ted his hand. "Very tired. But alive."

"Are you hungry?"

"One good thing about getting old is that I do not want as much food."

White Bear felt immediate relief that they did not have to share their
few boiled roots and their bits of meal cake, and then he hated himself
for begrudging food to his own mother.

_Getting old_, she had said. She was not an old woman. From what she had
told him, he guessed her age was less than fifty summers. But the woman
before him was terribly gaunt and stooped. The privations of the moons
just past had aged her beyond her years.

He felt a stone block his throat as he realized that his mother might
not have much longer to live.

Iron Knife bent down and hugged Redbird, then patted Woodrow's head with
a big hand while the boy looked up at him with shining eyes. It was Iron
Knife, leading the war party that had captured Woodrow, who had insisted
the boy be allowed to live.

Like everyone else in the band, Iron Knife was mostly brown skin
stretched over a skeleton, but his was a very big skeleton, a head
taller than White Bear's. Studying Iron Knife, White Bear wondered
whether he could ask his help in getting Woodrow and Nancy safely away.

Iron Knife said, "There is no safety in following Black Hawk. He said
the British and the Potawatomi and Winnebago would join forces with us,
and they did not. Now he says the Chippewa will help us. He is sure to
be wrong again. And before he gets to the Chippewa he must travel
through Winnebago country for many days, and now most of the Winnebago
are helping the long knives hunt us."

Sun Woman said, "Black Hawk knows that if we join the rest of the tribe
in Ioway, he will no longer be leader. No doubt those who accepted He
Who Moves Alertly as their chief have prospered as much as we have
suffered. Black Hawk will have to take second place to He Who Moves
Alertly. That sticks in his throat like a fishbone. He would rather lead
us on and on until we all die."

White Bear had to force his voice from a chest tight with urgency. "You
will not have time to build enough canoes and rafts before the long
knives are upon you."

And the heads of the long knives would be full of names like Kellogg's
Grove, Old Man's Creek, Apple River Fort, Indian Creek and Victor, and
their hearts would be ravenous for revenge.

Iron Knife sat down on the tree trunk beside Sun Woman and pointed at
the river. "If they attack us before we can cross, we can defend