Snow Bird
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 10: Going Forward
They came out of the willows at midday.
Not because it was safe — she wasn’t certain it would be safe for a long time — but because the children were past cold and into something more serious, and the elders needed fire and shelter and water, and staying in the frozen thicket until safety arrived was not a plan. It was a way to lose people more slowly.
Grey Wolf had bound his side with a strip of hide that morning, her hands doing the work while he held still and didn’t complain, which told her the wound was serious enough that complaining would have cost him something he didn’t want to spend. She had seen enough by now to read the difference between hurt and damaged, and this was closer to damaged than she wanted to think about. She bound it tight and helped him to his feet and said nothing about what she was thinking.
He would stand or he wouldn’t. She intended to make sure he stood.
What was left of the camp was not a camp anymore.
She had prepared herself for this, or believed she had, and found that preparation was not the same as readiness. She moved through it with Grey Wolf beside her and kept her eyes on what was useful — what could be salvaged, what remained of the food stores, which lodges were still standing well enough to provide shelter. She did not let herself look at certain things and she did not let the children look at all.
Tibo stayed at her side. He had not left her side since Grey Wolf came through the willows and she had not asked him to. He was ten years old and he had been a man for approximately six hours and she was not going to take that from him by sending him away now.
Other survivors were coming in. By ones and twos, from the brush along the river and the gullies to the north, moving carefully into the open the way people move when they are not yet certain the danger has passed. She counted them as they came. She noted who was missing and held that knowledge in the part of herself she had learned to keep separate from the part that had to function.
Sagwitch came in wounded, supported by two younger men. He looked at Grey Wolf and then at Mary Ellen and then at the children she had brought out and he said something to Grey Wolf that she caught most of and filed away to think about later.
Grey Wolf answered briefly. She caught her own name in it. Snow Bird.
They built fires from what was salvageable and she organized the children around the nearest one and put the elders as close to the heat as they could get and took inventory for the hundredth time that day — who was hurt, how badly, what they had, what they needed. It was the same arithmetic it had always been. You looked at the facts until they stopped arguing with you and then you moved.
Lena had been patient through all of it with a four-month-old’s magnificent indifference to catastrophe. She was hungry now and said so, and Mary Ellen sat at the fire and fed her while Miya — Miya, who had been brought out by Hupia in the first minutes of the raid and who had apparently spent the morning organizing the smaller children in her particular imperious fashion — climbed into her lap beside the baby and leaned against her without a word.
Mary Ellen put her arm around her older daughter and held both of them and looked at the fire.
Grey Wolf lowered himself beside her, slowly, and she moved Miya to make room and he sat and she felt his weight settle against her side and she leaned into it and let it be what it was.
They sat together at the fire while the afternoon light went thin and the survivors gathered and the work of continuing began around them.
In the days that followed she learned what the army had taken and what it hadn’t.
It had taken lives — more than she could let herself count in those first days, more than the band could easily absorb, names she had learned over two years attached to absences that didn’t close. Bear Hunter was dead. Others she had known, had cooked beside, had argued with over the correct way to dry meat, had watched with their children at the evening fire.
What it hadn’t taken was the band itself.