Isolation had almost always been a large part of her life. Until Grey Cloud had been six, when the Spirits made themselves known to her instead of Sitting Wolf, she was surrounded by and enjoyed the constants of human contact. Be it the warmth of her mother's smile or her father's laugh, the wild games her brothers and sisters and cousins would play, she could always count on someone being nearby, peeking about, listening in. Maybe bring a gift or play a prank. But then the Nightmare came, and after the darkness and blood red blur of memory, she and her mother were all that remained. Guided by Coyote, they had taken home in a clouded valley of the Black Hills until her mother joined the Ancestors ten years later.
Now going on twenty years of cautious distance as opposed to the six she barely remembered, setting camp a half-hour's ride from Reaper's Gulch was not much of a burden on the Arapaho woman's mind. She had other things to attend to this evening.
"Hootseeiu tee oo ma nha heeiou," said the woman under the shade of a stretched-hide shelter, sitting on her knees and stooped over an assortment of ingredients arranged by her fire. Her skin is the color of new copper warmed by it's light, but her eyes are pale and the oily light makes them colorless. From temple to temple, the strip of skin around them is painted black, black like her hair, which is plaited at the sides and anchored by long strips of red cloth. An eagle's feather dangles from one braid, dangerously close to the flames.
"Thank you for these things." Her painted fingers pinched granules and dried herbs from each of her carefully arranged spread, adding each to a small square of fox stomach, cleaned and dried. Also among the ingredients is a pale powder mixed with soot, and what looks like a lock of braided red hair. Grey Cloud spoke as she had many times before; to the observer unfamiliar with her, it is to no one. "The God-man's daughter has fits that keep her awake. He asks to make her sleep..." She hook her head, the feather and braid and red cloth waving. "Fix the fits, I say. And he looks at me like something he scraped off his boot heel." A pause, then the painted skin on the bridge of her nose wrinkled slightly. "Of course you had nothing to do with it."
Clearly, this medicine woman has found ways to cope with her isolation and innate loneliness.
"Whether it's because I am 'savage' or 'woman', I do not know. He seems ...easily irritated." Folding the skin-bag and it's contents together, she starts to thread it closed with twisted sinew. The outside is plain, but secured with a purple shell bead and more of that red hair.
That one order will help replace the shoe on Cucheta's hind hoof and buy another box of ammunition. Maybe delivering it a day before the agreed upon time will add a bit more. Perhaps a new rifle. However it proceeded, she would make due - there weren't many places a tribe-less Shaman woman could easily fit, and that left even fewer steady sources of income. Not that she really required an income - the land could provide for her easily. She still had her reasons for staying on the skirts of civilization, without detaching from it completely.
Grey Cloud put the hex bag with the others and rolled back from her knees. Old tension released with a pop-pop-pop down the length of her spine as she reached toward the deep purple sky in a stretch. Then her arms dropped, slapping the sides of a rawhide skirt and braided, beaded belt; plain, rustic clothing, compared to the women that often avoided her on her occasional ventures into town; savage compared to their high-necked shirts and every slip of skin covered by heavy stones of fabric. Women like the God-man's daughter.
A soft laugh bubbled up from Grey Cloud's throat, seemingly at nothing.
"No, I do not believe God-man or his God had anything to do with it, either."