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way a knife scars the skin.”
    “Then I will go with you. We should go now, in the dark, when these terrible things you will see will not blind you.”
    Nocona nodded his assent. He got to his feet and looked then at Red Owl. The old man looked as if he had aged fifty winters since the last time Nocona had seen him. It must be horrible, he thought, to make this old one so much older still.
    “Let’s go,” he said.
    Red Owl turned and looked toward the crest of the rise, not more than fifty yards above them. He nodded. “We will go,” he said. He started walking, and Nocona made a move to brush past him, to take the lead. Red Owl reached out and closed his bony fingers around the younger man’s wrist. “No,” he said. “I will lead you.”
    “There is nothing there that can harm me,” Nocona argued. “I don’t need your protection.”
    “Everyone needs protection from such things,” Red Owl insisted.
    “And what then, will the dead be less dead because you see them first? Will their hearts still beat, will breath still be drawn?”
    “No.”
    “Then what difference does it make whether you go first or I do?”
    “It is better. Trust me. It is better so.”
    “All right, but get on with it.”
    Once more, Red Owl nodded his head, the long white Sioux-styled braids he favored draping his shoulders and seeming to wriggle like snakes with the movement. He started forward again, this time more purposefully, his short legs whispering in the tall grass with every step. Nocona fell in behind him, leaning forward against the increasingly steep incline. At the crest, Red Owl raised his hands to the sky and mumbled something that Nocona didn’t catch.
    “What did you say?” the young man asked.
    “Never mind, my son. That is between me and the Great Spirit.”
    Nocona moved up alongside him and stared down into the broad valley. The river still had a trace of color, its rippling surface dark red at the center and shading to nearly purple near the banks. The valley was full of shadows, the willows on the far end of the village masses of black as the sun disappeared behind boiling black clouds. Nocona looked up at the spears ofblinding light for a moment, half a dozen of them lancing out from behind the gilt-edged clouds and, one by one, vanishing.
    Peering down into the gathering darkness, Nocona could see that it was worse than he had feared. Most of the tipis had been burned, leaving heaps of ash and burned goods, sometimes, too, leaving charred lodgepoles like the rib cages of great beasts. Mounds of shadow lay scattered, and he knew without seeing the details, that they were the bodies of his people, slaughtered like buffalo and left to rot in the sun.
    He started to run then, breaking away from Red Owl, his voice roaring from his lungs of its own volition. His feet were flying through the tall grass and he had the sensation that if he tried to stop, they would go out from under him. Halfway down, he stumbled, fell headlong and rolled over and over, then spread his arms out like wings to arrest the fall and popped to his feet again as if he had meant to fly.
    On the flat, he picked up speed, stumbled once more and this time sprawled on his face, the wind knocked from him by the fall. He turned to see what had tripped him, and realized even as he crawled toward it that it was a body. He closed his eyes, screwing them tightly shut, hoping that he would never have to open them again. But he knew that was no answer. Slowly, he opened them, his hand hovering just over the back of the prostrate figure. The smell was overwhelming and it hit him with all thesuddenness of a bird flying into a stone wall.
    The smell of death was everywhere, thick in the air, like a mist that seemed to be coating his skin. He covered his nose, scrambling away from the corpse and getting to his feet. Nocona pinched his nostrils shut. In the last lingering dark gray of twilight, he could see mounds of shadow everywhere he looked. Heaps of