into a lung. Paulie almost felt it, piercing him, throwing him forward. Afterthat he could hardly breathe, his lung was filling up, he was weak, he couldn'trun anymore, but there was the cave here, and the water was low, and he hadstrength enough to climb up under the overhang, taking care not to brush againstit and leave a stain of blood from his back. He would lie here and hide untilthe white men went on and he could come back out and go find Iris father, gofind a medicine man who could do something about the blood in his lungs, onlythe white men didn't go away, they kept searching for him, he could hear themoutside, and then he realized it didn't matter anyway because he was never goingto leave this cave. If he coughed, he'd give himself away and they'd drag himout and torture him and kill him. If he didn't cough, he'd drown. He drowned.

Paulie felt the moment of death, not as pain, but as a flash of light thatentered his body through his fingertips and filled him for a moment. Then itreceded, fled into some dark place inside him and lurked there. A death hiddeninside him, the death of a Cherokee who wasn't going to leave his home, wasn'tgoing to go west to some unknown country just because Andrew Jackson said theyhad to go. He held inside him the death of a proud man who wasn't going to leavehis mountains, ever. A man who had, in a way, won his battle.

He knelt there on all fours, gasping. How could he have seen all this? He haddaydreamed for hours on end, and never had he dreamed of Indians; never had theexperiences seemed so real and powerful. The dead Cherokee's life seemed morevivid, even in the moment of dying, than anything in Paulie's own experience. Hewas overwhelmed by it. The Cherokee owned more of his soul, for this moment,than Paulie did himself. And yet the Cherokee was dead. It wasn't a ghost here,just bones. And it hadn't possessed Paulie -- he was still himself, still the