New York - The Novel

but six feet long, so that it would go more than twice round his waist. On a background of white shells were some little geometric figures picked out in purple. The girl pointed to them proudly.
    “Do you know what it says?” she asked.
    “I don’t,” he confessed.
    “It says”—she ran her finger along it—“‘Father of Pale Feather.’” She smiled. “Will you wear it?”
    “Always,” he promised.
    “That is good.” She watched happily as he put it on. Then they sat together for a long time, watching the sun as it slowly grew red and sank over the forests across the river.
    In the morning, when he was leaving, he promised that he would come in to see her again on his return.

    Dirk van Dyck’s journey that summer was a pleasant one. The weather was fine. On the western bank stretched the vast, forested regions that were still controlled by the Algonquin-speaking tribes like his daughter’s people. He passed creeks he knew well. And he traveled, as he liked to say, as the guest of the river. That mighty tidal flow from the ocean could send its pulse up Hudson’s River for a hundred and fifty miles, all the way to Fort Orange. In summer, even the salt seawater came upstream nearly sixty miles. So, for the most part, he let the current take him in a leisurely fashion toward his destination up in Mohawk territory.
    Many people feared the Mohawks. The Indians who dwelt in the regions around Manhattan all spoke Algonquin, but the powerful tribes like the Mohawks who controlled the vast tracts of land to the north of them spoke Iroquois. And the Iroquois Mohawks had no love for the Algonquin. It was forty years, now, since they had started to press down upon them. They raided the Algonquin and took tribute. But despite the Mohawks’ fearsome reputation, the attitude of the Dutch had been simple and pragmatic.
    “If the Mohawks raid the Algonquin, so much the better. With luck,that’ll mean the Algonquin are too busy fighting the Mohawks to give trouble to us.” The Dutch had even sold guns to the Mohawks.
    In van Dyck’s view, this policy had some risk. The northern outposts of New Netherland, up at Fort Orange and Schenectady, lay in Mohawk territory. Sometimes the Mohawks up there gave trouble. It was just such trouble that had called Stuyvesant up to Fort Orange the other day. Little as he liked Stuyvesant, van Dyck had no doubt that the tough old governor would cope with the Mohawks. They might be warlike, but they’d negotiate, because it was in their self-interest.
    As for himself, van Dyck wasn’t afraid of the Mohawks. He spoke Iroquois and he knew their ways. In any case, he wasn’t going as far as Fort Orange, but to a trading post on a small river about a day to the south of the fort. In his own experience, whatever was passing in the world, traders were always welcome. He’d go into the wilderness and sell the Mohawks adulterated brandy, and return with a fine cargo of pelts.
    “Put your trust in trade,” he liked to say. “Kingdoms may rise and fall, but trade goes on forever.”
    It was a pity, of course, that he needed to trade with the Mohawks. For he liked his daughter’s Algonquin people better. But what could you do? The White Man’s eagerness for pelts and the Indians’ eagerness to supply them had wiped out so many of the beavers in the lower reaches of Hudson’s River that the Algonquin hadn’t enough to sell. Even the Mohawks had to raid up into the territory of the Huron, still further to the north, to satisfy the White Man’s endless demands. But the Mohawks supplied. That was the point. So they were his main trading partners now.
    His journey took ten days. Venturing into the interior, he encountered no trouble. The Mohawk trading post, unlike most Algonquin villages, was a permanent affair with a stout palisade around it. The Mohawks there were tough and brisk, but they accepted his brandy. “Though it would have been better,” they told him, “if you had brought guns.” He returned with one of the largest loads of pelts he had ever brought downriver. Yet despite the valuable cargo he now carried, he was still in no hurry to return to Manhattan. He considered ways of delaying, a day here, a day there.
    He intended to keep Margaretha waiting.
    Not too long. He’d calculated carefully. She had set a deadline, so he was going to break it. He’d tell her of course that the business had taken longer than anticipated. She’d suspect he was lying, but what