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remember. Like The People, he viewed anyone not of his clan with distrust.
    “I can live with Crooked Leg. He needs help to watch his sheep.” He offered an alternative to his father’s suggestion, not wanting to be uprooted from all that was familiar to him.
    “No.” The denial was quick and decisive. “When your mother was alive, you lived with her people. Now you will live with mine. It’s a white world. It’s time you began walking its path, learning its values and beliefs. You are going to have to make your own place in it—all by yourself. I would help you if I could, but I’m tied … tied by a system you don’t understand yet.” He sounded tired, beaten. “Once I thought only of myself and what it would take to make me happy. I tried to hold onto too much. I’ve lost what I cared about the most. Now there are too many others who would be hurt. I didn’t think about them before, but I have to now.” He glanced at Hawk and saw the bewilderment in his narrowed blue eyes. His mouthtwisted in a wry grimace. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”
    With a confused shake of his head, Hawk mutely admitted that he didn’t—not the last part. Walking the second path of the white world made sense, because he obviously needed to learn more. But the other part about hurting people was something he didn’t understand.
    “Let me explain it this way,” his father murmured. “If you had a flock of sheep and a lamb was separated from them and being attacked by wolves, you would want to save it—protect it. Yet, if you did, you knew the wolves would attack the whole flock and harm them. Would you save the lamb and lose the whole flock? Or would you stay with the flock and hope the lamb might somehow survive?”
    “I would stay with the flock,” Hawk stated.
    “That’s what I’m doing. You are my lamb,” he explained. “There are some things I can do for you, but I can’t stand beside you.” Even as he made the statement, he looked away, unconsciously re-enforcing his words by his action. “I’m going to check on my horse, get it bedded down for the night. We’ll have to sleep here. I wish we didn’t, but—”
    “You do not believe in ghosts,” Hawk reminded him, since it was the obvious reason for not wanting to sleep in the hogan.
    “Not ghosts, no,” he agreed. “The only thing haunting me will be my memories.”
    He walked out the door that traditionally faced east and Hawk was left inside—alone.
    With the first streak of dawn, two horses and riders trotted away from the hogan into the immense rumpled blanket of snow. The thin, wavering line of smoke from a dying fire drifted out of the chimney of the abandonedhogan. The pink dawn colored the gray smoke with a lilac flush.
    In the bitter cold of morning, the two rode silently away from the canyon. The man had the collar of his heavy parka turned up to keep out the invading chill. His Stetson was pulled low on his head. The boy was bareheaded, his disheveled black hair gleaming in the first rays of sunlight. While the man’s shoulders were slumped, the boy sat erect, a natural wild nobility in his bearing.
    Traveling ever south, they entered land Hawk had never seen before. Its strangeness heightened his senses. His gaze moved restlessly, always looking, searching, identifying, noting any and all movement within the realm of his vision.
    His first sight of a cattle herd came near mid-morning. He had seen cattle before, but never in such numbers. And they hadn’t been as fat as these red-coated animals with curly white faces. His nose wrinkled at the smell that came from the warm bodies of the cattle. He glanced at his father, but he didn’t seem to notice.
    Hawk studied the man’s profile. Those lines that had once curved upward to make his eyes laugh were now straight, robbing the blue eyes of their happiness and vitality. They looked in his direction rarely, then held the contact only for mere seconds.
    Alone.