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beside the water. We were tired from our long travels and the old people stumbled at every step they took. But the Red Coats strode through the camp with their chests out and their red jackets taunting those who would dare to stop them.
    Looking Glass said we would stay at this place for three suns. Here we would cut tipi poles and let them dry. Birch trees with tall, smooth trunks grew everywhere along the shores. They were the best trees for tipi poles. Our women cut down stacks of the saplings, peeled them clean, and set them out to dry in the sun. Without them we would have had to sleep beneath the stars. We would need the poles during the rest of our flight.
    We gathered food to eat along the way. The warriors hunted antelope and black-tailed deer, and the old men caught fish. The women dug roots. No one thought of the white soldiers we had left behind in Montana. No one except Lone Bird, one of our brave warriors.
    He rode through the camp, telling the chiefs that we must stay on the trail. "I do not trust the Blue Coats," he said. "Maybe they are close behind us. Keep going. Move fast. Death may be following on our trail."
    Wah-lit-its agreed. He told of his dream. "Last night I saw myself killed. I do not turn back from death, but first I will kill some soldiers. My brothers, my sisters, I am telling you, we are all going to die."
    He offered to take the Red Coats and scout back along the trail.
    White Bird said that was good, but Looking Glass told Wah-lit-its to hunt antelope instead. "The Blue Coats are far away across the mountains," he said. "Our horses are weary and need rest. This is a peaceful place, and here we are safe. Your dream was idle fancy, no more."
    We forgot Lone Bird's warning and Wah-lit-its's dream. When the hunters came back, it was a happy night. For supper we ate speckled trout and camas roots baked in ashes and the last of the huckleberries we had picked along the way.
    Swan Necklace polished his boots and put bear grease on his hair. He fairly glistened. He said kind words about my eagle-feather and goose-quill jacket and the blue-beaded band I wore around my forehead. But he was so full of his part in battle that he could talk of little else.
    I was proud of him. To please him I said, "You'll be a chieftain after just one more battle with the Blue Coats."
    "They'll come sneaking along again in a few days and I'll kill some more."
    Children made ugly masks of the dead soldiers with eyes hanging down on their cheeks and pieces of ear cut off. They dug holes and buried the masks deep and laughed and hummed secret songs that they made up.
    Our ponies and mules were tethered above the stream, where they could be watched during the night. Sentries were placed on the crests of the valley but not enough of them. The camp slept well. In the willows frogs croaked their night song. A child screamed and dogs barked. A woman who had been wounded at White Bird moaned. Those were all the sounds I heard before daybreak.
    The sky was cold gray when I woke from a troubled sleep and crawled out of the tipi. I had picked up a pot to fill with water for the morning meal when the
first shot crossed the stream. It came from a tree close behind me.
    Wah-lit-its, wrapped in his long red coat, had gone out to see that the herd was still safely tied up. He marched along the shore with a warrior's step. A second bullet struck him in the back and knocked him down. He was the one who had killed Richard Devine and started the war, and the enemy knew it.
    Wah-lit-its crawled to the stream. He was falling in the water when his wife came out of their dpi. She was heavy with the child she would bear him and walked slowly. She caught him in her arms and held him until he gave one long gasp and was dead.
    The man who had killed Wah-lit-its stood over her, saying something I could not hear, putting bullets in his smoking gun. The next bullet struck her in the chest. She staggered but made no sound. Somehow she got the gun from