spirit. Redbird drew back.

"I will not do that," she said. "I promise you." But if she saw that
Gray Cloud would surely die anyway, of freezing, would it not then be
best to take the risk of waking him?

And what if he did wake on his own, but was too frozen to climb out of
the cave and walk back to the camp by himself? Then he would need her
help.

She decided that if she got to the cave and his spirit was still out of
his body, she would do everything to help him short of waking him. She
would build a fire near him. She would cover him with warm cloaks, try
to warm his body if she could do that without disturbing him.

She boiled the peppers in a small tin pot set on stones over Sun Woman's
low fire. After she had filled a skin with the pepper water, she rolled
tinder and a pale eyes fire striker into a blanket. She put her hand on
Sun Woman's snowshoes, leaning against a wall of the little wickiup, and
Sun