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A confused boy is easy to , he offered , and showed me how he used the water plants as a filter when he filled his long tubular water skins I think they weregreat care not to touch them with his bare hands He carried thee flat rock and marooned them there The little red creatures swiftly baked flat and brown in the hot sun of the day He h flat leaves of a swort bush and carefully stored the dried frogs in one of the inner pockets of his loose robe I was beginning to realize that although I had believed we had both ridden away from his camp empty-handed, Dewara had actually been very well supplied for our sojourn He had with hiet it from him, he would force me to admit my dependency on him

He was so cheerful and affable withfor ed He suddenly stepped into the role of instructor, as if he had finally decided he would teach s my father had wantedby the pond, I thought ould go straight back to his camp on my father’s lands near the river Instead, he led and I followed We stopped at , showedit, and told me to practice with it Then we left our taldi and e of a ravine He stunned the first prairie grouse we flushed and I raced up to wring its neck before it recovered His second one, he broke the wing, and the bird led ht it I could not hit a bird for the life of me until the late afternoon, when I actually killed one with ht, we had fire and cooked meat and shared his water skin as if ere coarrulous He told me a number of battle tales from his days as a warrior, back in the time when the Kidona raided their fellow Plains, and he laughed aloud as he joyously recalled those "victories" Froends" about the constellations Most of his hero tales see I perceived that a successful thief was ad the Kidona, while a clumsy one often paid with his life It seemed an odd morality to me I fell asleep as he told a story about seven lovely sisters and the trickster who seduced them in succession and had a child with each one of the none of the, yet they kept their history in their oral accounts I was to hear hts that followed Sometimes when he told tales, I could hear the echo of the years of repetition in the measured way he spoke The oldest tales of his people spoke of when they were a settled folk and lived in the skirts of the mountains The Dappled People had driven them out from their homes and farms, and a curse from the Dapples had made his people wanderers, doo plants and orchards The way he spoke of the Dapples as i their vast riches confused me for several days Who were these people with patterned skins and ic that could cause a wind of death to blow upon their ene of the Specks, it was ale and opinion I had of the Specks as a primitive woodland tribe of sie of them as a co that the Specks had somehow forced the Kidona to retreat froers Therefore Dewara’s people had endowed theendary power to excuse their failure to prevail against the Specks This "solution" troubled h boards nailed over a brokenThe cold winds of another truth still blew through it and chilled low of friendship or true trust of Dewara, but in the days that followed, he taught and I learned From Dewara I learned to ride as the Kidona did, toto the uide her by tiny thuds of allop, into a tu myself flat or coe of all the Plainspeople, became more fluent

I had never been a fleshy youth, always rangy and, thanks to eant Duril, well muscled But in the days I was in Dewara’s care, I becah as jerky We ate only er, and dreaers passed like ill-advised lusts A sort of euphoria at my reduced need for food replaced them It was a heady sensation, difficult to describe After my fifth or sixth day with Dewara, I lost count of the days, and ed to him It was ever after difficult for me to describe the state of mind and body that I entered into, even to the trusted fehom I discussed my sojourn with the Kidona warrior