In the spring, when the sky grew more blue than gray during the day and the snow in the high places began to melt and wake the water on the hillsides, little Udaya was told to watch her brother.

In the early evening of the day before, Elan and Gopan had gone up into The Canyon of the Two Owls to hunt when dark clouds rolled over the valley and surprised it with a heavy icy rain. Moments before the cloudburst, the brothers had separated when Gopan, the elder, had flushed a large rabbit from a bank of white brush and rushed after it over a craggy knoll to try and spear it. When the sudden rain began to fall, Elan, a small boy of 11, became confused in the freezing wetness and fading light, and took a wrong turn at the meeting boulder and slipped and fell the height of two bear down into a slushy cleft, where a collection of old snow had broken his fall, but then dumped him into a pool of icy water that swallowed him. Elan could not find any places on the sides of the rocks to grab to pull himself out or to place his feet, and as the sky darkened, he cried and grew cold as he fought to stay afloat and yelled for his brother.

When he did not catch the rabbit and the rain began to fall, Gopan thought his brother surely must have began to head home, so he turned around and did not return to the meeting rock and instead found the canyon trail and in the chilly rain, sidled down it. After the slippery, rocky descent brought him to the deer path, he realized his little brother was not ahead of him.

As the wet sky rumbled and fell over him, he stopped and turned, and looked up the trail behind him and listened. Beneath the crackle of distant branches popping under the weight of rain and snow and the closer rattle of raindrops striking the junipers and pinons around him, Gopan gazed into the darkened white behind him and listened.

And finally he heard the faint call.

Filled with dread, Gopan rushed back up the rocky slope, fighting the wet blurriness filling his eyes, until he found the voice he had followed, and the crag that swallowed it. Gopan was three years older than Elan, husky and soon entering the circle of the men, so he was able to find and drag a long section of thick fallen trunk over the gap, from upon which he reached down and wrenched his quaking brother out of the white pool.

Gopan did his best to carry the shivering body down the tricky canyon incline as rainy sleet continued to fall, but twice his moccasins slipped, dropping them both briefly onto hard rocks and frozen earth. Still, Elan had quit crying and tightly held Gopan, his arms wrapped around Gopan’s neck, as Gopan, legs quivering, tottered down the path.

Once they were at the deer trail, Gopan could move more quickly since the path was well known and had a gentler slope.

In the wintry storm, though, they still took too long to get home.

—

Bundled immediately in a pile of skins and laid before the fire in the big room, Elan soon developed a fever.

After he brought Elan in, their mother sent Gopan back out to cut some bark out of one of the White Trees, and when he returned, she removed the outer skin from it and then ground the meat of the wood into small bits and cooked them over the fire in water until it made a thick tea. Elan was awake and then asleep, but she continued to raise his head onto her legs and make him drink the liquid every hour.

Udaya, 9, little sister of Elan and Gopan, sat in a dark corner of the room and watched everything develop with wonder and fear until her mother asked her to put beans on the fire and to do chores.

As the storm continued into the night, Elan’s fever burned so warmly that in the early morning hours, he began to have seizures. Gopan and Udaya tried to sleep against him, extra warmth by his shivering body. Their mother watched them, watched him, watched the fire, watched the night.

Udaya’s father had been gone a week already, out on the plain to the west and climbing the Blue Mountain with a hunting party hoping to find bison or elk, and because he was away, her mother had to decide what else to do for Elan.

In the morning when the sun rose, Udaya’s mother wrapped herself in a cloak of pelts and put a squash and beans in a leather bag, and then she asked Gopan to hurry west across the high valley and down the mountain trail to the village to tell her mother and the elders that Elan was badly ill. She would go north to the Tewa medicine man’s home and hope to bring him back by nightfall. After Gopan dressed and went out into the wet blue morning, Udaya’s mother put a fan of eagle and hawk feathers above his head and mumble an inaudible prayer and then told Udaya to make more tree medicine for when he woke up in the next hour and to keep the fire hot, and to kill and pluck a turkey. And then she left to hike in the dreary rain over the smaller mountain to find the medicine man.

Udaya stoked the fire and then sat by Elan and interlocked her small fingers and looked at his red face and active eyelids and worried, and talked to him as he slept.

That is how Udaya ended up watching her brother.