Chapters Nine and Ten Summary and Analysis

Pretty-Shield asks Frank if animal-people ever talked to him. When he declines, she insists that they do. To demonstrate, she tells him another story, one about a woman and a mouse; the mouse was a woman-mouse.

In the summertime, the Crow moved their lodges to the plains to follow the Buffalo. Pretty-Shield was in a lodge of sixty. Everyone was hungry and when a man asked his wife for food, she opened a pouch to find a woman-mouse and her children. In a dream, the mouse-woman warned Little-face, the woman, that in four days they will be attacked by the Lacota. Little-face then told the chief, who had a weaker but similar premonition. One of the chief's men had spotted some people in the distance.

Later in the night, two of the tribe's men, Red-bear...