Girl in a Buckskin

swiftly. “Great stone mountain. Fisher’s nest.”
    All morning Becky worked with doubts hammering at her thoughts. When the sun had reached the top of the sky one of the young boys came running across the meadows and the silent village suddenly came to life. ” Nboo-or-ne-poo, ” cried the boy, and Becky heard a great sobbing wail from the women at the campfire.
    “What is it?” she cried. “Where is Dawn-of-the-sky?”
    “ Nboo-or-ne-poo. She is dead,” the young man cried fiercely.
    Becky shrank from him in horror. There was the wailing and the hot sun and the beginning of nausea in her. When the wailing abruptly ceased she looked up from her crouching position and saw the men returning across the hill in single file. At the head of the procession walked Black Eagle carrying Dawn-of-the-sky’s broken body in his arms, and now Becky understood: Dawn-of-the-sky had gone to the stone mountain and flung herself down into the abyss.
    “Our sister is dead,” Black Eagle said as he reached the fire and held out her body. “Her spirit died many moons ago but today we will paint our faces white, for her body has gone to the Great Spirit.”
    Across the fire his eyes met Becky’s and as they burned into hers she read in his glance that she was no longer wanted here, that white men had done this to his village and Little Doe’s skin was white.
    Now there was nothing left—nothing at all, and the nothingness filled Becky’s heart until it was like a stone from which no more tears could be wrung. With a bowed head she stumbled away from the fire, and going into Dawn-of-the-sky’s lodge for the last time she gathered together her few belongings and prepared to go back alone to Shoonkeekmoonkeek.
     

Chapter Nineteen
     
     
     
    THE ICE HAD MELTED ON SHOONKEEKMOONKEEK AND Becky stood a moment listening to the marvelous sound of water gently lapping the shore. It was music after the harsh snowbound winter. A quick little breeze from the west sent ripples scudding across the cold blue water out by the island and the clearness of the air outlined every tree on the distant mountains. But the lake was at high water. Melting snow had flooded the inlet and diminished the shore line so that Becky was forced back to the woods around the lake.
    The cave looked different to her as she walked toward it through the shallows with her moccasins slung over her shoulder. She had tidied it up before leaving for Wnahtakook but she had not lived in it since the wintry night of the war party and it was strange to see it without snow. It looked foreign to her, so that she could scarcely believe she had spent the autumn and winter in it. Crawling inside she found it clammy with cold. Water dripped from the ceiling and earth had fallen across the tunnel dug into the rear. As she stood there looking around a water snake slithered away into the shadows. A few weeks’ absence was a long time in the wilderness.
    Black Eagle had given her a small iron kettle. She possessed a knife, Eseck’s musket and the buckskins she stood in. Nothing more. They had left their mark here, it was true: the blackened stones on the beach, the drying frames rotting near the mouth of the cave, the dugout that had floated away with the rising of the water, the trench Eseck had dug for the cut-log cabin. But she had little stomach for living here, for Eseck had vanished, Dawn-of-the-sky was dead and O’Hara gone.
    The truth of the matter was that she was feeling almighty sorry for herself. “When I’ve just what I came here with,” she reminded herself. ” I’m still here, am I not, and did I ever expect to be anything but a solitary, a woodsy, a thornback?”
    Straightening her shoulders she went to work. Turning her back on the cave she built a rough lean-to on the beach and spread hemlock boughs over the pebbles. Then taking up her bow and arrows she went out to scout around. When she came home it was dark but she had meat again and from a tall tree on the top of Honwee she had glanced across the valley and found it placid except for the fine thread of smoke rising from Wnahtakook twenty miles away.
    She ate the meat half raw and curling up in the lean-to fell asleep, too exhausted to be cold. When dawn awoke her she set out to recover the dugout, wading the shallows of the lake until she found it caught in a tangle of floating tree limbs on the west shore. Stripping branches from a fallen tree she made a rough paddle and pushed the dugout to the