Greta didn’t want to go to Sir William’s Indian Trading Store that morning, but she never did, and I always won my way with her. It was a routine visit to the grey-plank building tucked away in the oak and beech woodlot on the bank of the big creek, just downhill from Sir William’s estate. I had brought in some of my fancy-carved ladles for trade. The shilling I received for them from Isaac, the white-haired Mohawk storekeeper, went deep in my pocket. “Popular item,” he’d said to me. “I’ll take all you can make.”

​

The sale boosted my confidence. I reasoned with Greta that as long as we were there, we ought to have a peek at the treasure trove of guns, trinkets and household contrivances stocking the earthy place. Reason prevailed. She was hurrying me—I aren’t at my comfort in here, Annabel—when Onawatsta’s killer blocked the sunlight in the doorway.

​

Besides Isaac, me and Greta, there were two others in the store. The craggy-faced Indian men dressed in colonial clothes sat in straight-back chairs by the iron stove in the middle of the clutter. The day was fresh, for August. We all turned our heads to the hefty silhouette. Hands on the doorjambs, the man clipped harsh words in the native tongue.

 

The men came forward in their chairs. Isaac, standing behind the front board on which my whittled ladles were arranged as a wooden bouquet in a red-ware pot, said, “Come in, sit.”

​

The Goliath shouted angry Mohawk words.

​

Isaac put his hands flat on the board. “What business have you with him?” he asked.

​

“My business,” he replied, putting an end to questions.

​

“Do not do anything rash,” one man at the stove said.

​

“Give him your ear,” the other added, “not the hatchet.”

​

Goliath pulled away from the advice, his arms dropping to his sides. “My ear? I give him this day the final thing he shall ever have of me, or anyone else.”

​

One of the men at the stove spoke to him in Mohawk. He responded with a quick nod, turned about and disappeared. Isaac sat down on his stool. The men sighed. “Should we follow?” one asked.

​

The other shrugged, and sipped. “To what end?”

​

“These young men will be the death of us.”

​

“They forget the words that come before all else.”

​

“Good Peter will shake his memory.”

​

I grabbed Greta’s sleeve and pulled. “Come along, Gretles … farewell, Isaac!”

​

I bounded out the door to follow the excitement, the sense of satisfaction at seeing another on the verge of loosing control humming through me. Looking all around, I caught sight of the striding man. “There!” I pointed through the towering trees. “Let’s go.”

​

I put my trouser-clad legs in hasty motion and had to tug skirted Greta to get her started. “No, Annabel—” she resisted, “I aren’t in the least way of wanting—”

​

“We’re going. Come along.”

​

Greta Crouse was my best friend, a dewy and beautiful spring blossom, and as predictable, too, in her delicateness. She had burnished auburn hair, melting hazel eyes, spidery eyelashes dusting milky cheeks, and a red rosebud mouth, usually in a dainty pout. I often felt like a snub-nosed, freckle-faced, yellow-haired misfit next to her, but exceeded her in bravery and good sense. Greta loved me, her hardy wildflower sister. We butted heads as regular as rain, but always began anew. I never had to try with her.

​

I picked up my speed, keeping Goliath on the warpath within my sights. Greta shrieked in panic and caught up. We tripped the big creek bank in the cool shade of the bordering forest. “Why s’ever are we following that Injun?” she whined.

​

I dithered over upsetting her with the truth, but my father taught me honesty. Honest man, that—was the highest compliment he could pay. I was his only child and the receiver of all his esteem and attentions. He was my hero. I’d often sit with my boot up on the bench against the woodshed wall and watch his manly physique heave the axe to the timber with force, and think he was the strongest man in the world.

​

“He’s going to knock a head,” I told Greta, “and I want to see it.”

​

I ran, ducking low branches and hurdling roots and rocks and escaping her complaint. Our moving target cut into the woods, and so did we, diving into the leafy green ocean. Where we lived, on the borderlands, farmers leaning on hoes and townsfolk pulling at lace cuffs often decried the woods a dark and dangerous realm. They saw trees as things to be cut down. But the greenwood gave me safety, and plenty of light, as it stood. It was my place.

​

I ran, in the underbrush. Greta struggled and straggled. I stopped, panting, and turned about. “Make haste,” I hissed to her in a loud whisper. I glanced back, over my shoulder, then turned right around. He was gone.

​

Greta came to me, her face pained, her knuckles curled to a stitch in her side. “This is tortuous,” she murmured.

​

She couldn’t run to save her life. “Torture’s nought but a fancy of your mind, Gretles.”

​

“Then why do my knees hurt?” she asked, lifting the hems of her short skirts in blue cloth.

​

I looked. They were red and raw; scuffed. “You fell?” She nodded. “Don’t think on it. Let’s go.” 

 

For her own good, I had to make her tough. We were twelve years of age that summer, and time was running out. I waved her on, leading her towards the pleasant gurgle of coursing water. We came out of the woods at a bend in a six-foot-wide, cobbled stream. Shafts of sunlight put a shine on the leaves all around, giving them a quality of heaven. I picked up a lichen-covered branch and handled it like a spear. Greta peered up from her eggshell hands and said, “And you can just leave my hinder-end be.”

​

I gave her a smirk. She was recalling an incident that had transpired at the apple cider milling of the previous autumn. It was our job to scrape out pulpy wads of crushed apples that clogged the grinding cylinders from time to time, with pointy branches. Wielding mine as a hero’s bayonet, I thrust, never imagining my blade point would puncture Greta’s skirt, and her soft flesh, too. She yowled as if mortally wounded. Blood spotted her fundament. I couldn’t help it, I laughed. She was so funny-looking. “Why must you inflict pain!” she screamed.

​

But I’d never intended to inflict pain. Now, nearly a year later, she still hadn’t the grace to forgive me for my regretful but playful mistake. “Your arse is safe,” I said, wondering why she must persist in picking on me.

​

I shoved the sturdy branch under a big waterside rock and flipped it over. Muddy water swirled into the crater. With it, tadpoles were sucked into the pool. I crouched down. Once the silt settled, I scooped up a few of the little swimmers. They flopped about in my hands, helpless. I sensed their panic. The all-embracing instinct to survive amazed me.

​

Greta hunkered down beside me. “Put them things back where they belong.”

​

They were mine. “Since when are you such a tender heart?”

​

“You’ll ruin them.”

​

Ruin was Greta’s favourite word. She said “ruin” more than a Presbyterian preacher. “Ruin’s tolerable.”

​

“Hope they bite you.”

​

“With what?”

​

“Then I hope they poop on you.”

​

​I grinned, with twofold purpose. Greta said the word poop and the tadpoles in my hands wanted their life as much as I wanted mine, but they were powerless against the likes of me. “I would do anything,” I vowed in a hushed oath, “lie, cheat, steal, battle giants, eat pa’s kale soup—anything—to keep my breath.”

​

“Then why s’ever are you robbing them of theirs?”

​

I glanced at Greta, surprised she’d heard me. “I aren’t—”

​

“Annabel, one of them’s dying!”

​

Of the three tiny polliwogs in my cupped hands, one had ceased moving. I flung the lot back into their watery element, as if they had bit me. Two immediately thrashed their tails, but one floated like a thick curled eyelash upon the surface. We were silent, watching it do nothing, then I sighed, “Only the good die young.”

​

That’s what my father had said when a boy in town had succumbed to the pox. “Whom the gods love, dies young,” Pa recited like a sorrowed poet. “The best go first.”

​

It made perfect sense to me. Bad folks should outlive the good. They had more brains. It took a canniness to be underhanded, as well as to survive. The two went hand-in-hand. Plotting and scheming and ducking trouble were demanded in both cases. Being good was simple, but it could get you killed.

​

The urge to move tugged at me. Coursing waters lead and where they lead, we must follow. It’s like praying, only you get to run. This especially gladdened Maeve, my wulver. She was the Scottish wolf who lived inside of me that not even Greta knew about. I always knew Maeve was there, since I was small, but did not know what she was until my father told me fables about the wulvers who once stalked the greenwood fringing the loch, in his native glen. Like Maeve, they too were friendly, until riled up. Then Maeve would protect me. But she was most agreeable in the unbounded wilds of nature, where my imagination was allowed out of its cage and freely roamed, which meant Maeve could roam, too. Freedom is a balm.

​

We skipped and walked. Ten minutes later, the flowing waters cascaded, all white and frothy, down into a narrow passage cutting its way between steep rocky ridges furred by tall pines. We paused on a bull-sized boulder at the gully’s mouth and listened to the water’s call. “I aren’t going down there, Annabel,” Greta said. She never did understand the language of the woods. “Looks a bad way to go. Looks dangerous. That water’ll suck you right under.”

​

Whether a thing was good or bad only depended on whether you liked it or not. I liked the rushing water, and it liked me. Every jubilant spray it kicked up as it struck a boulder trying to slow it down was a friendly splashing hand waving encouragement at me to forge forward.

​

And danger ought not be avoided. I trusted the water to give me no more danger than I needed, and it trusted me to not be afraid. “Only if you fall in,” I replied. “Keep to them logs, see?” I pointed to the decaying tree trunks collecting moss and mist all along the streambank, a thin strip of land at the bottom of the steep ridge. “Step your feet lively, keeping a move on. Thinking on it too much trips you up. Keep to mind, speedy bird gets the worm.”

​

“Worms is for corpses,” she muttered.

​

“Dawdle here much longer—” she was a hard case, “that will be you.”

​

“Annabel! I aren’t dressed for this!”

​

“Beyond my ken why you must dress like a girl—”

​

“Because I am a girl!”

​

“Woods don’t care.”

​

“And so are you.”

​

I knew I was a girl. But if the world knew, they’d put me in a girl’s place. The love of freedom was planted in my breast as well as it was in any boy’s. If I wanted to freely roam, shameless and unafraid, in the utter wildness besieging our frontier home, then like a boy I had to run. “Tell me a thing I don’t ken,” I returned, sarcastically.

​

“You look like a ploughboy.”

​

My brown linen trousers were fairly clean. Greta exaggerated. Brushing away a little dirt, I smirked, “Honest work.”

​

“Time to take your place in civilized society, Annabel.” She didn’t dare meet my eye. “Put on skirts, and all—take a maid’s place.”

​

“I ken my place.” The water rushed away without me. “Aren’t in skirts.”

​

I jounced down a staircase of tumbled boulders that led to the moss-saddled logs accumulated in a jumble, streamside. Toe-heeling them, I spread my wings wide and raced the current, tasting the wind, exhilarated by speed and space and air. I ignored Greta.

​

Through the passageway, the stream spilled into a fragrant spruce forest. On an ancient trail overgrown with chicory, goldenrod and wild carrot, my mood lightened. I forgave Greta and we talked about nothing important. The water’s roar became a murmur at our backs.

​

The woods opened to a hidden clearing, an acreage of bent grasses and scattered berry bushes, an eye-popping find. Tall spruce forest walled it in on three sides and a sheer grey cliff rose up on our right, like a forbidding fortress. The cliff-face had crumbled in one spot, leaving a wide but shallow gouge. The fallen rock formed a hill of broken stone that filled the gouge to within ten feet of the treed cliff-top. A flat-topped hillock of no great height, made beautiful by lime-green, sweet woodruff, swept away from the base of the hill of stones. Its pyramidal shape suggested it was a man-made earthwork, and put me in an awe. “Injun place of the dead,” I murmured. “Mound builders.”

​

Greta, hunching her shoulders, scratching her elbows, grimaced. “Burying ground?”

​

Nodding, hushed, I entered the clearing as if walking into a spruce-walled church. My gaze was drawn up to the stone altar. I couldn’t believe my eyes. “Greta.”

​

“What?”

​

“Look.”

​

At the peak of the broken stone, a man-made pole was impaled. From it, the face of the dead stared out. A human skull kept watch; a fitting sentry, able to see on both sides of the veil. “He’s the guardian,” I said. “Protects the grounds from trespassers, pilferers and fools.”

​

“He never kept us at bay.”

​

“We aren’t out of the woods yet.”

​

“Don’t I know it,” she muttered, then flounced down in the sweet woodruff and examined her scuffed knees. “It’s the living Injuns what alarms me, Annabel, not the dead,” she said. “Aren’t no such thing as Injun ghosts. They have not got souls. That’s the stuff of ghosts. When Injuns die, they perish like the beasts, and rot upon the Earth.”

​

Greta’s folks were good people but rigid Christians. They did not mix with the heathens, so she was ignorant. She knew Indians about as well as she knew rhinoceroses. Rawley, our farmhand, and my parents befriended them, and they even called at our home. Many had in fact turned Christian so they’d be considered fully-fledged persons by exacting white folks, and also they enjoyed singing in church. “They go to Sky World,” I said, “—the Injun heaven.”

​

“Na, there’s only the one, the Christian heaven.”

​

“And they has so got souls.”

​

“No they don’t. They’re barely human.”

​

I searched for signs of humanness in the skull. The expressive flesh was gone, but his toothy grin was real and wide. “Looks like he’s laughing,” I said.

​

She snorted, unkindly. “Last laugh were on him.”

​

I moved towards the tumbled stones. “Where you going?” she asked.

​

“See the skull.”

​

“Don’t touch it. Might hex you, turn you into a girl.”

​

She was making fun of me. The urge to touch the skull came on even stronger. I advanced, refusing to be stopped by the stone keeper looming over me, trying to scare me, refusing to bow to me, defiantly insisting—I will endure.

​

I understood, and met his challenging stare with one of my own, just as defiant and enduring. I was issue of the Camerons of Lochiel, a worthy descendant of a long proud line of heroic ancestors whose valiant deeds were told to me in lyric tales of yore. My father had laid my heritage before me; I had to be tough, no matter how I might feel inside. “Camerons dinna suffer any affront,” he’d say to me, speaking a tradition. Then he’d wink at me in the collusive way he did with his Highland friends.

​

I put my hands on the rocks. Greta squawked, “Why you intent on going up there?”

​

“So he has another face to look at!”

​

And I had to face him. Highlanders closed in on their opponents.

​

The jagged rocks abraded my hands but up I trail-blazed to the pinnacle, arriving chuffed and damp with sweat, knees awkwardly bent and a sharp rock pressing into my belly. Bearing my discomforts bravely, I pushed back my wide-brimmed hat to hang by its ties and met the huge spectral eyes with a smirk. “Surprise,” I said.

​

My father told me the fairies in Scotland were kept happy with offerings. Following suit, to stay on the good side of the local ghosts, I cleaned the skull of cobwebs, beginning with my finger in the nose hole. “Ever seen a white person afore?” I asked. Like a good sentinel, he did not blink. “Plenty in these here parts, nowadays, more so than Injuns.” I giggled, catching hilarity from his wide, toothy, unabashed grin. “I come in peace,” I uttered with mock gravity.

​

I used my sleeve to rub dust off the bony ridges. “Dutch, German, Irish, English, Scotch, all here, and one Frencher family, name of Crosset, in town. My pa’s Scotch, but don’t call him that. That’s a Sassenach word. He’s Albannach, a Highlander. They go hand in hand with you Injuns. Made of the same clay, so pa says. Our battle cries sounds the same, too, no fooling. I heard plenty of that wild hollering from men in their cups.”

​

A final polishing of his stern brow, and he shone, nearly like brand new. Sure I had curried favour, I smiled. “No, no—no need to thank me. I promise you, it was my great pleasure.” I gave him a look of pity. “Rotten thing they done to you,” I said. The Mohawks believed that without hands the dead were denied entrance to Sky World, since they could not grasp the sky. “Beyond my ken why we must depart this place, anywise, and go someplace strange. None should have to quit their home.”

​

Looking back, after all these years, I marvel at that child’s innocence, a thing unseen until it was lost, a part of the much steeper price paid for reconciliation.

​

I turned about and parked my rear on a flat slab. Hands between my knees, I beheld the immensity of the sheltering forest and the blue sky above capping all in an overarching wonder. The perfumed air was as soft and warm and quiet as a mother’s love.

​

To this day, the fruity scent of spruce conjures that precious moment in time and that little girl who still believed in goodness—me—in the last summer of her childhood. Ten long years would pass before I lived peacefully in my soul again.

​

In the next moment, the crackle of snapping branches disturbed the peace. A Mohawk man in ribbon shirt and trousers, frantic as a hunted beast, bolted out of the trees. He zigzagged on the field, unsure which way to go, then came at us.

​

My heart quickened. Greta popped up and let out a blood-curdling scream as though Satan himself was coming to get her, though the man was clearly more tormented than tormenting. She stumbled and skittered, anxious to reach the rock pile. I shifted my gaze between her and the desperate man, and estimated she would make it. “Run, Greta! Run!”

​

Picking her way up the rocks, hand on her hat, she sobbed, “My scalp! I just knew savages would distress us out here.”

​

The man tripped, then got up and did thrash about rather wildly, knees high in the scrub. A vicious barking echoed in the woods, getting louder and louder, raising the hairs on the back of my neck. A boar-sized black and tan dog bounded out of the forest, paws pounding, and tore like a shot to the chased man. The dog caught him, pouncing and dragging him down close to where Greta had been sulking. I winced, hearing the man’s tortured screams.

​

Greta scrambled up and flopped over on the rocky peak. She furrowed an aggravated brow at me and the skull, as if it was all our fault. “Shouldn’t we help him?” I asked her. She hung her head and panted. “Gretles?” She stilled her panic, one arm about her middle and forehead in her hand. “We should help him, Greta.” I took her all-over body quake as a refusal.

​

Another Mohawk man appeared in the field, and my insides lurched. It was the Goliath hunter, from the store. His tomahawk blade glinted in the sun, blinding me for an instant. He strode towards the fallen man whose leg danced in the mouth of the head-shaking dog, the war hatchet swinging in his hand. “He’s got a hatchet,” I said with urgency, tumbling into the trench behind the peak of broken stone. “Hide!” I pulled on Greta’s skirts, and she fell in.

​

We hunkered down shoulder-to-shoulder, our knees high and backs pressed to the cold cliff face. Greta stuffed her pretty little head between her skirted knees and white-knuckled it, whimpering like a new-born in a trap, fear inhaled with every breath she took. “Annabel, oh Annabel, what should we do? What will we do?”

​

“Fight.”

​

“Fight?”

​

“Shush, Gretles,” I said. “You’ll give us away.”

​

She mewled, god-awful sounds, irritating me and convincing me to never put my life in her hands. “I’ll kill you myself if you don’t shut up,” I hissed at her.

​

I crept forward to spy. Goliath on the warpath paced with menace about his disabled prisoner, then called off his dog. In the Mohawk language, he yelled at the man, who vainly tried to drag himself away, on his elbows. Fallen on his side, he pleaded in his native tongue. I scrunched back down and sent my eyes up and around and thought about our defences.

​

Greta pressed to me. “Annabel, I’m so scared. I have never been this scared.”

​

I huffed, ready to throttle her. I did not understand her fear. If someone made a threat on me, I took it as an insult. That inspired fury, not fear. “If he attacks, throw rocks,” I told her, then glanced at her with worry. “Aim for his head.”

​

I hazarded another glimpse at the crazy Natives and was put somewhat at my ease. The broad-backed assailant sat cross-legged in the grass, his tomahawk across his lap. On the other side of him, the injured man had quit writhing. Slowly, he levered himself up and got on his knees. Pained face to the sky, he began to sing, his strained voice wavering like a melodic, wounded animal.

​

I resumed my seat, behind the rocks. “He’s singing,” I said, consternated.

​

Greta stared hard at me, as if it was all my fault, but did not sound a reply.

​

His forlorn chant went on, and on. Greta and I looked to one another for answers, and I shrugged. Minutes passed. I chewed on my fingernails and fiddled with the frayed end of my bootlace and poked at rocks. Greta clung to me. The man’s emotion continued to echo in the trees and then it heightened in pitch and tone and mounted to such a ferocious intensity it must surely have reached up to heaven. Fists on my mouth, I cringed at its rawness, my skin broken out in enervating goose-bumps.

​

Then, silence. Greta and I exchanged glances, and I went forward. Goliath stood, his back board-straight and hatchet dangling, over the kneeling prisoner, whose head hung low. In the next instant I reeled as Goliath cried out a fierce war whoop and leapt up and brought the axe-head down with swift and deadly force on the man’s bowed head. The skull loudly cracked and blood sprayed and the lifeless man thudded to the ground.

​

A plaintive wailing rose on the breeze, long-dead ancestors keening, ghosts all around me, the trees weeping, the land shuddering, and my blood ran cold. I was paralyzed, wide-eyed with shock, and forgot Greta was there. “He knocked his head,” I murmured to myself.

​

She was up and beside me in the next trice. “It’s him,” she whispered, with fright, then grabbed her head as if to keep it from spinning off. I raised my hand to slap it over her wide-open mouth, but she beat me to the punch and screamed as though she’d been set afire.

​

Our cover was blown. I clapped my eyes on the scene below. Goliath was heading for us in an easy lope, his dripping hawk at hand, his barking, sprinting dog leading the charge. Tree roots as thick as boat ropes hung over our heads about the cliff’s brim, not much beyond our reach. Facing the stone wall, I dropped on a knee and braced myself to it with locked arms. “Stand on my shoulders,” I said, “put your hands on the wall, I’ll stand, walk your hands up, grab those roots.” She didn’t move a hair. “Now!”

​

I had little trouble supporting her weight. My hands followed hers up the wall until my backbone was rigid and her fists full of fibres. I encircled her ankles and stepped back and she screamed as I let go, her swinging boots nearly kicking me in the face. Attached to the roots by her hands, her arms straight, stretched out as if on the rack, she hung, and did nothing else. I pushed on her blue-skirted rump, wanting an apple-pulp stick. “Go!”

​

“How?”

​

“Hand over hand!”

​

“I can’t!”

​

“You must!”

​

I turned about as the wolfish dog placed its massive paws on the foot of the rocky climb. With a shrugged apology and the will to do what needed to be done, I yanked the skull off the stake and whipped it overhead at the dog. It connected, smack dab in the snout. The poor thing yelped and pawed its nose. I pitched rocks, hitting it broadside, and checked on Greta, hanging on the rack. “Pox on it—climb!”

​

“I’m stuck!”

​

“Use your feet!” I grabbed her ankles and planted her soles on the stone. “Walk up!”

​

I turned to my other front. I had kept the dog at bay but its master had arrived. He glowered up at us as though we were the youngster minions of Sawiskera, the Indian evil one, brought to bear upon the Earth. “Quarter!” I called, applying muscle to the pole in the rocks, my rough and ready hands twisting and pulling. “Grant quarter!”

​

“Tell Ury Snell he is next!” he shouted at me, his copper face contorted with hate.

​

I drew back, perplexed. “Who?”

​

“Tell the Great Little Man I will have my vengeance!”

​

“Tell him yourself!”

​

He glared up, inspecting me, and found me wanting. “The white skins are all of one body! Evil! A little girl, the likes of you, protecting that villain, a rat who would turn our people from the good mind. Ury Snell is a—”

​

“Stranger to me!” I shouted, jiggling the wooden pole to save my life.

​

“We let you in our longhouse, cared for you and fed you, until you numbered like the blades of grass. Now you would take our whole house!”

​

At long last, I wrested the pole free and jumped up on top of the stone altar and took the post of the skull, his stake now my spear aimed at he who would dislodge me. “I took nothing!” I hollered.

​

I remembered Greta. Arms up, she was sitting on an invisible chair. “Heave ho!” I ordered, wishing I had gone first. “Or you’ll see your ruin this day!”

​

I turned my attention. Goliath seemed to have simmered down. The hurled skull was in his hands. He rolled it around, studying it from all sides. “The white roots of the Great Pine grow black,” he said, then pierced me with a look of deadly intent.

​

My chest rose and fell. I held my spear steady, my gaze alert, my heart beating, unwilling to be put down, guarding my ground, but I nearly soiled my small clothes when out of the blue he let out a loud yowl and smashed the skull on a jagged rock.

​

His dog rushed to his side. Gently, he stroked the animal’s head, staring at the cranial debris. “The fate of my people,” he said. “Sawiskera’s Islanders pit us, one against the other.” He retrieved a shard of the broken skull and held it up. “This is my people. This is what your people have brought to Turtle Island. Destruction!”

​

I glanced over to the man collapsed in the grass, and his killer caught my meaning. “Onawatsta broke faith,” he said. “He has sung his Death Song. It did not please my ear to hear it, but … we will not bear a traitor. One who sells his mother for rum.” He spoke to the dead man. “Why, Onawatsta? You were my friend, afore the force of liquor cut you at the roots, afore the enemy to our people ripped you from us, and turned you to ruin.”

​

He sat dejected, on a boulder. Petting his dog, he disappeared into his thoughts. I lowered my spear, baffled. “Get me down,” Greta squealed.

​

I cinched her waist and eased her down. She stayed up top while I cautiously descended, my spear at the ready. Nearing, he glanced at me, then tossed his tomahawk outside of his reach. I stuck the tip of my spear to the ground, gripping the shaft with both hands. “I really don’t ken no Ury Snell,” I said.

​

“Consider yourself well off that you do not.”

​

I chewed on my lip. “Not all white folks is the same.” He side-eyed me. “What you was saying, ’bout white skins. We aren’t all of one body.”

​

“Oh?”

​

“My father is a good man.”

​

Feebly, he smiled. “What is your name, little girl?”

​

“Annabel. What’s yours?”

​

“Good Peter.”

​

“What’s your dog’s name?”

​

“Otkon.”

​

“What’s that mean?”

​

“Spirit.”

​

“Good name.”

​

Good Peter scratched Otkon behind the ears, then asked me, “You have a farm?”

​

“Fifty acres.”

​

“Fifty acres…” He squinted, nodding, then breathed in so deeply his nostrils flared. “In our ancient tradition, no-one can own the land. The land is our first mother. You cannot sell your mother.”

​

Na, Mama would never let me do that. Pa wouldn’t allow it either. Twirling my spear, I made myself sociable and remarked, “Good tradition.”

​

“We think it so.” He took a better look at me. “You are a brave girl.”

​

“Thank’ee.”

​

“Who is your father?”

​

“Alexander Cameron.”

​

“Highlandman,” he said, as if that explained my courageous stand.

​

“Aye.”

​

“Your blood came from across the sea, but your father planted you here. Here you will find your treasure, in the land that grew you.”

​

I fixed on the mention of treasure. I enjoyed pirate stories. Following in the footsteps of bonnie Anne Bonny suited me well. “There’s treasure here?” I asked.

​

“Inside you.” My face fell, but Indians were known to speak in riddles. “In your tradition, a woman is made to feel shame. The big book of your people faults her for all the sufferings of humankind, and punishes all women for the transgression.”

​

“You spaking of Eve?”

​

“She who talked to a serpent.”

​

I nodded. “She brought sin and death.”

​

“In our tradition, women bring the good. They bring life and nurture it. Women—” he narrowed his eyes and scanned the embracing forest, “—it is the whole Earth.”

​

“Reckon.”

​

“And the serpent is our grandfather.”

​

“Kin,” I nodded, showing him I understood, though I didn’t.

​

 “Aye. White men have made enemies of them, but we are on good terms.”

​

I smooched my mouth, unclear whether he meant women or snakes. “Good tradition.”

​

“We think it so.” He petted his dog, then met my eye. “This land grew you. You are the holder of the treasure, the cup of ancient wisdom, of this land. Do not be afraid of this power, though your people try to make you ashamed of it. Remember who you are. Be what you might have been.”

​

“All right.”

​

I snuck a head-tip up to Greta, telling her it was time for us to take our leave of Good Peter and his bewildering traditions. She came down. We bade farewell and stepped away.

​

My lack of alarm after witnessing such terrible violence may seem peculiar, but where I lived it wasn’t unusual for one Indian to kill another, especially if they were drunken. It had nothing to do with me, not yet. All the same, Greta and I didn’t utter a word nor lift solemn eyes from the ground until we’d reached the treeline.

 

We peeked at one another. “Annabel, what’s worse?” Greta asked, kicking at the thick layer of spruce needles on the forest floor, releasing its aroma. “Getting killed, or seeing it inflicted upon another?”

​

“Getting killed,” I replied, without hesitation. Her long face told me she was unconvinced. “We just saw murder done, Gretles, and we’re still hale.”

​

“That Injun … he were full-out alive the one second, and dead the next.”

​

“He should have run faster, then.”

​

She sighed, heavy-laden. “He don’t matter no more, I reckon, but … terrible thing. Seeing such a terrible thing could ruin a body for the rest of their natural life.”

​

“Better ruined, than dead.”

​

“Better dead, than ruined.”

​

“Ruin’s tolerable.”

​

“Aren’t tolerable in the least. Every time you think on it, the hatchet cracks into your skull, only it’s the memory of it … total sum might approach to the thousands.”

​

“Then don’t think on it,” I said.

​

If I could go back in time to that innocent little girl—me, before Ury Snell—I’d tell her, I’m sorry. I’d beg for her forgiveness. But you will be all right, Bells. Your treasure awaits. And none of what’s coming killed you.