Savage Arrow Read Online Free PDF Page B

watched as his nephew placed the tiny bird comfortably in it.
    “He will sleep now,” Lone Wing said, setting the nest aside. “His belly is full. Before I came to talk with you, I fed it tiny insects.”
    He laughed as he pointed to the bird’s bulging belly. “You can see his filled belly,” he said, then sat down beside Thunder Horse and gazed thoughtfully at him. “Tell me, my chieftain uncle, did you complete your fasting and praying?”
    “I did,” Thunder Horse said, sitting now with his knees drawn up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them.
    “Did you dream?” Lone Wing asked anxiously.
    “
Ho
, I dreamed often while I was alone beneath the stars,” Thunder Horse said thickly. “And in those dreams came answers.”
    “Would you tell me those answers, or are they only for you to know?” Lone Wing asked, searching Thunder Horse’s eyes as his uncle turned and gazed at him.
    “In time you will know all because of how thingswill be,” Thunder Horse said. He then smiled and again placed a hand on his nephew’s bare shoulder. “And you? While I was gone, did you study? You know that it takes much time and thought to become the Historian of our band. To record the events of our people by painting pictures on skins, you must be alert and knowledgeable of all things pertaining to our people.”
    “
Ho
, as you told me, watching and observing is studying, and I did that well while you were fasting, my chieftain uncle,” Lone Wing said, proudly squaring his shoulders. “I feel that I am ready even now to become our people’s Historian.”
    “We have one now who is our Historian, who is called ‘Old One.’ He is very skilled at what he does, but he is eager to teach you things that you cannot teach yourself by observation,” Thunder Horse said. He lifted his hand from his nephew’s shoulder and rested it again on his knee.
    “My chieftain uncle, I not only want to be our people’s Historian, I want to be like you,” Lone Wing blurted out. “I want to be a man of strict honor, a man of undoubted truthfulness and unbounded generosity.”
    “You will be all of those things,” Thunder Horse said, smiling at Lone Wing. “Give yourself time and you will become the man your heart is leading you to be.”
    “If I could, I would be you,” Lone Wing said, then giggled as he saw his uncle’s eyes twinkle at that comment.
    He watched as Thunder Horse looked away from him to gaze into the flames of the fire. His uncle’s eyes seem to fill with shadow and thought, and Lone Wing wondered what had taken him away so quickly.
    He sat there quietly as he waited for Thunder Horse to remember that he still sat there with him.
    As Thunder Horse gazed into the fire, the orange of the flames reminded him of flowing, flame-colored hair, catapulting him again back in time to the moment when he had seen the white woman up close and realized just how mesmerizingly beautiful she was.
    Something deep inside him warned against thinking about the lady.
    Whites had taken much from his people. She was white, and worse still, she was somehow connected to the man all of Thunder Horse’s people despised.
    Yet no matter how wrong it was to think about her, or how hard he tried not to, Thunder Horse could not let go of his memory of her. Like no other woman before her, she had put fire in his heart!
    He suddenly rose and went to where he stored his clothes. Hurriedly he pulled on a fringed buckskin outfit.
    Suddenly he was not as bone-weary as he had been earlier. Thinking of the woman had revived him.
    He would no longer just speculate about her. He would go and observe her.
    “Chieftain uncle, are you going somewhere?” Lone Wing asked as he gathered his nest and bird into his hands and rose to his feet just as Thunder Horse placed a sheathed knife at the left side of his waist.
    “
Ho
, but I will not be long,” Thunder Horse said. He gently placed a hand on Lone Wing’s shoulder and escorted him outside, where the