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Unconsciously Hawk had been conditioned to accept the fact. Just as his Indian way of life had conditioned him to accept the death of his mother and sister. He wasn’t without regret. He missed her. The hogan had seemed strangely silent without the crying of his temperamental sister. Yet it could not be changed; therefore, it must be accepted.
    Ride on and forget. The sun is shining on a new day.

Chapter III
    When Hawk first saw the cluster of large buildings, he thought they were entering a town. Dirt roads linked each wood building to the next, brown lines crisscrossing the white snow. Yet his searching eyes could find no trading post. There were many corrals, made from smooth boards that were white. Sometimes there was only one or two horses inside them, although one held more. The horses were big, muscled animals like the one his father rode.
    Near the corrals, there were three buildings. It was toward one of these that his father was riding. Hawk guessed these buildings were the barns his father had once described to him, where animals were kept, sheltered from the winter storms. Hawk had never been off the Reservation until this day. All of his previous contact with whites had been through the strict teachers at the Reservation school, the Mormons who operated the trading post, and the man, Rawlins, on those few occasions he had come to the hogan with Hawk’s father. Hawk didn’t include his father in the list of white men he’d met. Yet he had learned much about the world of the whites from all these sources, especiallyhis father. Now he was seeing things that had previously only been described to him, and he was all eyes.
    A man was standing on a flat wagon with no sides, pulled by a big machine with three wheels and stopped beside a corral. Hawk identified the big machine as a tractor from a picture he had seen in a schoolbook and felt proud that he knew of such things. With a long fork, the man was throwing dry, yellow grass—hay—into the corral for the horses to eat.
    When they rode by him toward the middle building, the man glanced up and waved to his father. He looked at Hawk, then looked again, and stopped his work to stare. Being watched so closely by a stranger made Hawk uneasy. He urged his horse closer to his father’s.
    The funny-looking, long building called a barn had a tall door at the end, tall enough to permit a horse and rider to enter it without the rider dismounting. His horse shied once at the opening, then nervously followed the horse his father rode inside.
    After being outside with the brilliance of the sun reflecting off the snow, it was dark inside. Hawk’s eyes quickly sought the darkest corner to make a swift adjustment to the absence of light. His nose was assailed by a dry, irritating dust and the smells of horses and leather and dung. There was a warmth inside the building despite the absence of the sun.
    A few yards inside the building, his father stopped his horse. Hawk followed his lead. Saddle leather creaked, a stirrup taking all his father’s weight as he dismounted. Hawk hesitated, then kicked his feet out of the stirrup and slipped soundlessly to the hard floor.
    Uncertain what to do next, he waited until he saw his father begin unsaddling his horse. Hawk untied the rolled blanket that contained his belongings from behind his saddle and set it on the floor. Laying thestirrup over the saddle seat, Hawk tugged at the cinch strap. He had grown taller in the year and a half since the saddle had been given to him and no longer needed to stand on his toes to reach any part of the saddle.
    The strangeness of his surroundings had all of his senses honed to sharpness. His acute hearing picked up the sound of human footsteps approaching before there was an audible crunch of snow outside the opening.
    “Someone comes,” he warned his father in a very low voice.
    The footsteps were close enough for a white man to hear when his father looked up. The smaller-built chestnut horse was