Someone picked up.
"Mr. Sleighbow?" she asked, trying to sound businesslike and brisk. "This is Jennifer Talldeer, returning your call."
Mooncrow concentrated his outer awareness on the video game-the only one he ever played, something involving small odd-shaped blocks dropping down from the top of the screen-and pondered the many problems his beloved granddaughter was coping with. He watched her constantly, and he was well aware how she must be feeling right now. After all, he had gone through his own version of her particular balancing act.
That must be exactly what she felt like; as if she were a tightrope dancer. When one was very young, the balancing between life among the Heavy Eyebrows and life as a shaman was not particularly difficult. There simply were not many points of intersection, and no real points of conflict that could not be resolved by appeal to a parent to intercede with authority outside the family. But as one became older, the responsibilities became greater, and the number of conflicts increased. And there was no one to intervene on an adult's behalf.
No one could remain forever in the Spirit World, not even in the long-ago days. The Little Old Men had also hunted and taken the war trail, raided and planted, until they grew too old. Then they remained behind to guard the village when younger men went on the hunt. But they did not sit always in the Lodge of Mystery, speaking to the spirits; they had their outer lives as well as their inner ones. But in these days, it was much more difficult to balance the secular life with the sacred - perhaps more so even for Kestrel than it had been for him. He had been a man with a simple job, one which began at seven in the morning and ended at three in the afternoon. It did not follow him home, disturb him in the sweatlodge, ring his phone at odd hours.
He understood her better than she knew. She must pay for this house; she must earn the money for food and clothing. She was the hunter, and the quarry was far more capricious than any buffalo. And yet she must also be the shaman-in-training. The clock must drive her - and yet, she must learn to let things come at their own time, to ignore the clock and the calendar and the demands they made on her concentration.
When he had been her age, he had not had this particular crisis; he had been far too busy dodging the bullets of Japanese fighters as they strafed the runways of the strange Pacific islands he had been stationed on. He had been concerned with his own survival, the survival of his fellow Indians, the survival of his fellow Americans. He had been a Warrior, and the only Medicine he had needed to practice had been Warrior's Medicine, for the hawk had fallen with his head to the west, and as in the old days, it had been from the west that The Enemy had come, for all that they called themselves men of the Rising Sun. His Medicine pouches had been tucked into little corners of the Corsairs he had serviced - and he had been proud when his planes and pilots returned, beating the odds.
No, his crisis had come later, when he was a man of peace again, and he had a home, a wife, and a small son to provide for. That was when he had felt the pressing of the Heavy Eyebrows' world of the clock, against the Medicine world of the seasons. He had often felt as if he were juggling knives.
She must feel as if she, too, were juggling knives, and the nature of her job meant she might also be tossed a red-hot poker at any time. But she was a Warrior. He had known all along that she would be a Warrior. The path of the Warrior-Shaman was that much harder, the balances more complicated. Her blood was of the peacemakers; her path of the fighters. The dance she danced was no traditional one, but an intricate weaving of steps that would leave a Fancy Dancer exhausted, akin to the skill needed for Hoop Dancing.
He half closed his eyes and his thumbs danced upon the control buttons, and the little blocks fell and fell, falling into place. Not always neatly, but he kept ahead of them. That was the object, after all-to keep moving, keep ahead of the falling blocks.
Kestrel had another sort of problem, for she had always been a very earnest and responsible child. One of the Heavy Eyebrows words for what she was, he suspected, was "over-achiever." She always wished to do everything perfectly, quickly, greeting each new conquest with the need to do more. This was partly his fault, he thought; he should not have permitted her to take on any of the internal paths of the Heavy Eyebrows. He had allowed her to become contaminated in her thinking-
Now, that was not right. He had not taught her to put that part of her that dealt with the Heavy Eyebrows world into a box. That was what he had done, ultimately-and when that part of him was in the box, he did not allow it to touch his inner self. In the past two years or so, he had noted a tendency in her to wish to control things, to direct them, rather than simply permitting them to happen and then dealing with the results. Those knives she was juggling would in fact juggle themselves-if only she would learn to trust in them, in the Spirit World, and in herself.
That was the reason why he continued to tease her about sex. The Little Old Men of the past had sequestered their virgins until a husband chose them or the husband's family chose her for him-or until she found a man to her liking and an uncle to broker the match. That was one of the customs that made no sense in these days, for there was no way to learn the world while being sequestered. And besides, as a shaman, it made no sense for her to be a sequestered virgin, for how could she understand the powerful medicines that sex created between man and woman if she knew nothing of them herself ? Not that Kestrel was a virgin-he was perfectly well aware what she had been up to, and while she might have thought it was her mother who had put the condoms in her underwear drawer when she was sixteen-
Still, in some ways he might just as well have sequestered her away. For the past two years, at least, she had been living like a Heavy Eyebrows nun. No men, not even a suggestion of a man-no, nor a woman either. That was unfortunate; one needed to take care these days, but abstinence was doing nothing for her.
It seemed to him that she needed some sort of outlet for the tension inside her, and that sex would be a perfectly good release. It would certainly help her to balance herself; it would be the best of Good Medicine, with the right man. She needed to find herself another youngster, and rediscover one of the simple things. She would discover by giving up control of herself to a sensation how many of her problems could be dealt with by giving up an attempt at control and letting them happen.
This thing, this obsession of hers with earning the pipe- receiving a sacred pipe would signal the next level of her achievement as a shaman, would, in fact, mean that she was no longer his "apprentice," but his equal. The trouble was that she was so certain that it was time for that to happen, as if things in the Spirit World were punched in on some kind of celestial time clock. It was the control thing that was holding her back, and she could not see it. Nor could he tell her; she must see it for herself. He was trying to lead her in that direction by being suggestive, a dirty old man, using the shock to send her to find a more appropriate partner, and so to see what it was she needed to see.
Yet for all his hinting and suggestions, she was so intent on time, on control, on Outer World responsibilities that she could not seem to see past his joking with her to his serious intentions.
Or else she didn't want to admit that she could actually need or learn from something as "simple" as sex.
He sighed. He could only continue to do as he had been doing, and hope that sooner or later he would find another path, or she would find one. Until that happened, Kestrel was certainly a bitch to be around.
"I'm glad you called, Miss Talldeer." The tinny voice did not sound terribly glad, but that could have been either Corporate Manner or simply the bad speaker in her phone. "You caught me just before I left for the day."