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most natural thing in the world to write about the Sioux and Cheyenne.
    Perhaps feeling that she was a kindred soul, Veronica had offered to teach Maggie to speak Lakota, and Maggie considered it a rare gift to be able to speak the ancient Sioux language. Veronica had charmed her with old tales and legends, stories of Iktomi , the trickster; of the Unktehi , who captured men and turned them into beasts; of lya , a monster who ate animals and men. She wished lya would go to LA and devour Frank Williams!
    Maggie wiped her face with a corner of the sheet, determined never to think of the past again. It was too painful to think of Frank and what might have been.
    With a sigh, she closed her eyes and willed herself to relax, to think of quiet blue oceans and the whisper of the wind sighing across the prairie, singing to the tall grass.
    Instead, she fell asleep thinking of the Indian sleeping in her guest room.
    In her dreams, he came riding toward her as he had once before, a darkly handsome stranger with eyes as black as a midnight sky and skin like burnished copper, but this time she wasn’t afraid, and she didn’t run away.

Chapter Eight
     
    Sunlight warmed his face. He heard someone singing softly, smelled meat cooking, and he knew it was time to get up, to go to the river to bathe before he offered his Dawn Song to Wakán Tanka .
    Sighing, Shadow Hawk started to get up, only to be seized by a sharp pain in his right side.
    Hand pressed over the bandage swathed around his middle, he sat up, unmindful of the thin blue blanket that slid down his chest and pooled in his lap as he stared at his surroundings. He’d had little experience with the wasichu , but he knew immediately that he was inside one of their square houses. Was he a prisoner?
    Frowning, he recalled seeing one of the white man’s lodges when he’d emerged from the Sacred Cave, but before he could wonder at its presence he’d been shot. By an Indian wearing the clothes of a wasichu .
    He stared at the white material wrapped around his torso. It was unlike anything he had ever seen, lightweight with tiny holes, like a net.
    He touched his hand to the mat beneath him. It was firm yet soft, covered with pale blue cloth. A bed, he thought it was called. His cousin Bright Flower slept in such a bed. She had married a white trapper when Shadow Hawk was sixteen and he had gone to visit her several times just to make sure the wasichu was treating her honorably.
    He had thought the white man’s lodge very strange, its furnishings stranger still. Bright Flower and her husband had taken their meals at something called a table, eating off colorful dishes made of hard-baked clay. She had cooked on a huge black metal object, a stove, she had called it, instead of over an open fire. He had refused to sleep in the narrow bed they offered him. He had sat on the floor instead of the wooden seat called a chair…
    Chair, he thought. That was what the Spirit Woman had been sitting in, a chair with wheels. He shook his head, bewildered by the strangeness of the whites.
    With his hand pressed against his side, he slipped out from under the blanket and made his way to the door, ignoring the sharp pain that pierced his side with each step. It was time to leave this place, time to go back to the village, to find out if his mother still lived.
    The sound of distant voices made him pause and he turned back into the room, moving toward the window, a sudden need to be outside the confines of the white man’s lodge making him forget the ache in his side.
    He put his hand to the window, marveling at the smooth coolness beneath his fingers. His cousin’s windows had been covered with oiled paper. You could not see through them. They did not feel hard and cool like clear ice. He pushed against the window, but it refused to open.
    He tapped it once, twice, and then, hearing voices behind him, he whirled around, his gaze darting around the room in search of a weapon. He was reaching for