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seed.
                   The night world lived as White Calf Dreamed. .
. .
                   In a land of glare, she walked, one tired step
after another—the ancient ritual of travel. A wind, hot as the draft radiating
from ember-cradled cooking stones, puffed at her face, desiccating her thin
flesh. About her, the slumbering anima of the land waited, restless, drying,
and dying.
                   "Didn't used to be like this." She
grimaced at the rasping of her voice. The old stories talk of water, of buffalo
so plentiful a strong man could cast his dart in any direction and kill. The
old stories talk of grass up to a man's waist. And now? Springs my grandfather's
grandfather drank from are no more than muddy seeps. Only the old ones know.
Only the keepers of the legends.
                   But the legends are changing. People are
changing. Even .place names are changing. Everything . . . changing . . .
                   The old familiar ache stitched and throbbed in
the joint of her right hip. Down deep inside the muscles of her age-worn legs,
cramps of fatigue gnawed like big black ants in the infested heart of a
deadfall pine. The hurt in her feet had grown, expanding, encompassing. Arches
flat and complaining, she padded across the hot clay, toes stinging as burning, eburnating joints swelled.
                   "Too damn old for this," she
muttered. "Ought to have a fancy lodge . . . strong sons and daughters to
bring me meat. Ought to be free to sit around and talk and make jokes. Tell the
old stories so they're remembered. Watch the young men and women act foolish
trying to impress each other. That's what."
                   Except the vision had come. While she prayed
and fasted on the high peaks of the Buffalo Mountains , something had happened to her. Four days
she'd been without food or water, chilled by the cool night air, desiccated by
the rays of the spring sun; she'd shivered and purged her soul.
                   Naked, she'd sat on the high point , seeking the source of the call that had
driven her all her life. Each time she had retreated, tried living like a
human, the call had returned, imperative, driving her to abandon each of her
husbands and the children they'd sired off her. Each time she'd returned to the
high places to seek the source of Power.
                   So she had gone again, until, on the fourth
day, a man's image had formed in the clouds, his features lit by the blinding
rays of the sun. A handsome man, tall, his Power had sung in silence, dwarfing
the clouds, a presence of warmth and sunlight.
                   She'd watched in awe as he smiled at her, an
arm rising to point southeast toward the plains where her native peoples had
lived since the time of the First Man. As quickly as it had come, the image
faded to be replaced by that of Wolf, eyes glowing yellow as sunbeams pierced
the clouds.
                   She'd blinked then, heart racing in her chest,
staring up in wonder at the puffy white formations of a giant thunderhead.
Weakened and shaken, she'd climbed down, found her clothes, and eaten before
setting off on the journey.
                   "Wolf Dreamer," she mumbled.
"He brought me here."
                   She took a deep breath, shaking her head and
slowing to a stop. Her tongue smacked, sticky in her dry mouth as she squinted
into the white glare of the beating sun.
                   An old woman alone in the vastness and heat,
she stood, back stooped from the tumpline holding a bulky pack on the fulcrum
of her hips. She peered around in all directions, catching her breath. The
distant bluffs shimmered like a Spirit Dream—jagged outlines wavering. Even the
blue vault of sky above had dulled, faded and parched. Outside of the restless
whisper of the bone-drying breeze, only a grasshopper clicked to the emptiness.
Even the birdsong had