Girl in a Buckskin

speak of it now, when Indian scalps Indian, his own blood brother?”
    Eseck looked at her, his face drawn with exhaustion. “He was not killed by Indians, Becky. You want to hear the truth, then sit and hear the rest of it. He was shot and scalped by white men. By white men, Becky.”
    “You lie,” she gasped.
    “I do not lie. I tell you how it was.”
    “But how could they have made such a stupid— senseless—horrible mistake!”
    Eseck shook his head. “It was not a mistake.”
    She stared at him astonished. “Eseck, you must be mad!”
    “This is the way it is now,” he told her savagely. “Those fine, bewigged gentlemen in Boston have passed a new act. They pay bounty now on the scalp of any Indian, man, woman or child. Twenty pounds they pay.” He raised his terrible eyes and looked at her. “Do you think for twenty pounds a scalp a man seeks first to find whether he kills a friendly Indian or not?”
    Becky shrank from him in horror. “Eseck—”
    “Redfoot can tell you,” he said. “The woods up north are full of bounty hunters—but four of them came south and the one who killed Blue Feather had a black beard and a tomahawk with strange figures carved on it. He shot Blue Feather in the back as he was kneeling to drink from a stream. Then he scalped him—for twenty pounds, he said. Well, at least it is more bounty than a wolf fetches,” he said with a curl of his lip.
    Becky sat stunned. It was madness, all madness. Surely in a moment she would wake up to find the world sane again. Then she thought of Dawn-of-the-sky and pressed her fists against her eyes. “He will not see his baby,” she said in a shattered voice.
    “Or his wife. Or hunt again in the forest. Or come to exclaim over my musket. But then the Indian has no soul,” Eseck said bitterly, and with burning eyes strode from the cave.
     
    It was after this that Eseck began to change. Cabin fever, Becky told herself fiercely, and begged him to go out hunting, but if he went out he soon returned, saying carelessly that he could find no tracks today. Then he would sit by the fire, his eyes shuttered so that Becky could not guess what he thought or what pictures he saw in the fire. One day when he left the cave to look at his snares, Becky followed and found him down beyond the south shore where the lake narrowed into a stream. This was where the Indians buried their dead, piling stones over their graves so the wolves would not touch them, and here Eseck stood with his head bowed. Seeing him there so alone among the dead Becky went away, wondering if one of the cairns marked Blue Feather’s grave, for Indians always brought their dead home with them.
    On other days Eseck carved bone tips for his arrows and painstakingly sharpened their knives, but even this he could not do for long. He would get up and stride around the cave and sometimes Becky would feel him watching her. There seemed to be no rest for his thoughts and they drove his body hard.
    Then one day Eseck awoke early and it was as if the fever had left him and he was sane again. She saw him blow up the fire and tear off pieces of cold venison to eat and when she sat up on her pallet his eyes were sure and knowing again. “Today I go out,” he said softly.
    “I am glad,” she said.
    She watched him dress in his thawed-out buckskins and pour nookick into a pouch, propping the musket against the chimney as he always did when he went hunting. She gave him hot tea and he drank it quickly while he strapped on his snowshoes. When he went to the door he turned and looked at her and his eyes softened. He stood there, straight and slender as a sapling, his gray eyes level, a shock of bleached yellow hair showing from under the fur hood, and there was nothing about this parting to tell Becky it was different from any other.
    “Take care, little sister,” he said.
    She nodded. “You, too, Eseck.”
    He paused only to lean over and tighten his snowshoes and then he walked away without glancing back. Following him to the door Becky watched him for a long time and when he had disappeared from sight she thought of him threading his way through the silent white forest, as much a part of it as the trees. When she grew cold she went into the cave and began shaping corn meal into loaves for his return that night.
    But Eseck never came back.
     

Chapter Fourteen
     
     
     
    ALL THE WAY TO WNAHTAKOOK THE WOLF STALKED Becky, squatting on his haunches when she turned to look at him,