Girl in a Buckskin

with rage and disappointment.
    But her tears had strengthened her and now she could look back to the pitiable creature of the afternoon and think of her with scorn. “You should have flung yourself at the wolves with the frenzy you felt,” she scoffed. “What a poor, sad, weak thing you’ve become, Rebecca Pumroy. If you are to stay here you will have to do better than this.”
    And so she sat and stared into a cup of bitter goldenrod tea and took stock of her plight, putting aside the hope that tomorrow’s dawn might bring Eseck home, putting aside even the thought of Eseck. She would not go back to the Leggetts, of that she was certain. Better to become a solitary, a woodsy, risking queemess, than that. She might go west over the mountains into the Dutch country, but a woman without a man or a family would be stoned from the streets of any town. With luck she might instead find some lonely outpost farm where kindly folk would take her in with no questions asked, but she had little hankering to end her days fetching and carrying for someone else and hiding from every stranger who passed by.
    Or there was Wnahtakook. Eseck had said that if ever an accident befell him she must go to Wnahtakook and Black Eagle would take her in, but although she yearned to see women again and Dawn-of-the-sky in particular some inner part of her warned against it. For to be taken in by the Mahicans was to become truly their daughter. Little Doe, and if the weeks stretched into months she might one day find herself tying an embroidered band about her forehead, or dressing her hair with grease. And speaking naught but their language, her heart crying out with loneliness, might she not one day take a man among them and move into his lodge?
    It was unthinkable, so here she must remain. And wait— for Eseck would come back, he had come back before and she would not believe he was dead.
    “Tomorrow I will go hunting,“ she told herself with resolve. “I will leave the cave far behind me and hunt meat like a man, for if I am to live out my days in the wilderness I must have the courage of a man.”
    And putting away her noggin she lay down again on her pallet and slept her first deep sleep since Eseck had disappeared.
     
    Late in the day Becky moved cautiously in behind the trees and stopped. There were a dozen deer yarding in front of her under the birches. They had trampled away the snow to expose the patches of dried brown grass on which they were feeding, but one of them, a young doe, had wandered off from the group and was sniffing curiously at a fallen, snow-covered log. Becky knelt in the snow and notched an arrow to her bow.
    The arrow flew through the air and sank into the doe just below the ribs. With one startled, reproachful glance at Becky the doe leaped gracefully away into the woods, scattering drops of blood as it ran. Becky picked up her bow and followed. The silence of the wintry woods was so distinct that far ahead she could hear the deer as it floundered heedlessly through the brush. She hoped it would tire soon, for she was starving, and the thought of carrying the meat home was not an easy one.
    The sound of thrashing diminished and Becky quickened her pace. When she reached it the doe had just died and the warmth of its blood had made little hollows in the snow. Leaning over it Becky whispered, “Forgive me but I am very hungry and I, too, am Little Doe and kill only to live.” Taking out her hunting knife she began to skin the deer when she was suddenly arrested by a sound she had heard only twice before in the valley of the Housatunnick.
    It was the crisp ping of a gunshot.
    Becky leaped up and looked wildly around. It couldn’t have been a musket, she told herself, for none of the Indians had guns or powder but as she waited, listening, the familiar and terrifying echo came to her ears as the hills picked up the sound and flung it up and down the valley.
    Eseck, she wondered breathlessly? She looked down at her trembling hands and at the hunting knife that had fallen into the snow, and remembering the wolves she forced herself to pick up the knife and go back to work. Swiftly she cut away the choicest parts of the meat, wrapped them in oiled skins and leaving the rest in the snow set out to follow the noise of the gunshot. Because if it were Eseck he was in trouble, and if it were not Eseck then she was in trouble, and might just as well meet it in the open than to be trapped like a rabbit in her cave