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adventure and hardship he and their mother had endured together, but he would not stop now. The sadness of walking those grounds again, standing in the very places where he and Rose had stood together, was still too great.
    He hoped his children would come to share his passion for Wyoming’s Powder River country. Dixon had loved it from the moment he first saw its rolling green hills, clear sparkling streams, and lush valleys where the blue meadow grass grew tall enough to brush the belly of a man’s horse. The land filled him with a sense of hope. Perhaps in this lovely country he would come to know and love his younger ones as he loved Harry.
    â€œWhat will Buffalo be like, Pa?” Harry said.
    â€œIt’s a new town,” Dixon said, “just getting started, but it’s growing fast. Already there are two dry goods stores, a bank, a hotel, a dentist, and a school you children will attend. It’s about time. We’ll stay in the hotel until our house is finished.”
    Cal and Lorna, sitting in the rear of the wagon with Mrs. MacGill, looked at each other when their father said the word “school.” “He can’t make us,” Cal said in Bird Talk.
    Dixon turned his head toward the twins with a frown. “What did I say to you two about talking that gibberish? There’ll be no more of that, you hear?”
    â€œYes, Pa,” they said in unison. Lorna reached out and took her brother’s hand.
    They rode on in silence, the only sound the clop-clop of the horses’ hooves on the rocky road. Late in the afternoon they made camp along a wooded creek. Harry unharnessed the horses, rubbed them down with empty feed sacks, and fed them nosebags of grain while Dixon pitched two tents, one for him and Harry and another for Mrs. MacGill and the twins. The Scotswoman and her charges had no trouble finding dry wood, and soon a good fire was blazing.
    â€œIt’s been a while since I slept out under the stars,” she said as she peeled potatoes. “Not since me and my old man, Keddy, first come out here all them years ago. Eighteen and sixty-three, it was and, aye, things was diff’rent then. My hair was black as midnight when me and him set out and white as you see it now by the time we put in at Alder Gulch. It was those nights sleeping rough and fearin’ the Indians and the wolves what did it.” She rose and walked to the fire where she dumped the potatoes into a pot that already held salted meat, chopped onions, and carrots. Their meal would also include fried eggs and powder biscuits, now baking in a Dutch oven, with strawberry jam.
    â€œIndians ain’t nothing to fear, Auntie,” Cal said. “Who would be afraid of Biwi or Billy Sun?”
    Mrs. MacGill stirred the stew with a long wooden spoon. “Mebbe they ain’t so fearsome now, but they was plenty diff’rent back then, I can tell you that. Jerusalem!” She batted at an ember that leaped from the fire and ate a hole in her apron. “And I’m not sure you can ever completely trust them. The Injuns, they remind me of the Selkie folk from back home, from the Orkney Isles. You think you know ’em, but you don’t. To think different is to get your heart broke.”
    â€œSelkie folk?” Lorna said.
    â€œI’ll tell you and your brother about the Selkie after dinner, but only if you promise to be good and don’t do nothin’ to set off the doctor.”
    The twins were good as their word, and the meal passed without discord, with plenty of stew and biscuits for everyone. After, Dixon smoked his pipe as Mrs. MacGill and the twins cleaned the pots and dishes in a wash pan of hot soapy water and toweled them dry. The snapping logs turned from black to gray and the evening sky purpled as a chill wind blew down from the mountains.
    Finally the work was done, and Lorna and Cal wrapped themselves in warm blankets, ready for the widow’s story. Her