Girl in a Buckskin

Northampton and Springfield. And here, bounded by the mountains, is where no one has settled and few have gone.”
    “Why?”
    Eseck shrugged. “The mountains. The dispute over who owns it. The Indian wars.”
    “But we are going there.”
    Eseck pushed his foot over the map to obliterate it, and then sprinkled pine needles around until there was no trace of the map. “Yes,” he said, “we are going there.”
    The manner in which he said this freed something inside of Becky. The long years of saying “yes, ma’am” and “no, sir” had shrunken her spirit until it was as feeble and hopeless as a small candle flame in a brutal rain. But watching her brother draw his map, hearing him describe the valley to which they were going, she realized that at last she was beholden to no one. She was no longer Rebecca Pum-roy, town pauper, but Rebecca Pumroy, mistress of her own life. And thinking this her spirit expanded with a rush, like a fire given air to feed upon, and she felt for a curious moment as boundless and free as all outdoors.
    “I need no rest,” she said crisply. “If we are going, then we had best be gone.”
     

Chapter Five
     
     
     
    BLUE FEATHER HAD BEEN CHASING A MOOSE IN THE MOUNTAINS all day when he drifted by chance into the valley. He was young but already a warrior and a hunter, and he had been thinking all day of the meat he would bring home and of the muk-sens he would cut and shape from the hide of the moose. He was thinking of these things when ahead of him through the leafy green forest he heard the sound of movement.
    Deep in his throat Blue Feather made a happy guttural noise, and stringing an arrow to his bow he moved noiselessly in a wide half circle so that the wind would not speak to the animal and tell him a human was near. Blue Feather’s movements were sure and fast, yet he disturbed not so much as a leaf on the trees he passed. It must be a very large moose, he thought, listening to the thrashing sounds; he must have come to the valley following some fresh scent or perhaps, like Blue Feather, he desired to look around, being tired of the hills and curious as to what lay below.
    As Blue Feather crept stealthily nearer, the thrashing sounds abruptly ceased. Had the moose caught his scent, after all? But the animal was downwind. He listened for some smaller noises, the sound of earth being trampled, the whisper of boughs whipping back into shape. But there was nothing. Puzzled, Blue Feather unstrung his arrow and returning it to the quiver on his shoulder he nimbly climbed the nearest tree. Not until he was high in its branches did he pause to look, and what he saw astonished him.
    There was a small clearing nearby, and lying on a bed of hemlock branches were two men, one fully grown, the other young, with the soft face of a girl. It was the sound of the hemlock branches he had heard. But what made Blue Feather’s heart beat fast was the sight of their faces. These men were white men.
    Blue Feather had seen only a few Long Knives before, a Dutch trader who occasionally crossed the mountains to trade knives and beads for skin, and once in a while a trapper who wandered into the valley. Many of his people had known the white man well, among them his father, when they had lived beyond the hills in The Place of Many Council Fires on the Mahicanittuck. But that was before his tribe had been squeezed out of the valley by the fierce Iroquois and the white men. Of the two, the Iroquois were the worse, his father told him. The white man carried presents and wanted only land. The Iroquois wanted blood.
    Blue Feather gazed at these palefaces in amazement for he had never before seen one beardless. The hair of the taller man was almost white, the color of moonlight when the moon is full. The hair of the younger was a dark yellow like the color of certain stones he had found in the shallows of the lake. He had thought without beards their skin would be white as snow; in this he was disappointed but their hair more than made up for the disappointment and excited him strangely. It was a pity, he was thinking, that his people had so few warriors else they might risk the white people’s wrath to the east and take these scalps. Such hair would be the envy of everyone.
    Then he began to wonder what these palefaces were doing here in the valley of the Housatunnick. Did it perhaps mean there would be others following? Wherever white men came there was trouble, his people said, and remembering