Snow Bird
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2
She woke before dawn with Miya at her side and Grey Wolf already gone from the lodge.
The fire was banked but not dead. Someone had seen to that.
She lay still for a moment and took inventory the way her father had taught her to take inventory of a new situation — what do you have, what do you need, what can you do about the difference. Her body ached from the birth and the ride and the hard ground. Her milk was in and Miya was already stirring, which meant that problem solved itself. She had the clothes on her back, ruined as they were. She had her hands and her health and a clear head.
She had no idea where she was.
She picked up Miya and put her to breast before the fussing became crying and looked around the lodge in the grey pre-dawn light. Orderly. Hides and pouches arranged with purpose. A man’s space, functional and spare, with a child’s cradle board that had clearly been used and then set aside — the dead wife’s, she understood. The sight of it settled something in her chest that she didn’t examine.
By the time Miya was satisfied and drowsing again Mary Ellen had made her decision, though decision was perhaps too large a word for it. She had simply looked at the facts until they stopped arguing with her.
Thomas was dead. The train was gone. There was no fort, no settlement, no name she could call that would bring anyone. There was this lodge and this child and a young man who had buried her son and stood watch at the creek and brought her here and had not, in any of that, been cruel.
If you can’t beat ‘em, her mother used to say, leaving the rest of it unfinished because the finish was obvious.
She set Miya down and went to find the water.
The older woman — she learned her name was Hupia, though she couldn’t yet say it right — watched her carry the first load back to the fire without comment. The second time she came back Hupia handed her a clay pot without being asked and pointed at the fire, and Mary Ellen cooked what was there to cook, which was dried meat and something that might have been turnip, and nobody complained about it, which she took as a reasonable beginning.
Grey Wolf returned mid-morning with two other men and a deer across his horse. He glanced at her at the fire, at Miya sleeping in the cradle board she had rehung because the child needed somewhere to be, and said nothing. He went about the work of the deer.
She went about her work. They did not get in each other’s way.
In the afternoon he appeared at the lodge entrance and said something and gestured and she didn’t understand the words but she understood the direction and followed him down to the creek. He stopped twenty yards from the bank and put his back to her and stood there.
She looked at his back for a moment. Then she went to the creek and washed.
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