Leaving Shannon to her uncertain typing, Koda checks her patients for the second time since dawn. Sister Matilda and her kittens have gone home to general rejoicing in the Burgess household. The Scotty, sadder and with luck wiser, has recovered from his unfortunate encounter with the porcupine. The rabbit with the infected eye, though, is not progressing as well as he had done initially. The inflammation has faded, and he quietly munches his alfalfa pellets as she runs her hand down his back. The infection persists, though, evident in the thinning flesh over his ribs and the pale color of exposed skin and membranes. She makes a note on his chart to add a second antibiotic to his evening dose; penicillin and sulfa together will still take almost anything bacterial. If that doesn’t do the job, they will have to go to an antiviral, and supplies are short.

Not for the first time, a cold chill trickles down her spine. This rabbit may have a constitutional idiosyncracy or underlying condition that leaves him more vulnerable than most. Conditions are ripe, though, for the spread of disease of all sorts. Winter has held most infections in check, save for the usual bronchitis and colds of the season. With the return of the sun, the melting of corpses buried under a meter or more of snow, the likelihood of epidemic will soar. And there is no more public health service, no more Center for Disease Control, no more pharmaceutical companies to mount an emergency campaign for an effective drug or vaccine.

For much of the rest of the afternoon, she inventories the clinics’ supplies, making lists of drugs to search for or attempt to find on the black market that is rapidly springing up. Or rather, the open market; looted or not, merchandise is moving again, paid for in trade goods or services. If they are not already, medications will be at a premium. The unpleasant thought comes to her, not for the first time, that it may become necessary to reinstitute taxes on a population that is barely surviving.

At midday she returns home for a quick lunch and a quicker walk with Asi. Kirsten has gone into Rapid City for the afternoon session of the rapists’ trial. Testimony is almost finished, and closing arguments will begin soon. As the only surviving national symbol of law, Kirsten must be present when the verdict comes in. A smile touches Dakota’s mouth for an instant, and is gone. Kirsten’s strength is beyond question, but she has never faced the cold responsibilities of power before, the chill that must stiffen the fingers of any but the most brutal authority scrawling a signature across a death warrant.

Leaving Asi to his nap on the hearth, Koda returns to the clinic. The neutering surgery goes well, and the Basset mix starts coming out from under the anaesthesia before he is well settled in the hospital ward. The mother wolf and her cub lie stretched out in the sun, sleeping so soundly that they never stir as she passes. Igmú, becoming ever more restless as spring deepens around her and the call of her blood becomes more insistent, bats her ball about her enclosure with increasing fierceness; Coyote, more relaxed, wags his abbreviated tail and whines, thrusting his slender nose through the mesh of the fence for a pat and a scratch.

As the sun stands down toward the horizon, Dakota sets aside her work. In the storeroom, she lays out the buffalo hide robe her father has brought from home and unfolds it on the worktable. Unlocking the freezer, she gently removes the frozen body of Wa Uspewikakiyapi, setting aside its heavy plastic wrappings. She performs each movement deliberately, holding apart her anger and her grief. For a moment she rests her hand on his broad head. This will not happen again, she swears to him silently. Never again. Your people will be free, and safe.

With a pair of surgical scissors, she snips a lock of fur from his mane, where it is untinged by blood. She takes a second from the plume of his tail. These she affixes with a leather thong to the spirit stick, making a mane about the head and throat of the wolf she has carved. With it, she will undertake to remember and honor him as a beloved member of her family for the year of formal mourning and to host a give-away at its end. It does not matter that he is of another nation. He has been closer to her than any not of her blood, save one. Kola mitawa. My friend. My teacher.

And now there is another. As if summoned by the thought, a light step sounds in the corridor, followed by a tap on the door. “Dakota?”

“Come in.”

Kirsten opens the door, moving quietly. She pauses a moment, taking in the wolf’s body, the fur still in Dakota’s hand, the buffalo robe. Silently she crosses the floor and steps into Koda’s arms. Koda holds her tightly, not speaking, merely resting her cheek atop the silken softness of the fair head. After a moment, Kirsten says, “I wanted to be with you when—that is, for the ceremony.” She steps back a fraction and raises her face questioningly. “If that’s all right?”

Koda lays her palm against the other woman’s cheek. “Of course it’s all right. You’re family now, to both of us. All of us.”

Deep beneath their searching concern, a spark of joy lights the green eyes, and is gone. “Let me help.”

Together, then, they wrap Wa Uspewikakiyape’s body in the buffalo robe, tying it in place with long strips of braided sinew. Into one knot, Dakota ties a medicine hoop fashioned of a supple willow branch, with small patches of cloth—white, yellow, red and black—tied at the quarters and leather thongs running at right angles between them. Into another she fastens an eagle feather and two pinions from a redtail’s wing. “Because,” she explains, “he was a chief of his nation.”

When they are done, they wait quietly by the honored dead, their hands joined.

*

The knock sounds softly against the service door. “Tanksi?”

Dakota opens it to find Tacoma on the landing, Wanblee Wapka’s pickup backed up to the loading ramp. Her brother is in civilian clothes again, jeans and a deep blue ribbon shirt, his hair caught back at the nape of his neck. His gaze slips past her to Kirsten standing by the table, back again. “You’re ready?”

For answer she nods, and together the three of them carry the body of Wa Uspewikakiyape to the waiting vehicle. Though Tacoma still limps heavily, he has set aside his crutches. He moves awkwardly but surely as they sidestep across the landing and Koda carefully lowers herself, her hands never losing their hold on their chill burden, into the truck’s cargo space. A drum and beater occupy one corner, together with a long, narrow bundle Koda recognizes as her father’s canupah, his ceremonial pipe. A fringed bag, worked generations back in shell beads and porcupine quills, contains his herbs and other holy things. Kirsten and Tacoma follow her down, and they lay Wa Uspewikakiyapi on the spread deerhide that covers much of the truckbed. Bracing himself on the wheel housing, Tacoma folds down gradually until he is perched beside the drum, then lifts it to sit between his knees. Kirsten moves hesitantly as if to offer a hand, and he shakes his head almost imperceptibly. “Thanks. I got it.”

Koda steps over the side and lets herself down in a single drop; Kirsten follows via tailgate and bumper. Manny swings open the door to the back of the cab, and Kirsten climbs in, followed by Koda. Wanblee Wapka glances into the rearview mirror, checking his passengers. “Everybody settled?”

“Good to go, Leksi,” Manny answers, and Koda follows his gaze as he tracks from Tacoma in the cargo bed to her hand joined with Kirsten’s on the bench seat. His eyes go wide for a second, and he mimes thumping his head against the metal frame of the window to his left. “Everybody but me, right?”

“Not everybody,” Koda says.

The light moment passes as Wanblee Wapka pulls the truck out into the street, and from behind them begins the deep heart throb of the drum, beaten slowly. There is little traffic, vehicular or pedestrian, but here and there a uniformed soldier stops to stare at them as they pass. One or two, recognizing Kirsten’s profile where she sits by the right window, salute; yet another, whose high, broad cheekbones and copper skin bespeak her Cheyenne ancestry, removes her cap and bows her head. The guards at the gate snap to attention and pass them out with looks of puzzlement on their earnest faces, but make no demur. Once off the Base they turn toward the county road that leads into the foothills, the big truck taking the ruts with ease as they begin to climb toward the ancient streambed and its treeline, the place where Wa Uspewikakiyape had lived and died. For the most part they travel in silence, Koda lost in remembrance and a growing feeling of relief, anchored in time and place by the strong, small hand folded in her own.

Wanblee Wapka wrestles the truck up the slope of the rock outcropping that shelters the sealed den. Sliding to the ground, Dakota’s eyes run along the line of trees, the dry course of the ancient stream that once cut its way down through limestone to create the shallow drop from the narrow remnant of wooded meadow with its march of trees. Among them now stands a scaffolding made of strong, straight limbs and rope, its platform six feet above the grass. Boughs of pine and larch cover it, interspersed with the slender trumpets of scarlet madder, the blue stars of anemone. From each corner hangs a leather thong strung with white chalcedony and striped agate, porcupine quills and a falcon’s feathers. A circle of river pebbles makes a wheel about the scaffold, flat, larger stones set at the four quarters. This is a chief’s burial. “Washte,” says Koda. “Thank you, Ate.”

Manny and Wanblee Wapka lift down the body of Wa Uspewikakiyape and lay it by the scaffold. Tacoma sets the drum by the south upright and takes up his station before it. From his pouch, Wanblee Wapka takes several braids of herbs, sage and pine and sweetgrass, a smaller leather bundle that Koda knows contains pollen and another of cornmeal. Finally he unwraps his pipe. To Kirsten he says, “This is what we do for family when they go to walk the Blue Road. Everyone participates.”