Girl in a Buckskin

nostrils it seemed very familiar, for once he, too, had rubbed his hair with bear fat every day and smoked his body in the sweat lodge after bathing in the creek. As he looked around his eyes picked out the chiefs squatting near the fire. He wondered which might be the medicine chief and which the peace chief but his glance kept returning to the smallest of the men, a very old warrior whose hand rested on what to Becky might have resembled a shepherd’s crook adorned with feathers but which Eseck knew to be a coupstick. A very brave man, he judged, narrowing his eyes to count the eleven feathers on the stick—eleven Iroquois—or might some of his victims be white men? He did not look for scalps; white men valued scalps but Indians found them of little use.
    Taking care not to walk between the fire and the chiefs, lest he be thought without manners, Eseck moved slowly to the spot Blue Feather indicated. “Sit,” he said to Becky, and they both sat down on the tamped earth with their legs crossed under them.
    Nothing was said. A new pipe had been started by one of the sagamores and Eseck watched it move full circle toward him and Becky. When it reached him he accepted it from his neighbor and puffed on it placidly. Not tobacco, he noted; they were not important enough for tobacco, which was the gift of the Great Spirit. This was only dried leaves and bark and he hoped Becky would not gag at the taste.
    “Smoke,” he told his sister, and she took several quick puffs, her hand steady.
    “Good,” he murmured under his breath.
    Now at last the sign talk began. Yes, they had come a long way, they had been walking for three suns. They came in peace, with small gifts. He directed his talk to the old chief and it was this man who answered him. Eseck could see the chiefs were not unimpressed and this head chief talked to him as a friend. Because I speak their language, Eseck thought, and they can see that I talk without greed in my eyes. But now I must be careful, he told himself, and narrowing his eyes told the men why they were here. Powerful white man’s magic had sent them here, he said, to live alone and in peace in the valley of the Housatunnick.
    The Indians began to murmur among themselves at this. He wished he could understand all of their words, but their language was only a cousin of the dialect he knew so well and there were many gaps in his understanding. He gathered there were other families living down river at a place called Skatehook and that these people would have to be brought into council as well. A powwow would mean a wait of several days, he realized, and he did not like it. For himself he did not mind but how Becky would endure it he could not imagine.
    He watched and waited as the men talked among themselves. Their faces were bright with red ochre, with designs of birds and leaves covering their cheeks and foreheads. To Becky, he supposed, they were hideous but he could read the faces under the paint and knew them to be not unfriendly. Nor could he blame them for not wanting white men in their valley. Wherever white men came there was trouble.
    Eseck sighed, because he was a white man. No matter how many years he had been the adopted son of a Wabenaki chief he was still a white man. He could think, sitting here, of how Indians had killed his mother and father and burned the village he’d lived in, but to this he could add other memories, of an Indian village in the north where his brothers, the white men, had left not a single woman or baby unscalped, and the sight of an Indian horribly mutilated and tossed away to die. He could remember, too, how his Indian family had accompanied him on the long walk home from Canada, hunting deer for him and repairing his muk-sens until they reached the first white settlement. He was their son and they would have died for him if the need arose. But it was bad to think of Indians as human when his fellow white men said they had no souls and were demons of the devil. It was bad and it was dangerous.
    He was conscious of Becky’s questioning glance upon him. He said, “They do not want white men here in the valley. They are going to send messages to the rest of the tribe down river and have a powwow about us. We may have to stay here several days.”
    “I don’t want to stay here several days,” Becky told him. Her lip quivered and he wondered if she were going to break.
    “It will be all right,” he assured her quickly, and hoped he spoke the