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song. Bitahlo leaned forward, eager to hear her acceptance of his declaration of love.
    â€œWhat was that?” Dojihla said. “Did I just hear a moose breaking wind?”
    I almost fell off my branch with laughter. For his part, Bitahlo went pale, turned, and stalked off.
    Dojihla’s mother looked up into my tree. “My husband, what is wrong with that owl?” she said. “It sounds as if it is choking.”
    â€œForget the bird, my wife,” said Dojihla’s father. There was a look in his eyes that told me what had happened was like that last stick pulled from the beaver dam, the one that makes the pent-up water come rushing forth. “We must talk.”
    Then the two of them went into their lodge where their daughter could not hear them.
    Of course I could. If you can hear the deliciously terrified heartbeat of a mouse hiding in the grass far below your treetop perch, it is not at all difficult to make out a human conversation within a nearby wigwam. That conversation! It both worried me and gave me hope.
    â€œOur daughter now has nineteen winters,” Dojihla’s father whispered. “It is well past the season for her to choose a husband.”
    â€œBut how can we find any man who is stupid—I mean suitable enough?” said Dojihla’s mother. “Our daughter is so choosy.”
    â€œMy wife,” Dojihla’s father replied, “we shall no longer allow her to choose. We will have a contest in the old way. The man who brings in the most game in a day will be the winner. Our daughter will have to marry that man. It is an ancient tradition. Even Dojihla cannot refuse to follow it.”
    I took flight from the tree while they were still talking. I should have been depressed at the thought that Dojihla was going to be forced to take a husband. But I was not. An idea had come to me. It was a crazy idea. It was so strange that I was not sure where it had come from. Still, it made me feel a glimmer of hope. Was it possible? There was only one who could tell me. I had to find my great-grandmother.

CHAPTER 14
    One More Question
    IN SOME OF HER STORIES, Great-grandmother told that long ago there was not as much distance between the various beings in creation. Back then, things were not as set in their ways as they are now. Nowadays, it seems, if you are a fox, for example, that is what you will always be. But back then you could sometimes become something else. That fox might be able to turn into some other creature.
    The thought of one creature turning into another made sense to me. After all, I saw it happen every day, firsthand. There’s a nice fat mouse scampering about in the grass. Swoop, grab, gulp. And now that mouse is a mouse no longer, but part of an owl.
    But that old way of one thing becoming another did not involve either dying or digestion. It was just plain and simple shape-shifting. In certain of the stories Great-grandmother told me, it happened because some being made a foolish wish. Like the owl who wished it would never grow old and die. The Great Darkness gave that owl its wish, but not as it expected. It was turned into an owl-shaped stone that would never grow old and die. Great-grandmother had pointed that very stone out to me, where it stood at the edge of the chestnut forest.
    In other stories, though, the being that changed shapes did so because it had fallen in love with some creature that was of a different kind. Like an owl falling in love with a human.
    It took me some looking about, but I finally found my great-grandmother. Instead of her usual perch, she was in a big oak tree near the spot where I had been a nestling.
    As soon as I landed silently by her side, she turned her head to look at me.
    â€œWabi,” she said, “you have a question for me.”
    Not just any question, I thought. This one had been spinning about in my head like a whirlpool. It was the most important question I had ever thought to