She felt like a statue carved in ice. And at that very moment White Bear let go of her hand. Somehow she knew that he was withdrawing from her, not because he had sensed her thought about Wolf Paw, but because he was troubled by some thought of his own. But instantly there was a space between them, and she no longer knew his mind. He was still walking beside her. He walked straight ahead, not looking at her. She turned her head to the front and did the same. She felt as if she had been pushed away, hard, and it hurt. It seemed to her that they walked for days through the unchanging grass, but the sun remained fixed somewhere beyond the tasseled curtain. Yellow and blue, yellow and blue, the whole world had been reduced to those colors. And to one sound, whispering grass. The Bear stopped walking. Redbird and White Bear went around the huge animal, Redbird to the right and White Bear to the left. She found herself on the edge of a great crack in the ground, so deep that its bottom lay in shadow. It zigzagged from somewhere, appearing out of grass, and continued toward somewhere, vanishing back into the prairie. A stream of bright blue water wound through the dark bottom of the ravine; water had cut this wound in the prairie. The Bird spirit swooped and darted in the crack like a living fire arrow. "White Bear's uncle hides there," the Bird trilled. She heard a growl beside her deep as distant thunder, and the ground seemed to tremble. The Bird flew up, swooped to hover over the Bear's head, then dove down into the canyon. Down to an entrance into the earth framed by two upright wooden posts and a beam laid across them. Beside the square of darkness were abandoned wooden carts and a hill of gray gravel that partly blocked the stream. This was a mine, Redbird understood, where the pale eyes dug metal out of the ground. The Bear spirit put one paw in front of the other and, with grace and balance astonishing in a creature so huge, walked down a narrow path Redbird had not noticed before to the shadowy bottom of the ravine. Then it lumbered up to the mine mouth. She opened her mouth to cry out in fear, but the Bear was gone. _There is a man in there._ And her spirit helper, the Redbird, had led that giant Bear to him. She had commanded it. She had not wanted to use her shaman's powers to hurt anyone, not even one she hated as much as this uncle of White Bear's. White Bear had saved many lives and never killed anyone. Even though she was a spirit and this great grassland was sunny, she felt cold, and her stomach knotted. _I will lose something because I did this. I only did it to bring White Bear back to his body. But I will suffer for it, even so._ _And so will White Bear._ _Only let White Bear live_, she prayed to the powers that brought life into the world. White Bear turned to her. _It is done_, said his spirit voice. _My other self has found Raoul de Marion._