She spies several sets of rabbit tracks straight away and smiles. The meat will be perfect to mix with the mash she’s already prepared, enabling the injured animals to regain their strength more quickly on food they’re accustomed to eating.

She notices that the tracks lead in the direction of the lone tree directly ahead; the tree whose bark litters the ground and whose trunk provides a living monument to the friend she’s lost. With a soft sigh, she continues in the direction of the tree, stepping around the huge trunk as the tracks veer off, and stopping, bow hanging slackly from a suddenly limp hand.

Wa Uspewicakiyapi is gone. Only the blood swirling in the rapidly melting snow remains. There are no bits of fur, no drag marks that would indicate a large predator coming upon his corpse. She blinks, and then stares. There, in the fresh muck and gore, lie a fresh set of bootprints of a size and a pattern she knows all too well.

Her lips peel back from her teeth, exposing a snarl more feral than any wolf ever born.

“TACOMA!!!!!”

*

The man who slowly rises to his feet is her brother. That thought is clear in the part of her mind that remains in the human world. Tacoma, her twin in all but the day of his birth, close as if they had shared the floating darkness of their mother’s womb.

It is all that stops Dakota from launching herself across the room at him. Her vision holds him in the bright center of encroaching darkness, the hunter-sight that narrows until it focuses on the prey and the prey alone. Vaguely she is aware of another presence in the room, shifting form as the light pulses with every slam of her heart against her breastbone, now human, now not. Her blood howls in her veins, adrenaline sending shock after shock through nerves that she wills not to respond. Dry as old cotton, her mouth struggles to shape human speech. She says again, laying the words down like stones, “What have you done with him?”

In all their lives, Tacoma has never spoken less than truth to her. At some level, she knows that the shadow in his eyes is not a lie but uncertainty not over what to tell her but how. She waits in frozen silence, her anger gone all to ice within her. After a moment he says, “I brought him back to the clinic, Dakota.”

The cold within her goes more frigid still. There is only one place in the clinic he can be. Just to make certain, she asks. “In the freezer? Is that why the keys weren’t on the hook this morning?”

“Yes,” he answers quietly, “to both questions.”

“I scolded Shannon for losing them..” She makes a small, futile gesture with one hand. It seems to move on its own volition, apart from her will. “I should have believed her when she said she hadn’t been careless.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for her to be blamed. I was looking for you just now to tell you.”

Slowly color fades back into the edges of her vision, expanding the space around Tacoma to include the rust-red bricks of hearth behind him; the puzzled face of Asimov, head canted to one side; Kirsten, her eyes wide with something that is part fear, part pain. Some of her anger goes out of her then, leaving emptiness behind. And yet, she knows that the fear is for her, not of her; the pain endured for her. She lets some of the anger flow out of her on a sigh. “Why, Tacoma? For gods’ sake, why?”

Tacoma pauses, and Koda realizes that he is choosing his words carefully. Then he says, “To be a witness, tanksi. Partly to show that Manny shot a man who was violent and dangerous and had earned his death. And more importantly, to show what we—we humans, all of us—can fall back to all too easily.”

“We’ve already begun to slip, Dakota.” That is Kirsten, speaking softly. “Think about that mob at the gate. The bastards who shot the mother wolf for sheer cruelty. We—all of us, the scraps of our society—can go back to living as we did a hundred years ago. Or we can make something different.”

Stepping softly, Tacoma crosses the space between them, holding out his hand to her. “The buffalo can come back, Koda. Igmu Tanka Kte’s son and his grandsons can run free on the plains again. Puma can come down from the mountain and out of the desert where she has been driven by too many guns, too little care for life.”

Tacoma is not a shaman. But Koda can see the vision clear in his eyes and does not doubt its truth. A shiver ghosts over her skin. The prophecy is an ancient one, brought to the Lakota people along with the sacred pipe and the seven ceremonies. In an age long past, Ptecincala Ska Wakan Winan, White Buffalo Calf Woman, had foretold the restoration of the Earth and all her children, the return of nations long since passed over to walk the Blue Road of spirit. Their father’s great grandfather had danced the Ghost Dance to bring that restoration nearer. His father and mother had danced, too, and had died in a hail of U. S. Cavalry bullets for it. Wanblee Wakpa. himself wore the hummingbird shirt and stamped the measure of the dance into the dry earth of Pine Ridge during the uprising of ’73. “The time of the white buffalo is coming,” Dakota says. “You see it.”

“I see it. I see it as clearly as I see you, tanski.”

“And was it necessary to desecrate Igmu Tanka Kte’s body for your vision, thiblo?’ The edge is back in Koda’s voice. “Do you think Ina Maka can’t do it without you? That is pride speaking.”

“And that is pain speaking, Dakota.” The soft voice is Kirsten’s. The young woman’s face is pale as moon shadow on snow, but her eyes are resolute. “He was your teacher, wasn’t he? Let him teach others, too.”

“Don’t let his death go for nothing, tanksi.” Tacoma reaches for her hand, and this time Dakota allows him to enfold it in his own. “Neither you nor I nor Kirsten can say anything that will speak as clearly as his suffering.”

“You know there will be attempts to excuse Dietrich, Dakota,” Kirsten says. “People will tell themselves and each other that he was only trying to make a little extra money for his family, if he had one. They will say that we need fur now to keep us warm. That he was doing a service and that the uprising has made all our environmental protections obsolete. If we are to keep those laws, as we must, abstract arguments won’t work. What happened to your wolf will.”

Trapped.

Koda is pinned like a display specimen between their love and their logic, nowhere to go. Salt stings her eyes, tears she will not permit herself. She lowers her face so that they cannot see and says quietly around the cold that still burns raw in along her nerves. “He taught and protected me, and there was nothing I could do when he needed me.” Suddenly her rage tears through the wall she has built around it, ripping through her like a terrible birth. “I didn’t even know, goddamit. I should have known. I should have.”

Should have known he was in trouble. Should have known he was dying.

Should have known better than to leave him lying in the melting snow, no matter how burying him would have gone against tradition and her own deeply held conviction of the interdependence of all life.

He never failed me, and I have failed him when it counted most.

Gently she removes her hand from Tacoma’s. “Wicate,” she says.

Stepping away, she lets herself out into the spring morning, her feet carrying her blindly where they will.

*

The door closes behind Dakota with a snap like a spine breaking. Without volition, Kirsten takes a step forward to follow her, then checks herself abruptly. The jolt of it goes through her body as sharply as if she had walked into plate glass; the barrier transparent, invisible, strong. Over her shoulder, she looks up at Tacoma, whose eyes are as wide and dark with pain as his sister’s. He turns back to the fireplace, supporting himself against the mantel with both hands, his head bowed. “Christ,” he says, between his teeth. “Jesus. Fucking. Christ. Is there any way I could possibly have done it any worse than that?”

Kirsten steps up behind him and silently lays a hand on his shoulder. “Is there any way you could have done it that would have been less painful? No matter what you did or said, it was going to hurt her.” After a moment, she says, “You’re right, you know.”

“Oh, I know that.” He shakes his head, the dark hair spreading across his shoulders like a lion’s mane. “She knows it; you know it, everybody and his bastard brother knows it. And it doesn’t really matter a damn.”

“What we make of our world from now on matters. She knows that, too.”

“She knows that better than most of us.” Tacoma pushes himself away from the fireplace, turns again to face her. “Give her a while, then go after her. She’s going to need you.”

Kirsten feels the heat spread up her throat and into her face. Is it as obvious as that? Aloud she says, “Shouldn’t you—?”

“No. Not now.” From his pocket, he produces a pair of silver keys on a ring. “Give her these. I’ve got to get a team together to try to move a couple of generators from the wind farm. I’ll see her before I go.”

For long moments after the door shuts for a second time, Kirsten stands starting at the two small pieces of metal in her palm. From somewhere deep in her memory comes the image of a blue butterfly, fluttering its wings; the flutter starting a breeze; the breeze becoming a wind; the wind feeding a hurricane. Not even in Minot, with her fingers on the keys of the one computer whose codes could set the world to rights, did she feel the future so light in her hand.

She can hide the keys. She can take them back to the clinic and hang them in their accustomed place on the board.

Or she can take them to Dakota and trust her to make the right choice through her anger and her pain.

For a moment she turns the keys over in her fingers. They take the light from the window, glinting in the strengthening sun. Truth or dare. Truth or risk the loss of something she has never dared hope for, in all her life, for whatever life there may be left.