When White Bear had danced the circle nine times, he put down the gourd. He had brought out from the chateau a kettle of freshly brewed willow-bark tea and a porcelain cup. It would ease the pain in Pierre's stomach and give him strength. Whenever Pierre ate solid food, blood would come trickling out of every opening in his body and he would grow weaker and paler. He was slowly bleeding and starving to death. Smelling the tea as he poured it into the cup, White Bear remembered how he'd met Nancy Hale when he was collecting the bark yesterday along the bank of Red Creek. She'd been blueberrying. It was the fourth or fifth time he'd encountered her over the summer on the prairie near Victoire. The meetings weren't accidents; not for either of them. But he felt so uncertain about what he would do when Pierre died that he could only talk with Nancy about things of no importance. He looked up to see his father's eyes open. They had sunk so far back in the skull-like face that they seemed like embers glowing in caves. White Bear blew on the steaming cup and held it to Pierre's lips. He drank the tea down in small sips. Pierre smiled faintly as his eyes traveled over his land. The nearby ground, covered with grass cropped short by sheep and goats, sloped down to the split-rail fence that surrounded the chateau's inner yard. To the west White Bear could see the two flags flying over Raoul's trading post on the bluff overlooking the river, and beyond that part of the river and the dark west bank, the Ioway country. In the other directions were orchards, farmlands, pastures, and the prairie, yellowing with fall, rolling on to the edge of the sky. When Pierre had drunk most of the tea, White Bear put down the cup. He gathered up his sacred stones and put them back in his medicine bag. Pierre said, "You did a Sauk ritual for me just now, did you not?" "Yes," said White Bear. "It was meant to heal you. Or, if not, to give you strength to bear the pain." "I do feel better today," Pierre said. "But I must also have a certain rite of the Church if I am to pass over into God's love. I sent a week ago to Kaskaskia for your old teacher, Pere Isaac. He should be here any day. I have been a great sinner, White Bear." It gladdened White Bear's heart that his father called him by his Sauk name. "You are a _good_ man, my father," he said in the Sauk tongue. Pierre raised his head, and White Bear saw that the effort pained him. The burning, sunken eyes turned on White Bear. "Son, I must have my answer now. Earthmaker let me live all summer, that you might have time to decide. Now you must tell me." "Can you not let me go back to my people, Father? Why do you ask me to stay here and fight for something I do not want?"