Girl in a Buckskin

He was gone, at any rate, this huge young man with the soft blue eyes—aye, and she would remember him with kindness, not begrudging him his laugh at her. But a woodsy she would not be. Straightening her thin shoulders she tied up the Book and walked back to the dugout. No longer would she eat with her fingers or wear breeches like a man. Nor would she live in either cave or lean-to another winter. Eseck had dug her a trench for a fine cabin of cut logs. She would build the rest herself.
     

Chapter Twenty
     
     
     
    THREE MOONS PASSED QUICKLY. THE SUN GREW WARMER as it climbed the sky and the trees wore green again. Moss spread over the hill and wild strawberries gleamed scarlet in the woods. There was rain and there was sun but it was spring and then summer and the earth was friendly again. Deer came down to the lake to drink, and the birds chattered noisily at dawn and wild turkey flew over the lake. Becky put away the thought of Eseck and Blue Feather and O’Hara and worked as she had never worked before. She cut trees in the woods and dragged them to the shore where she stripped them of leaves and branches and notched their trunks one atop the other in the clearing around the trench. She mortared the logs with clay from the inlet and sharpened and resharpened the clumsy axe she had made. She cut birch shingles for the roof and laid them across the top and when the cabin was snug as a nest she cut new trees, driving herself hard, and made a puncheon floor. She grew hard and lean but no longer was there the trench Eseck had dug to mock her past dreams: there was a cabin, with window and door and the luxury of a wooden floor. This was one dream she had made come true.
    And there was another dream now, too, for with a cabin of cut logs she was no longer a wild thing but a settler, a staid woman with land, and in the summer when she had Indian corn growing up and down the hill she would be a farmer. With the stone of her hatchet and the iron of her muscle she would beat back the woods and if the French Indians came to kill her it did not matter; someday other white men would come to the shores of the lake and would see the cabin and know that a settler had lived here, not a woodsy.
    The day she finished the cabin she marked off a full year on her birchbark calendar: July 3, 1704, and finding herself without meat she took down her bow and arrows from the mantel and went off to kill herself a deer.
    She tracked her deer a long way north so that it was not until dusk that she returned with a quarter of the animal slung across her shoulder. She was thinking how fine it was to come back to a cabin that smelled inside of new wood. She had the musket with her that she would hang over the mantel, and before she climbed to the tiny loft to sleep she would sit a while before the fire and drink a cup of raspberry-leaf tea and listen to the crickets sing. It was a good thought, and she reached the top of the hill before she sensed any danger. Even then the warning was no more than a faint prickling of her scalp as she caught her breath at the summit. A queer thing, this sixth sense that told her someone else was in the valley. She stopped, sniffing the air as she had once seen Eseck do, not understanding then why he did it. The wind was from the west, dusk had come early and there was a great silence in the valley as if the birds and animals held their breath with her. Becky lowered her burden to the ground, hiding it in a clump of blackberry bushes, and taking care not to make a sound she crawled over the top of the hill and peered through the tall grass down the slope.
    The cabin looked quiet enough. She had covered the birch shingles with hemlock so that the roof would not catch the sun, and squinting she could just make out the darker clump that was home to her. No smoke rose from the chimney but she knew the coals would be red when she returned. Her glance moved to the horizon but there was no smoke there, either, and the lake was dull silver without shadow or movement.
    Then Becky heard a faint sound from the slope and she stiffened. It was an animal sound but strange to her ears: no animal of the forest made such noises and she realized with a start that down near the cabin a horse had blown out his breath, as if impatient at being tethered so long. Becky narrowed her eyes thoughtfully. There was cover aplenty on the hill, and the light was in her favor. By rights she should turn about and run back to the forest but