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fear was that, in the end, it wouldn’t be enough.
    From day to day, no one knew what meat the hunters might bring. The women had to be prepared for anything. Today, gathering was more successful than hunting: finding a trove of yams and tubers with a thick, fine yellow flesh.
    Using a flattened rock, T’Cori scraped out a hole as deep as her forearm. She crosshatched brush carefully, struck sparks into kindling and nursed her fire to life, rolling stones into the pit while the flames still crackled. After they died down she laid leaves and grass on the stones, sprinkled some water, then laid down the yams. On top of them she lay more grass, sprinkled more water, then more grass and a thick coating of earth, leaving the yams to cook.
    As a dream dancer, she was more familiar with the medicinal qualities of plants and animals than their value as food. But all Ibandi women knew how to convert any edible living thing into a nourishing meal, if not a feast. She missed the easy comfort of her days walking Great Earths slopes, plucking thistle top, boar weed, and crowfoot. Those spices were good to chew raw or add twisty flavor to a stew.
    Blossom had taught her the best way to prepare wildebeest: singe them, gut and scrape them, then stuff the carcass with hot stones. The carcasses would then be rolled atop a burnt-down fire and sizzling ashes heaped on top.
Great Mother! Her
mouth watered at the memory.
    Dear lost Small Raven had loved ostrich. They had been in conflict over many things but had shared happy days preparing the great birds for feast— plucking and filling them with smoking stones, leaves and even their own feathers—laughing and singing as they alternated layers of leaves and feathers and ashes atop a stuffed bird so that it roasted from within and without. The aromatic smoke rose all the way to Great Mother’s peak, carrying their spirits.
    Creatures eaten with love surely rose to the top of the mountain, to play the games of love and hunt again and again through all the seasons to come.
    These days, T’Cori usually made do with a few yams and an occasional bird. Her hands shook as she prepared a scanty meal, and it was impossible for her not to think of smoked porcupines and opossums, ducks roasted in mud balls, strips of iguana meat roasted or stretched in the sun, mussels and crayfish and ostrich eggs cooked in glowing coals or hot ashes.
    T’Cori remembered the splash of cold stream water against her thighs as she and her sisters beat the river with hides, driving fish toward the nets. Hearing the water-children squeal and cry with fear like scaly birds.
    What wonderful times those had been!
    She smeared tears away with the back of her hand.
No.
Such memories would break her, and she had no right to break. She must be strong. More than strong. To be anything less than Great Sky Woman, the hope of her people, would be a complete betrayal.
    T’Cori was so absorbed in her work that when a gray-haired man touched her shoulder, she hadn’t even realized he had been waiting behind her. Her visitor was stooped now. Her medicine woman’s eyes told her his bones ached, but she knew he never complained, and he never walked in the rear.
    He was Water Chant, her father, the man who had abandoned her as a child. The coarsely knotted hair above his narrow face had faded to white. She had heard that he had once been the strongest, fastest hunter in Water boma. She had never known him, had not even suspected that he still lived, until he came to her just before the Ibandi left the shadow of Great Sky, pleading for her forgiveness.
    Forgiveness she had given happily.
    “I would have words,” he said.
    “Of course,” T’Cori answered. For a moment she considered adding
father
, but in the time it took for the thought to form, the moment flew.
    “In days past,” Water Chant said, “our speaking shamed my heart. Once upon a time I feared my daughter’s blindness, blindness I now know was a sight beyond my own. I