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hurt?”
     
    “Yes.”  He sat up and inspected the sizzling rabbit.
     
    “How long were you and your wife together?” she asked without thought.  He would yell at her now or--at the very least--insult her.
     
    “One winter,” he answered to her surprise.  He turned the rabbit over and over on the spit, studying it intently as if he were suddenly lost in his own memories.  “Song was a beautiful woman.”
     
    Katherine studied the anguish contained in his dark eyes, and for a brief instant, she felt a hint of jealousy for his dead wife.  Not for her having been married to this man, but because she had received the love that Katherine had always longed for.  The Indian spoke his wife’s name as if it were something precious and sacred.  No one had ever held Katherine in such high esteem.  She had hoped Joshua would.
     
    A sudden, terrifying loneliness gripped her to the point of strangulation.  She turned her back to the Indian, hugged her knees to her chest, and fought back tears.
     
     

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
     
     
     
     
    ADAHYA did not understand the change in the woman. Gone was the meddlesome busybody he had brought on this journey.  In her place was an irritated, foul-tempered stranger.  She now walked so fast he could barely keep up with her.
     
    Her mood had changed after he had told her about Song, and he did not understand why.  It felt strange speaking of his former wife.  He had not spoken of Song since the night she had left.
     
    Countless times since he had played over his actions with her, always questioning himself, wondering what he could have done differently to make her stay.  He had gone on many hunting drives.  Perhaps he had stayed away too long.  Or maybe he had not pleased her at night.  Song had practically refused to let him touch her those final weeks they were together.  When he would stroke her hair or try to pull her into his arms she had pushed him away and went to her sister’s hearth to sleep.  Song had been unhappy during their entire three months together, he was sure of it.  If only he had read the signs.  The entire village had.  They knew she was seeing another man--a white man, at that!  And they had tried to tell him, but he would not listen.  He had always believed the best in Song.  She had not even told him goodbye.
     
    He watched the white woman ahead of him.  Her braid had come untied, and her hair hung loose and free down her back.  Her hair was handsome, he had to admit.
     
    For a brief instant, he pictured her lying bare breasted before his lodge fire, her hair crowning her nakedness like a cape.  He had not been with anyone since Song, and he knew it was only loneliness that made him think of this white woman.  Still, he wondered how it would be to lie with this woman called Katherine St. James, to have her hands spread over his back as he rode inside her.
     
    She was not going to speak to him at all today, it seemed, and for some unbeknownst reason, his mood turned somber.  He had grown used to her incessant chattering.  Now her silence disturbed him.
     
    They walked in silence until nightfall.  The woman built a fire, and they ate jerky without speaking to one another.  When it was dark and each had stretched out on opposite sides of the fire, she slowly began to transform back to the talkative woman he had first known.
     
    “Did you know from the moment you first met Song that you loved her?” she asked, looking up at the constellations.
     
    For a woman to question him about love was something he had never experienced, but surprisingly, he realized that he was not offended.
     
    “I must have.”  He answered after a long moment.  “My mother said we would be a good match.  That is why she chose her for me.”
     
    “Your marriage was arranged?”
     
    “It is custom.”
     
    She sat up and stared at him.  The firelight cast eerie shadows across her pale skin.  “So you didn’t love her?”
     
    Adahya