Telling this takes a very little time; doing it took much longer. Suncatcher was anxious for us all to leave the village now that we had convinced her to come with us. She still forbade us to enter the other houses, for fear the plague would jump to us from any dead still inside.
“But we touched Morning Star, we buried him, and we are still here, Grandmother.”
“Risks may be taken for a great man,” Suncatcher said. “But I will not put two young lives in danger again. It will be forgiven.”
And she came to the entryway of the house and stood outside, to watch our litter-building.
It was while she was standing there, leaning on a walking stick we had cut for her, that we heard a shout from the edge of the village, and saw a group of figures coming toward us. We all stood there staring. They were the first living men we had seen for a long time.
There were three of them, and they came from the village by the river. Two of them Leaping Turtle and I recognized instantly, because they had been so good in the games played at a gathering of the villages last summer. The gap since then seemed like a lifetime.
Suncatcher knew all of them.
“Hunting Dog,” she said as they came hurrying toward us. “Wolfchaser. One Who Waits.”
This last one was an older man in a deerskin cloak, with ceremonial red stripes on his cheek and forehead. He took Suncatcher’s hands.
“I give thanks that you live, my sister,” he said. Then he looked at us, and to my surprise he knew our names. “And Little Hawk, and Leaping Turtle.”
“We give thanks too,” said Suncatcher. She had discarded her stick and was standing as straight as she could, her voice strong. “We are all that is left of our village. All else is eaten by the white man’s plague.”
Now that I looked at One Who Waits, I remembered his face. My father knew him; he had eaten in our house. He was still gazing at us with an odd, haunted look. He shook his head, and there was a silence. Then he said, very low, “Too many of our young have died.”
The plague came to their village as to ours, they told us. It ran fast through the youngest boys and girls, and killed many others too. The elders decided that the surviving families should move away from what had become a place of death—even though this was their winter home, even though the building of new dwellings would be much more difficult in the cold and snow.
So they had done that, and were still resettling themselves in a valley not far away. And they had been trying to find out how far this dreadful plague had spread through the nation. Of the five villages who would have been able to see the signals they sent into the sky, only two had sent an answer.
Leaping Turtle said, “We didn’t know whether you had seen our signal. We were afraid it was too late.”
Wolfchaser said, “We saw, and we came. And there is one person from your village who is now in ours, and will be very glad to see you.”
“Who? Who is it?”
He smiled a little. “Soon you will see,” he said.
And although they had come a long day’s journey, they set to work to help us finish the litter for Suncatcher—which, they said diplomatically, was an excellent piece of design but could perhaps be a little stronger. Suncatcher went into the house to make food for us all, One Who Waits went with her to exchange more news, and the two younger men pulled out their tomahawks and went in search of more saplings. By the time night fell, we had a litter sturdy enough to carry a large bear.
There were not really enough skins and blankets for six people on the sleeping platforms that night, but the fire burned warm and I kept it fed. And Suncatcher fed all of us with stew and cornpone as if she were welcoming a normal visit from neighbors, in normal times. I remembered that night for long afterwards, as if it were a glowing bright star in a very dark sky.
At daybreak, we left our village forever. We were so busy packing bundles of anything that could be useful, and making the litter comfortable for Suncatcher, that we had no time to say a proper good-bye. But as we walked away through the trodden snow in our small procession, Wolfchaser and Hunting Dog carrying the litter, Leaping Turtle, One Who Waits, and I laden with bundles and baskets, I heard my grandmother’s brave voice in the cold morning air. She was singing a chant of mourning, for the people and the place that we were leaving behind.
We walked all day, with one pause only, and just as the light began to fade we came to the new village that these valiant people had built, and were still building. There were perhaps twenty houses, and more partly finished, made in the usual way, with saplings set in a circle or oval and their heads lashed together in arches. The shingles that covered them had been brought from the old village. No new snow had fallen here since their building started, so the houses were dark hummocks in the white world, with strands of smoke rising from their roofs.
One Who Waits called out, loudly, and one by one people began to emerge from the houses, happy that their trackers had come back again. Some of them shouted a glad greeting as they recognized Suncatcher. I trudged over the snow with my bundles in a daze of fatigue and relief, and at first I didn’t notice the figure of a girl running from one of the houses toward us. She ran fast, faster than all the others, heading straight for me, and I broke my stride and dropped my bundles just in time to catch her as she ran into my arms, laughing and weeping both at the same time.
It was my little sister, Quickbird.
NINE
We were sitting round the fire in the biggest house of the village, which was long and had two fire pits. It had been the first one to be put up when they moved, to give shelter to as many as possible during the rebuilding. Quickbird was sitting between our grandmother and me, very close; I think she would have been sitting on Suncatcher’s lap if it had been sturdier. They had each thought the other one was dead.
“I don’t understand why Morning Star let you believe that,” Quickbird said to her.
Suncatcher said, “Morning Star was a wise man.” But she didn’t explain precisely what she meant by this.
My sister, like me, had had to grow up very fast. First she had watched our parents and the baby die, helpless to do anything to save them. Then, when Suncatcher sent her to join our sister Southern in the women’s house, hoping this might keep her from the disease, the plague went there too. And Southern too had died, with Quickbird in anguish at not being able to help her.
But the Great Spirit had not let the plague touch Quickbird. Though she nursed others in the women’s house, she never fell ill. In the panic that overtook the village as more and more people died, she had been able to help Morning Star in his desperate attempts to aid the sick. Soon she had become too busy to run back to Suncatcher for herbs and advice, as she had often at first—and then there had come the day when Morning Star told Quickbird that her grandmother had died.
“And he said, ‘This is enough. If you stay here you too will die, and I will not permit that. You must go at once to the village on the river. Your uncle Strong Bear will take you. The gods are angry with our people here, but not with all our nation. You are young and you must live for the rest of us, for your family and for the future.’ ”
Quickbird’s voice faded for a moment, and she swallowed and tried again.
“So I said, ‘What about my brother?’ And he said, ‘When Little Hawk returns from his journey, I will send him to you.’ And then our uncle took me out on the trail, and Morning Star told grandmother that I had died.”
Suncatcher said gently, “It was half a lie. He said he was the last one left, when he told me he was dying. His only full untruth was to you, and that was done to save your life—because you would not have left if you thought I was alive.”
Quickbird nodded. For the moment, she couldn’t talk anymore.
I said, “What happened to Strong Bear?”
One Who Waits was sitting on the other side of the fire. The lines on his face were darker in the light from the dancing flames.
He said, “Strong Bear was strong
indeed. He knew we were making a new village free of plague, and he brought your sister here. He gave her into my care, and then he told her he had to go and do one more thing—‘I may be some time,’ he said. We found his body in the woods ten days later. I think he could feel the plague beginning in him, and he would not bring it here.”
Our uncle Strong Bear was our mother’s brother, the son of Suncatcher. She must have been very proud of him. She said nothing, but nodded her head slowly.
Wolfchaser nodded his head too, but differently. He was a strong young warrior with a tall scalp lock, one of the sons of One Who Waits. He said, “The gods were angry with Strong Bear, as with some of our people and so many of yours. Now let us pray that their anger is satisfied.”
“In all the time of our people there has been no such great anger shown,” Suncatcher said. She was a strong person, my grandmother; here as at home, people listened to her. “No. I believe this is a plague brought to us by the white men. It comes only when they have been near—and it brings death only to us, not to them.”
Wolfchaser hesitated. He was reluctant to contradict an elder, but he said, “Perhaps the gods are not angry with the white man.”
“Hah!” said One Who Waits. “Not angry with the white man who comes in a ship and kills our people?”
I had heard this story, before I went on my solitary winter journey. South of here, not far from the Pokanoket village of Sowams, where our great sachem Yellow Feather lived, a trader from across the sea had invited a number of our people aboard his ship and suddenly, for no reason, had killed them all.
Wolfchaser hesitated again, because this was his father. “You yourself have traded with a white man,” he said mildly.
One Who Waits said, “I will buy his knife for ten beaver skins, but I will not therefore trust him.”
I wished I were older and could have joined this talk; he was describing exactly what my father had done. But my father had never said anything to me about his opinion of white men, and I had never seen one. All I knew was that after my father had taken that knife, he also took the plague, and died.
* * *
We heard more talk about the white men in the weeks and months after this. But it was a busy time, full of hard work. The village elders, who all knew Suncatcher well, had already taken in Quickbird as if she were one of their own. They had also embraced our friend Spring Frog, who, luckily for him, had ended his winter ordeal at their village instead of ours. We had hoped for word of White Oak, but there was none.
Now the village had adopted Leaping Turtle and me in the same way. We helped with the long hard business of rebuilding more than thirty houses in the new place, half a day’s distance from the old village that their medicine man felt had been cursed by the plague. We set traps, too, to bring extra food to the house of One Who Waits, where we were living—though we were careful beforehand to find out which places were not already trapped. The land and all that it supports belong to all men equally, but this was a matter of good manners.
Wolfchaser approved of us, I thought, and the others respected his opinion. I also thought he might have warm feelings for Quickbird, since although he was a tough young man, he was oddly awkward when he was talking to her. Quickbird didn’t seem to notice this; after all, she was still very young. In spite of everything that had happened she was often the same bright cheeky person she always had been, making fun of Leaping Turtle and me if she thought we were behaving too much like know-it-all big brothers. Wolfchaser too had a big brother, Swift Deer, but Swift Deer lived in his own house with his wife and two daughters. He was a fierce person, and I sometimes wondered how he had behaved to Wolfchaser when they were boys.
The outside shingles of all the houses in the new village that had been brought from the old houses were great heavy sections of bark from elm or oak or chestnut trees. In winter, the bark on all the trees is too hard to be taken, so we leave our brothers the trees in their cold sleep. But by the second moon of the year, the Snow Moon, even though the air is still cold and the snow still covering the ground, the trees are beginning to wake, and the sap is starting its long journey up from the roots into the branches and the twigs.
So when the big beautiful white moon shone full over the village, Leaping Turtle and I carefully sharpened our axes. We took turns, stroking each blade against a precious sharpener flint we had borrowed from One Who Waits.
Quickbird gazed at my axe, and at the rippled wooden shaft that enclosed it.
“Tell the story,” she said.
I looked at Suncatcher, and she nodded her head.
So I told One Who Waits about my father binding his grandfather’s axe head into the cleft of a young tree, so that it would grow for ten years and create an axe for Little Hawk. Fortunate Little Hawk.
One Who Waits took the axe and touched its shaft gently, reverently, with the tips of his fingers.
“There is time in this axe,” he said. “It is like our people. Whatever may happen, it will carry the past into the future. Some day, Little Hawk, your Manitou will bring you peace by returning your axe to one of the trees from which it came.”
“But not yet,” I said, rather nervously.
“Oh no,” said One Who Waits. “For now, it is your father’s gift to your life.” He touched the edge of the blade. “Aiee! And sharp!”
So we gave him back his sharpener stone, with our thanks, and the next day, with help from Wolfchaser and his friends, we set off into the woods to cut bark shingles for a brand new house in which Quickbird, Suncatcher, Leaping Turtle, and I would live. Spring Frog was living with the family who had taken him in when he first came; he was as close to them as if he were a son of their own.
We had already made the frame that would be the bones of our new house, by setting a circle of tall young saplings into the thawing ground and lashing all their tops together for a strong curved roof. Now we would give it its outside shell, to protect us from the weather as a clamshell protects a clam.
And when that house was finished, one week later, it marked the start of a new part of our lives. Suncatcher, Quickbird, Leaping Turtle, and I were a part of this village now, one family among thirty-two others, all of us linked by suffering and survival. Though we didn’t share the blood ties of most of the others, we had been drawn into the community not only by One Who Waits, who was their sachem, but by everyone.
Even fierce Swift Deer, who by nature mistrusted all strangers, had accepted us. When he came by one day to thank Leaping Turtle for mending a toy for his younger daughter, he was even heard calling him “little brother.” In all parts of our nation that had been hit by the plague, these same changes must have been happening.
The days were growing longer; we had passed the Snow Moon, and though the snow still lay on the ground, it was softer. It had gone altogether from most of the trees, who were waking slowly from their winter sleep. Soon the sap would be rising in their woody veins, and Suncatcher had already sent us out for twigs—slippery elm and sumac—that she would hollow into pipes for tapping the maple trees.
Whenever I could hardly bear the ache of missing my mother and father and all the rest, the ways of this new village were a comfort because they were just the same as the old. As the snow began to melt, all the men left for a deer drive, since the long winter had used up nearly all the food put into store in the autumn. Two other villages—the only two near us to have survived the plague—sent hunters too. The older men said sorrowfully that this year’s hunt would be very small compared to the past, when more than a hundred would take part, but Leaping Turtle and I were excited. This was a ritual for men, not boys, and for the first time in our lives we were to go too.
Small or large, a deer drive was a complicated matter, and took a long time. Out in the woods, we dug holes and planted a long line of logs as if they were trees, weaving brush between them so that they were like a fence. Then a long way away, perhaps five hundred paces, another line was planted to come very gradually closer to the f
irst, so that they formed an enormous arrowhead shape with a gap at the tip. Then it was time for more than half the men to go and hunt down a herd of deer, and drive them into the arrowhead, where they would be an easy target for the waiting bows.
The hunters had been gone overnight; it was almost dawn, the favorite feeding time for deer. Leaping Turtle and I were told to wait by the fence, with Wolfchaser, Swift Deer, and a dozen others. We were as tense as our bowstrings, straining for a sound of running feet.
“Aim for the neck, remember,” Wolfchaser said. “And don’t waste your time following a wounded deer, sooner or later he will lie down. Track, not chase.”
We were waiting beside the gap in the arrowhead fence, clutching our bows. For the third time, Leaping Turtle reached round to loosen the arrows in his quiver. Watching him, Wolfchaser smiled.
“At my first deer run I kept doing that,” he said, “and my father reached over and took all my arrows away. He gave me back three of them, and he said, ‘If you aim well, this is all you need.’ ”
Leaping Turtle looked embarrassed, and I tried to rescue him.
“Your father is not here?” I said to Wolfchaser.
Wolfchaser’s smile faded.
“He has gone to Sowams,” he said. “Yellow Feather has called together all the sachems, because many white men have come in a big boat—not just traders, but whole families. Yellow Feather is not happy, he would like them to go away.”
“Whole families?”
“Men, women, children,” Wolfchaser said.
I had never thought of the white man, the sailing trader from far away, as having a family—let alone bringing them to our land to live.
Leaping Turtle said, “Where are they?”
Swift Deer had heard our talk; he turned to join it, and his face was grim. He said, “They landed on Nauset territory, where the plague has struck the villages even harder than here. They dug up the winter corn store in an empty village and they stole it. Then they trod through a sacred burying ground, and they dug up a grave and stole the grave offerings. The Nausets shot arrows at them, so they went back to their boat—and now they have moved to our land.”