فصل 11 - بخش 01

ELEVEN

That spring was a good time in the village. More families had joined us, after long discussions at the fish-gathering. They had moved from another village closer to the river, where they too had lost many to the plague, including their sachem and their two wisest elders. There, they were at the far edge of our territory, close to the land where the Massachusetts people farm and hunt; now that they were so few, perhaps they wanted to feel closer to their own tribe.

So fifteen more families had come to join this new village of ours, which was already two villages joined together. When their houses were all finished we had a great ceremony of greeting, over which One Who Waits presided as sachem of us all. His council now was made up of elders from all the three original settlements, and Suncatcher was one of its most respected members.

Leaping Turtle, Spring Frog, and I had hoped that we might find our friend White Oak among these people, but he wasn’t there. Though nobody ever found his body, we knew he must somehow have died, during the winter ordeal that we’d been lucky enough to survive.

There were young children among the newcomers, which made everyone happy—not least Leaping Turtle and me. We had been in charge of building the little wooden watchtowers in the cornfields, just like those from which we ourselves had scared away thieving birds and animals from the fields when we were young. With only five children available to sit up there with noisemakers and blunt arrows, we had begun to think we might have to join them, which would have been very undignified. But now there were enough extra children who would be delighted to chase away the raccoons and the woodchucks, the jays and the crows. And they would be instructed, just as we had been, that Brother Crow may be scared away but never killed, because it was his ancestor who brought mankind the corn and bean seeds in the first place, one seed in each of his ears.

So the cornstalks grew tall, and in due course the beans climbed up, starring them with white blossoms, and the squash vines filled the ground below. Quickbird and all the women gathered the new greens as spring became summer. They were busy weeding, digging roots, cooking, weaving, sewing—at this time of the year I was always glad I was not a woman. But we men were just as busy, hunting birds and deer, trapping, and traveling to the river to fish.

Leaping Turtle and I were good fishermen. After the snow melted, the two of us made a private journey back to our old village, not to visit the deserted houses but to rescue from its hiding place the beautiful little birch-bark canoe we had made under the instruction of Running Deer. Mice had nested in it, but the birch-bark was still smooth, and all we had to do after we carried it home was reseal the joins with spruce resin.

We carved new paddles from ash wood in the evenings. Wolfchaser and Hunting Dog came with us when we took the canoe to the river, and hooted with praise when it floated light as a leaf. I think they were a little envious that we had been taught by Running Deer, who was famous in the whole tribe for his skill in shaping canoes. Leaping Turtle and I went out together one day to a high place near the river and gave thanks to his spirit.

Another day we did something Suncatcher had requested: taking digging sticks with us, we traveled back again to our old village, and beside the overgrown trail just outside it we dug a memory hole. It was in honor of Running Deer, Morning Star, our parents, and all those who lived in our village and were killed by the plague. It was a round hole about a foot deep, lined with stones, and now that it was there it would be kept open by generations of people to come. These memory holes were all over our land, on our trails; they were the record of the people who lived before us, and of what happened in their time.

Suncatcher was pleased when we had done this. At sunset that day she chanted a prayer for the memory hole and for those it remembered.

As time went by, we visited the memory hole regularly, to keep it clear of brush and fallen leaves. Through harvest and another deer drive, through the dark of winter and the first glimmering of spring, we lived our first few years in the changed world that we had entered when plague killed so many that we loved. I suppose Leaping Turtle and Quickbird and I changed too, as time passed, but everyone was working so hard that such things were not noticed. Our one concern was to make this village as strong a community as those it had been forced to replace.

In the rest of our land, though, there was thought for the things that changed. One day in late autumn, when One Who Waits and Swift Deer were visiting our house, a runner came through the village on his way to deliver a report to Yellow Feather. He was one of those who kept regular watch on a new settlement of white men, on the coast at Wessagussett among the Massachusetts. Since he was a friend of Swift Deer, he came to our house to greet him before returning to the trail. It would be a very brief greeting. Runners do not sleep until they reach the end of the journey; they run day and night, with only their pouch of ground corn for food.

His name was Bearclaw. He raised his hand in polite refusal when Suncatcher offered him a bowl of stew. “I thank you, Grandmother,” he said, “but with a full belly I cannot run.”

“I understand,” Suncatcher said. She handed him a ladle of water instead, and he drank.

Swift Deer leaned forward eagerly. “What did you find? Are the new white men still stealing corn?”

Bearclaw shook his head. “Even by thieving they couldn’t feed themselves,” he said. “The Massachusetts are using some of them as labor in return for food. These white men are not like the others, they have built a fort but they have no skills. The Massachusetts have no respect for them. I do not like the feel of things there.”

He turned toward the door. “My thanks to you all—I must go.”

One Who Waits said, “Carry my greetings to Yellow Feather. I hope he is in good health.”

“I pray so,” Bearclaw said. “He was not well when I left.”

He raised a hand and he was gone, with Swift Deer following. I knew the two would run together for a while and talk. There had been much talk in the sweat lodge that year, about the treaty Yellow Feather had made to help the first English settlers, about disagreements with the Narragansett people south of us, and about bad things said and done by Squanto to set Yellow Feather and the English against each other. It seemed that others besides One Who Waits were now feeling uneasy about Squanto.

Swift Deer and Wolfchaser talked often with their father, and sometimes argued. Leaping Turtle listened and tried to learn; like Swift Deer, he had an instinctive mistrust of all white men. I listened sometimes, but it was the kind of talk that made me wish I was away alone in the woods again. People seemed to me to fill life with shadows that should not be there. The Great Spirit gave us so much, and we had all lived our separate lives on the land in harmony—the trees, the plants, the birds, the animals, the fish, and—most of the time—men. There was surely room for all to go on doing the same, even if white men had come here too.

Leaping Turtle and I were digging a pit when we had our first argument about this. The Harvest Moon was past, the corn had all been dried and the beans threshed, and the women and small children were trying to beat the squirrels to the last berries and nuts. In our old villages, the pits for winter food storage had been in the ground for years, but here we had had to dig new ones, and each year we needed more than the last.

We were standing so low down that our noses were level with the ground. The digging had taken all day, and now we were lining the sides of the hole with stones.

“Just think,” I said, as the sweat ran into my eyes, “our children too will fill this pit with corn. Just like the old village, where we stored food in pits our grandfathers had dug.”

“How do you know our people will still be here?” said Leaping Turtle.

“Of course they will.”

“Swift Deer says more white men are coming, and their families, and they will take the land.”

“There is plenty of land,” I said. “Hand me that long skinny rock over there.”

“Swift Deer says—”

“Swift Deer is cross with everyone. Our father Yellow Feather has agreements with the white men, you know that, and they will live their lives and we shall live ours. That’s what One Who Waits believes.”

“You talk like a child,” Leaping Turtle said, and he dropped a rock on my foot—but not on purpose, and it was a small one.

He kept on telling me that he had heard this thing and he had heard that thing, and all of it meant that I was simple in my thinking, and that nothing would stay the same. That everything was becoming different, because of the coming of the white men.

And though I could not see it then, he was right.

Winter came, and the village was full of whispers. One Who Waits had received runners from two different directions, who had spoken to him privately and been in great haste. Nobody knew what they had said. One Who Waits did something that had never happened before in this, our new combined village: he called his council and all the men ceremonially into the biggest space we had, a long house that was the home for four families. It was morning. The women and children of the four families slipped away to other houses.

I felt small in this gathering. Leaping Turtle and I were by far the youngest present; we were surrounded by men who were bigger, older, and more important, and by a few wise grandmothers. But we were there, listening.

One Who Waits stood up and spoke loudly and clearly, with no expression on his face. He reminded us that our father Yellow Feather had joined us in friendship with the Patuxet settlement of English white men, by an agreement that both groups would live peaceably and protect one another. He told us that Yellow Feather had been very sick, and that some medicine from a leader of the white men, called Winslow, had helped him to get better.

Then he paused, and you could tell that he was getting to something he did not like saying.

“It seems,” he said, “that our father Yellow Feather and the English had word that the Massachusetts were planning to attack the English settlements, both the new one at Wessagussett and the first at Patuxet. It seems they believed this, even though many of the white men at Wessagussett were living with Massachusetts families. So a group of the English went to Wessagussett and they killed six of the Massachusetts.”

There was a long low murmur among the men listening.

One Who Waits’s voice became quieter and more full of emotion. He said, “It seems that the leader of the English group, a captain called Standish, invited the leading warriors Wituwamet and Pecksuot to eat with him, and then he and his men stabbed them to death in that house. He killed his guests. And outside the house his people hanged Wituwamet’s brother, and killed three other Massachusetts.”

The murmur grew louder.

One Who Waits held up his hand and the voices died down. He said, “But we are joined to these people by our treaty that Yellow Feather made. Their anger is not against us but against the Massachusetts. Remember that. They have no quarrel with us, they are our friends.”

The men in the house were not raising their voices now, but you could hear a restlessness, a shuffling of feet.

“I have told you what took place, my brothers,” One Who Waits said. “We will discuss it. But our father Yellow Feather would have you remember that we have had troubles of our own with the Massachusetts, as with the Narragansetts. This thing that has happened shows that if we remain friends with the English, we can have peace in our land.”

Swift Deer stepped forward into the central space and said clearly, “May I speak, my father?”

He was entitled to do this, as the eldest son of One Who Waits, but there was a little pause before his father answered.

“You may speak,” said One Who Waits. He sounded weary.

“It seems,” said Swift Deer, “that the Englishman Standish also cut off the head of Wituwamet. And that it is now stuck up on a pole over the fort of our friends at Patuxet, where the crows peck at it.”

There was a sharp burst of angry sound at that, but because One Who Waits stood there erect and unmoving, it died down again. Swift Deer was still standing too. They gazed at each other, and you could feel a tension between them like the strain in a tug-of-war rope.

One Who Waits said, “We have suffered much already. For the sake of our children, let us not seek war.”

And into the silence after his words, Suncatcher suddenly began to sing. From where she was sitting at the back, on one of the sleeping platforms of the house, her voice rose over our heads, into the smoky air. And it was not a war chant but an old song that the women sang to soothe an unhappy child, much like a lullaby. Some of the words in the song always changed to fit the name of the child, and Suncatcher used the name of one of the men in her family.

My name.

“Little Hawk,” she sang in her clear true voice.

“Little Hawk, fly above the trees.Fly in freedom, fly in beauty,Fly as the Great Spirit wills.The sky is there for you, Little Hawk.Little Hawk, fly in peace.”

When she was done, and the echo of her voice hung in the house, One Who Waits made the sweeping gesture that says, It is finished, and quietly we all made our way outside and went to our homes.