But Gray Cloud might already be dead. "How can we talk and smile so?" she cried. "He is up in the sacred cave, and the snow fell all last night and all day today." Sun Woman shook her head. "When I gave the boy to Owl Carver, I gave up the right to say what was to be done with him. Like Owl Carver, Gray Cloud belongs to the spirits now." "But the spirits--" Redbird waved her hands helplessly. "They protect as they like and they let death strike as they like." A shadow of pain crossed Sun Woman's face. "Do you say such things to hurt me?" Redbird was shocked. "No!" "Do you think I feel no pain?" Redbird felt tears filling her eyes, burning them. She wiped her face. "I know you do." Sun Woman brought her face closer to Redbird's, took Redbird's chin in her hand, and said, "I do not show pain because I do not want to make others suffer with me. But you know what I feel." Sun Woman opened her arms, and Redbird pressed her body against the bigger, older woman's. She felt Sun Woman's strength flow into her and she knew that she had found more comfort here than she ever would in the arms of her own mother. In the firelit wickiup, Redbird looked around her, thinking that this was where Gray Cloud had been a baby. She looked at the bench where she knew he slept every night. Where he must sleep again. "Do you have anything to give a person who has been very cold for a long time?" Redbird asked urgently. "Ah." Sun Woman went to the back of the wickiup and came back with a bundle of long, dark red peppers. "These peppers are grown far to the south, where the sacred mushroom and the bright blue stones come from. The longer you boil them, the hotter the water will get. He is to drink the water, but not swallow the peppers. If he is very cold, give him one pepper to chew on. That would bring the dead back to life. If you meet him before I do, this is how you can help him." _She thinks I mean to try to meet him when he comes back._ "I will go to him," Redbird said abruptly. Sun Woman stared at her. "You must not. If you interrupt his spirit journey it might kill him." "He has been in a cave for a night and a day, and this is the second night, colder than any night I can remember. My father watches for him, but he does not come. He could still be sitting in that cave. He has no fire. He has no food or water. The wind blows in from the river. The snow here at the camp is so deep that in some places the drifts are over my head. The cave could be full of snow. When he is suffering all this, how can you say that _I_ am a danger to him?" Sun Woman sat cross-legged on the rush mat floor and stared down at her hands folded in her lap. After a silence she looked up, and her grave, dark eyes held Redbird's.