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This man, who wore a vest of puma skin and fringed buckskin trousers had a great, arching chest and immense shoulders. His hair was black and thick and hung in braids down his massive, straight back. His face had lines of force and intelligence. She felt suddenly awed in his majestic presence and wondered if he might be someone of great importance.
Her eyes stopped on his moccasins, causing her heart to jump with relief.
They were black!
The Blackfoot were the only Indians known to wear black moccasins. That had to mean that she was in a friendly camp of Indians!
She turned her eyes slowly around her, deciding that this man was surely not the chief of this village, for farther into the village sat a much larger tepee positioned on a knoll that overlooked the others, as she imagined a chief's tepee would be.
A shuffling sound and a gasp drew Jolena's head around in a jerk. She swallowed hard and placed a hand at her throat when she found the older man staring at her, his eyes full of questions as he gazed intensely at her faceas though perhaps he knew it well already!
Brown Elk began inching backward, away from Jolena, then was forced to stop when his back came into contact with the cowhide fabric of his tepee. His heart was thudding wildly and he was feeling faint, for never had he expected to see that face againnot until he joined his beloved wives in the land of the hereafter!
''How… can… it be?" he finally stammered.
Jolena had already experienced such a reaction from another BlackfootSpotted Eagle!
He had also looked at her as though seeing a ghost, thinking that she was her mother!
That had to mean that this man also recognized the resemblance, which had to mean that he was surely from the same tribe, the same village, perhaps the same dwelling!
"Are you Brown Elk?" she blurted out, hoping he would understand her. She might be looking upon the face of her true father for the first time in her life! It did not seem possible, yet there it was in the way he was react
ing to her knowledge of his name!
"My name is Brown Elk," he said in English, his voice drawn. "And yours? What are you called? Where did you come from? Why are you here? How do you know my name?"
His gaze swept over her again, raising an eyebrow at the way she was dressed. It was obvious that she was an Indian, yet she was dressed as a white woman!
He looked at her again with wild, wondering eyes, knowing of only one way all of this could be possible!
She was the mirror image of Sweet Dove.
She was… his daughter!
It was as though it had been destined for them to meet in such a way!
After all these years of wondering, Jolena was in the presence of her true father, and now she didn't know what to do next.
She so badly wanted to move into his arms and cling to him, to take from him the comfort that she needed now to get her past her grieving for Spotted Eagle and Kirk.
But she knew that she had to hold herself in check. Just because he was her father by blood did not make them instantly love each other as daughter and father! Love would surely have to grow between them.
He was a father who would have to accept that the baby he had been denied was suddenly a grown woman.
"You are Brown Elk," Jolena said, her voice trembling as much as her knees and fingers. "I am called Jolena by the white community, but I am not sure what Blackfoot name you would have called me had I not been taken by white people instead of being left for you to find on the day my mother sacrificed her life to give me mine."
Brown Elk's shoulders swayed with the absolute knowledge now that this was his daughter, the child he had mourned. Even after his second wife had given birth to Two Ridges, this son had not been enough to erase the sadness of having lost his other child.
When his second wife had died from a feverish malady, he had not married again, but resumed trying to ease his haunting thoughts of where his first child was, and whether or not the child was even alive! And now he was blessed! His daughter had returned to him.
After all these years, his pleas and prayers to the fires of the sun had finally been answered.
Brown Elk reached his arms out for Jolena. " Ok-yi, come to me, daughter," he said thickly, fighting back the urge to cry that made men look like women in the eyes of those who witnessed such a weakness. "Let me fill my arms and heart with you. This has been denied me long enough."
Sobbing with joy, Jolena eased herself into his thick, muscular arms. She hugged him tightly, reveling in the wonder of the moment. "I never thought this would happen," she cried, turning her dark eyes up to him. "I have dreamed it. Oh, how many times I have dreamed it. I've prayed for this. It took a long time, but God finally answered my prayers."
Brown Elk placed his fingers at her waist and eased her slightly away from him, enabling him to get a good look at her. "I, too, have prayed," he said. "The Blackfoot creator, Napi, has heard my prayers. He has finally granted them true."
