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a single glimpse of the wrinkled brown face beneath.
    "He's called Itunkala," their sister explained.
    "A good name," Tasiyagnunpa announced. Still weak and weary, she lay in buffalo hides beside the fire.
    A good name? Mastincala asked himself. It meant Mouse. If there was a name sure to grant its owner a steeper path than Rabbit, Mouse was certain to be it.
    "He will need a brave heart and a strong arm," Mastincala declared.
    "And a brother to show him the way," Hinhan Hota added.
    "Such a brother he will have," Mastincala promised. Louis clasped his brother's wrist. A smile emerged on the paler boy's lips. Rabbit guiding Mouse? Yes, it was worth a laugh surely.
    "I have a young brother already," Louis whispered. "The Lakota call him Istamaza."
    "Istamaza?" Mastincala asked. Eyeglasses?
    "He doesn't see well," Louis explained. "The soldier doctor made him some spectacles. It would be worse if his skin wasn't so light. His hair is fair, too, like yellow grass. He will be a better white man."
    "You are Lakota now," Mastincala declared. "You will stay here with me. We will ride to the buffalo hunt and fight the Crows."
    "No, my father will come soon, and I will return to the fort," Louis muttered. "I, too, have a hard road to walk, it seems."
    "The road of the wasicun?" Mastincala asked. "That is a crazy trail!"
    "So it must seem," Louis confessed with a grin. "I'll come back, though, and we'll hunt again."
    "Yes," Mastincala agreed. "Many buffalo will fall to our arrows."

Chapter Five
    Louis's departure a few days later left Mastincala cold and hollow. Difficult days were at hand, and he now felt he faced them alone. There was a winter as bitter cold and frozen as any remembered by the old ones. Chills gripped the small and the helpless, and Mastincala worried over the survival of his small brother. But Wakan Tanka willed the child would survive, and ice, as always, thawed under the dancing suns of summer.
    As Mastincala prepared to meet the challenges of his twelfth summer, great changes shook the earth. Word came that war had broken out among the white men in the country beyond the great waters.
    "Ah, they are a quarrelsome people," He Hopa declared. "It is like them to fight among themselves."
    When Louis arrived to share the buffalo hunt, he told of great armies of graycoats who fought the bluecoat soldier chiefs. A hundred times a hundred were slain, it was said. Mastincala shook his head in doubt. How could so many people be killed? Even the wasicun thunder guns could not bring such a calamity to pass.
    "It's so," Louis insisted, and He Hopa reminded the Rabbit how the eagle chief Harney had made war upon the peaceful camp of the Sicangu at Blue Creek.
    "Then perhaps all the wasicuns will die," Mastincala said. "Then the Lakota people can live in the old way, walking the sacred road, with only the Crows and Snakes to fight."
    As snows came again to the plain, thawed, and faded under the golden glow of the summer sun, it seemed perhaps it would be just so. The wagon trains that rolled along Platte River grew fewer, and mostly now it seemed there were women and little ones together with old men on that road. Few soldiers kept watch on the wasicun forts. At Laramie only the old and lame occupied the long lodges.
    For Mastincala, those two years were a remembered time. He hunted and fished and grew taller. His shoulders broadened, and his voice deepened. While bathing in the chill streams of Paha Sapa, he saw that he was a boy no longer. Next day Hinhan Hota drew him aside.
    "Each Lakota is called in his own hour to be a man, my son," the Owl explained. "This is your time. No one among the people could have stood so tall in his boyhood. All that must now be forgotten. You go to walk the warrior path. Hau, it makes a father's heart sing!"
    Hinhan Hota then led Mastincala to the lodge of He Hopa. The old medicine man was waiting, his eager eyes betraying his feelings.
    "So, you are a boy no more, Rabbit," He Hopa said. "Much