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in triumph; my reason had won. But as I looked around at the melted snow, I saw that I was alone.
     
    I waited on the mountain until it grew too cold for me there, then climbed down to Rattling Hawk’s empty home before going back up the mountain next day. I do not know for how many days I did this. At last I realized that the yellow circle I had seen would not reappear. In my sorrow, I felt that part of me had vanished with the circle, and imagined that my soul had joined Little Deer. I never saw the glowing hoop again.
    I rode back to the mission a few days after Christmas through a blizzard, uncaring about whether I lived or died. There, Father Morel told me that the soldiers had acted at last, killing a band of dancing Indians near Wounded Knee, and I knew that the dancing and any hope these people had were over.
    I was back in the white man’s world, a prisoner of the world to come.
     
     

 
    The Soul’s Shadow
     
     
    The man had followed Jacqueline onto the pier. He stepped toward her, smiled, then walked back toward the steps leading down to the beach.
    He had nodded at her when she passed him before; his grayish-green eyes seemed familiar. He might be a former student. Her memory for faces was poor, and often she forgot what even her best students looked like once they graduated. All she noticed about most of them now was their youth; they were currents in an ever-renewed stream while she aged on the shore, eroded by their movement through her life.
    She leaned against the railing. He was below her on the sand, gazing out at the ocean; he glanced up as the wind ruffled his blond hair. She looked away. He couldn’t have been a student; even with her poor memory, Jacqueline was sure she would have remembered him. He had the tanned, handsome face of a television actor and the body of a man who frequented gyms; he was exactly the kind of man she would expect to see here on a California beach. He would not have been in her classes, which drew intense or slightly neurotic humanities majors; aggressive and grade-conscious pre-law students; or studious, asexual, aspiring scientists trying to fulfill a philosophy requirement. She would have noticed anyone so atypical.
    She turned her head slightly and caught a glimpse of his light brown windbreaker. As she felt his eyes on her, she looked away again. Was he trying to pick her up? She was flattering herself by assuming that. She supposed that he was either wealthy or out of work; vacationers were not likely to come here in February. He might be one of those Californian psychopaths who her friends back East assumed haunted these shores.
    From the pier, it seemed that a structure had been built on every available piece of land; houses, condominiums, and other buildings covered the hills overlooking the wide bay. The Strand was a wide sidewalk and bicycle path running north and south; beneath the low wall separating the Strand from the beach, the sand was white and clean. Everything seemed cleaner here; the beach was tended, the houses kept up, the cars unmarked by rust or mud. Jacqueline could not smell the sea; the odors of fish and salt water were absent. The past did not exist, only a continuous, ever-changing present.
    She gazed south toward another, larger pier that held shops and restaurants; beyond, a green peninsula marked by sheer, precipitous cliffs jutted into the sea. She propped an elbow against the rail, then noticed that the blond man was gone. He had been there only a moment before; she turned toward the row of houses overlooking the beach. Two skaters, legs pumping, rolled along the Strand; three joggers were trotting south. The man had vanished.
     
    Jacqueline opened the refrigerator door, took out a jug of wine, then leaned against the counter as her cousin and her old friend gossiped in the living room.
    “You’ve got to come,” her cousin Patti had told her over the phone a month before. It had seemed a good idea then. Jacqueline was on