the Great River
at the Bad Axe, thinking they would be safer.

Sobbing and clutching her baby, Redbird watched the orange sun disappear
behind the pointed treetops on the western shore of the little lake. She
thought, Iron Knife, so strong and always there when she needed him,
must be gone. Her two sisters and their new husbands, probably dead.

The people mourned, some sitting on the ground, some walking about
distractedly, some standing, holding each other.

And now Eagle Feather was stricken. She could not get the chill out of
her body.

When it was dark she relit her fire. Floating Lily woke and cried, and
Redbird held her to her breast. Then she crawled under her lean-to to
look at Eagle Feather. His eyes were still shut. He had not moved since
his outcry, and his breathing was shallow.

_I cannot bear this. Eagle Feather lying as if dead, White Bear
vanished, most of my people dead._

_Why have I been spared to suffer so?_

Black Hawk began to mourn aloud for his lost people:

"Hu-hu-hu-u-u-u-u ... Whu-whu-whu-u-u-u-u ..."

The rest of the people joined in the wailing. Redbird noticed that Wave
and He Who Lights the Water cried out, too, and tears ran from their
eyes. She liked them for joining the mourning.

Owl Carver was sitting beside her, holding the hands of weeping Wind
Bends Grass. His own features, as much of them as she could see in the
twilight, were still and drawn, shrunken by sorrow.

Redbird thought, the Sauk were known far and wide as a people who never
shirked the demands of honor. If even one man of Black Hawk's party
smoked the calumet with Wave, that would oblige Black Hawk and his
remaining braves to surrender to the Winnebago and make peace.

Redbird said, "Now, with so many dead, can we have peace? Will you smoke
the pipe with these two men?"

Owl Carver said, "If I were alone, I would smoke the pipe with them. But
I will not go against Black Hawk."

"We are all that is left of the band," she said. "Someone must take the
calumet and smoke it."

And by that odious Sauk custom, she thought, clenching her jaw, it would
have to be a man.

As darkness deepened, the wailing died down. Wave and He Who Lights the
Water made a little fire at the edge of the lake near Redbird's lean-to.

One by one the last people of Black Hawk's band drifted close to Wave's
fire.

The Winnebago brave stood before the fire holding the peace pipe.
Twilight lingered in the sky behind him while the