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satisfactions, always with the motions, the nearnesses, the sounds. His mother’s round, brown, dark-nippled breasts hung over him, her hand released him from the straits of the cradleboard, fondled him, cleansed him, and anointed him with oil, delighting his naked skin, and then the oozy nipple would meet his sucking lips, and he would nourish himself blindly like a root in the earth, lulled by the oldest of all the sounds, her pumping heart. If he opened his eyes, he would see her glinting eyes above him, her large hand moving slowly to discourage some buzzing, tickling fly, and beyond, the leaves moving, the clouds moving. Or he would watch his own fat little hand clench and open or experimentally extend a finger at a time, perhaps knowing or perhaps not knowing that it was a part of him instead of one of the familiar moving things of the sensual world around him.
    And sometimes the face of his sister, Star Watcher, would move into the round of his little world and loom before him with its white smile and its songs and its cooing and clucking sounds. Her face was as welcome as his mother’s, her caresses as kind, her skin as warm, her voice as musical; the only difference was that her little nipples did not give food.
    And he came to know other faces, too: his father’s, usually high above him smiling down, the eagle feather in his hair translucent with sunlight, the silver bobs of his earrings glittering just out of reach, the deep roll of his voice filling the world. And his brother’s face, a different smile, dark hair without a feather or other ornaments, and the funny popping sounds he would make with his lips to start the baby giggling. Still the days passed and the seasons turned.
    Then came days when he was kept close to his mother’s skin inside a musky-smelling animal hide, dark with interesting and tickly short hairs on it, and when the robe was opened the air on his skin was cold, a sensation new and needing to be understood. In those days there was always the sharp odor of smoke, and sometimes he would stay enchanted for long times by the light and movement of flames, contemplating fire and the moving shadows it made above him, hearing its soft or sharp little sounds. The fire was another familiar to him, always there, moving and making sounds, like another member of this family. Sometimes at night he would wake up, and though he could hear his mother’s heartbeat and her breathing, and feel the warmth of her skin, he could not see her or anyone else in the darkness of their
wigewa,
no one except the fire. It was always there, though sometimes itwould be burned down to silent, shimmering embers, and though it looked different then from the flames, it still had motion and he would recognize it, and make sounds to it, wordless talk in the cold darkness between two warm and living things, baby and fire.
    Still the days and nights passed and the seasons turned.
    His bones were growing straight in the straight cradleboard. Constrained in it much of every day, his limbs and backbone and the back of his head aligned by its straight wooden back, he was unconsciously being molded into that erect posture that characterized the Shawnees and made them seem an unusually proud and handsome people. Chiksika, now in his thirteenth year, was nearly as tall and straight as his father the chief, whom he emulated in every way. Chiksika and Hard Striker were often gone for many days at a time in the winter, gone together with their horses and guns and bows, just the two of them or with other men of the town, to hunt up or down the river and in meadow-lands to the west and south for meat and hides, leaving Turtle Mother and Star Watcher and the baby in Kispoko Town. Sometimes during their absences there would be howling, shrieking blizzards, and the snow and cold winds would force their way into the bark house. It would be hard to keep the fire alive, and the smoke would blow back down through the smokehole, filling the house,