Very gently she says, “It’s not going to be the same, no. In some ways, it may be better. Or there may be no one left to care. We just don’t know yet.”

Shannon’s color goes from the pink flush of annoyance to dead white. She manages, though, to muster a crooked smile. “Thanks. I think.”

Dakota returns it. “You’re welcome. I think.”

Leaving Shannon to her uncertain typing, Koda checks her patients for the second time since dawn. Sister Matilda and her kittens have gone home to general rejoicing in the Burgess household. The Scotty, sadder and with luck wiser, has recovered from his unfortunate encounter with the porcupine. The rabbit with the infected eye, though, is not progressing as well as he had done initially. The inflammation has faded, and he quietly munches his alfalfa pellets as she runs her hand down his back. The infection persists, though, evident in the thinning flesh over his ribs and the pale color of exposed skin and membranes. She makes a note on his chart to add a second antibiotic to his evening dose; penicillin and sulfa together will still take almost anything bacterial. If that doesn’t do the job, they will have to go to an antiviral, and supplies are short.

Not for the first time, a cold chill trickles down her spine. This rabbit may have a constitutional idiosyncracy or underlying condition that leaves him more vulnerable than most. Conditions are ripe, though, for the spread of disease of all sorts. Winter has held most infections in check, save for the usual bronchitis and colds of the season. With the return of the sun, the melting of corpses buried under a meter or more of snow, the likelihood of epidemic will soar. And there is no more public health service, no more Center for Disease Control, no more pharmaceutical companies to mount an emergency campaign for an effective drug or vaccine.

For much of the rest of the afternoon, she inventories the clinics’ supplies, making lists of drugs to search for or attempt to find on the black market that is rapidly springing up. Or rather, the open market; looted or not, merchandise is moving again, paid for in trade goods or services. If they are not already, medications will be at a premium. The unpleasant thought comes to her, not for the first time, that it may become necessary to reinstitute taxes on a population that is barely surviving.

At midday she returns home for a quick lunch and a quicker walk with Asi. Kirsten has gone into Rapid City for the afternoon session of the rapists’ trial. Testimony is almost finished, and closing arguments will begin soon. As the only surviving national symbol of law, Kirsten must be present when the verdict comes in. A smile touches Dakota’s mouth for an instant, and is gone. Kirsten’s strength is beyond question, but she has never faced the cold responsibilities of power before, the chill that must stiffen the fingers of any but the most brutal authority scrawling a signature across a death warrant.

Leaving Asi to his nap on the hearth, Koda returns to the clinic. The neutering surgery goes well, and the Basset mix starts coming out from under the anaesthesia before he is well settled in the hospital ward. The mother wolf and her cub lie stretched out in the sun, sleeping so soundly that they never stir as she passes. Igmú, becoming ever more restless as spring deepens around her and the call of her blood becomes more insistent, bats her ball about her enclosure with increasing fierceness; Coyote, more relaxed, wags his abbreviated tail and whines, thrusting his slender nose through the mesh of the fence for a pat and a scratch.

As the sun stands down toward the horizon, Dakota sets aside her work. In the storeroom, she lays out the buffalo hide robe her father has brought from home and unfolds it on the worktable. Unlocking the freezer, she gently removes the frozen body of Wa Uspewikakiyapi, setting aside its heavy plastic wrappings. She performs each movement deliberately, holding apart her anger and her grief. For a moment she rests her hand on his broad head. This will not happen again, she swears to him silently. Never again. Your people will be free, and safe.

With a pair of surgical scissors, she snips a lock of fur from his mane, where it is untinged by blood. She takes a second from the plume of his tail. These she affixes with a leather thong to the spirit stick, making a mane about the head and throat of the wolf she has carved. With it, she will undertake to remember and honor him as a beloved member of her family for the year of formal mourning and to host a give-away at its end. It does not matter that he is of another nation. He has been closer to her than any not of her blood, save one. Kola mitawa. My friend. My teacher.

And now there is another. As if summoned by the thought, a light step sounds in the corridor, followed by a tap on the door. “Dakota?”

“Come in.”

Kirsten opens the door, moving quietly. She pauses a moment, taking in the wolf’s body, the fur still in Dakota’s hand, the buffalo robe. Silently she crosses the floor and steps into Koda’s arms. Koda holds her tightly, not speaking, merely resting her cheek atop the silken softness of the fair head. After a moment, Kirsten says, “I wanted to be with you when—that is, for the ceremony.” She steps back a fraction and raises her face questioningly. “If that’s all right?”

Koda lays her palm against the other woman’s cheek. “Of course it’s all right. You’re family now, to both of us. All of us.”

Deep beneath their searching concern, a spark of joy lights the green eyes, and is gone. “Let me help.”

Together, then, they wrap Wa Uspewikakiyape’s body in the buffalo robe, tying it in place with long strips of braided sinew. Into one knot, Dakota ties a medicine hoop fashioned of a supple willow branch, with small patches of cloth—white, yellow, red and black—tied at the quarters and leather thongs running at right angles between them. Into another she fastens an eagle feather and two pinions from a redtail’s wing. “Because,” she explains, “he was a chief of his nation.”

When they are done, they wait quietly by the honored dead, their hands joined.

* * *

The clinic for once is quiet when Koda returns. Behind the desk, Shannon is occupied in updating files on a manual typewriter scrounged from who knows where, pecking away at the keys in an uncertain rhythm broken by the sluggish response of the mechanism. “That thing needs to be oiled,” Dakota observes as she pauses to check the morning’s sign-in sheet; no patients waiting, one drop-off to neuter. “Give Kimberly a call and see if the quartermaster has anybody who can break it down and give it a cleaning.”

“I’ve already—damn!” Shannon breaks off to examine her right hand. Her fingers are still smudged from an apparent struggle to feed in the red-and-black ribbon. “Second nail this morning. There’s supposed to be an old guy in town who used to be a typewriter mechanic. Colonel Grueneman’s got an airman out looking for him.”

“If he shows up, see what else he can work on. We’re eventually going to need all the maintenance people we can find, and not just for the clinic.”

“Doctor?”

Koda stops on her way back to her small office and the wards. There is a plaintive quality in the young woman’s voice. “What is it, Shannon?”

“It’s not going to get better, is it?”