By all rights he ought to be lying there too. He put a hand up to his ear, forgotten in the excitement of the encounter with Otto Wegner. The pain had settled to a dull pulsing. Gingerly, he felt the wound. The middle part of the ear was gone. The intact upper and lower parts were covered with crusted blood. He had washed the wound once in the creek. He must wash it again and bandage it. _Greenglove did that so blood would flow and it would seem to anyone who looked at me in the twilight that I'd been shot in the head. He was trying to save my life. Why?_ One day, White Bear hoped, he would meet Greenglove and find out why he had spared him. _And that other time--when he hit me with his rifle just as Raoul was about to shoot me--did he do that, too, to save my life?_ A solitary warrior sat before the fire, a long scalplock adorned with feathers hanging down the side of his head. The firelight gleamed on his shaven head and glittered on the beads around the rims of his ears. The bowl of the pipe he smoked was part of a steel tomahawk blade; the stem of the pipe was the tomahawk handle. He looked up, and his eyes widened when White Bear stepped into the firelight. "White Bear!" came Black Hawk's gravelly voice. "Are you truly alive or do you come back from the Trail of Souls?" White Bear felt an immense warmth as the firelight showed him Black Hawk's teeth flashing in one of his rare smiles. "I am alive," said White Bear. "I am happy! I am surprised!" Black Hawk cried, waving his pipe. "I thought all three of you were dead." Sudden elation dizzied White Bear, and the flesh of his back prickled as he realized what it meant to see Black Hawk sitting quietly smoking his pipe in the center of Raoul's camp. Victory! The long knives routed. How had it happened? Black Hawk might have made a terrible mistake leading the Sauk across the Great River, but at that moment White Bear loved him. Owl Carver stepped out of the shadows carrying a bundle of goods he had been gathering from the tents of the long knives. He dropped his bundle to throw his arms around White Bear. "My son is restored to me." White Bear sat down at the fire. "How did you escape?" Black Hawk asked. White Bear explained how he had played dead when Eli Greenglove claimed to have hit him. He said nothing about meeting Otto Wegner. He felt good about having spared Wegner's life, but he was not sure Black Hawk would understand. In fact, White Bear was not sure he himself understood. Owl Carver made White Bear hold his head close to the firelight while he examined the wound, muttering. "Truly, the things the long knives do pass all understanding," he said. "It was dark. You were in grass. Maybe he missed." "He missed on purpose. He has great fame as a marksman; he sees very well. He came and stood over me, and must have known I was alive."