“This is our brother. He has proved himself in the hunt and he is the husband of Suckahanna. Tomorrow we receive him into the People, and his name shall be Eagle.”

There was a roar of approval and applause and people crowded around John. John had to fight his way through smiling faces and slapping hands to get to Suckahanna and fold her in his arms. She clung to him and lifted her face to his. As their lips met he felt a sudden jolt of passion, a feeling he had forgotten for many years, and a deep hunger for more of her; more, as if a kiss alone would not satisfy him, could never satisfy him, as if nothing would ever be enough but to fold her into his heart and keep her beside him for always.

Suckahanna moved her face from his and reluctantly John released her. She rested her head on his shoulder and his senses shifted again to take in the touch of her slight body tucked beneath his arm, the way her long legs matched his side, the scent of her hair, the warmth of her naked skin against his cool damp chest.

The people were cheering them, linking their names together.

“Why do they call you Eagle?” she asked, turning her head up to look into his face.

He caught sight of Attone, waiting for his answer. “It is private,” he said with assumed coldness. “Something for us braves.”

Attone grinned.

John could not sleep with Suckahanna that night, though she moved from Attone’s house to stay the night with Musses. Attone himself carried her deerskin, her baskets and her pots to Musses’s hut and kissed her tenderly on the forehead as he left her there.

“Does he not mind?” John asked, watching this affectionate farewell.

Suckahanna shot him a quick, mischievous smile. “Only a little,” she said.

“I should mind,” John observed.

“He married me because he was advised to do so,” she explained. “And then he had to keep me, and my mother, and we brought no dowry, no bride price at all. So he could never afford to take another wife, if he should like another woman. He was stuck with only one: me. And now everything has changed for him. He is a bachelor again, you will have to pay him for me, he will like that, and he can look about him and choose a girl he really wants this time.”

“How much will I have to pay?” John asked.

“Maybe a lot,” she warned him. “Maybe one of your guns that you left at your house.”

“Are they still there?” John asked incredulously. “I would have thought that everything had been stolen.”

She nodded serenely. “Everything has been stolen. But if it is to be Attone’s gun I think you will find that it will be returned.”

“I should like my guns returned to me,” John observed.

She laughed. “I should think you would. When you are adopted tomorrow, when you are one of the People, then no man or woman or child will steal from you ever again, not even if they are starving. But they took your goods when you were a rich white man, and now your goods are gone.”

She looked at his half-convinced expression.

“What would you want with them? What would you do with them here, when everything that a man wants can be got with a bow and arrow, a spear, a hoeing stick, a knife or a fish trap?”

John thought for a moment and realized that his goods were part of the life he had left behind, part of his old life, better lost and forgotten than standing in the corner of his new Indian house reminding him of the man he had been, of the life he might have lived.

“Very well,” he said. “If he can get them back he can have them.”

John was woken just before dawn by Attone’s hand on his shoulder. “Awake, Eagle,” the man whispered. “Come and wash.”

They were early, only the men were moving like gray shadows down the village street. It was still dark, only a line of pale gray like a smudge of limewash above the dark of the forest trees showed that dawn was coming.

Tradescant waded into the river beside Attone and followed every move that he made. First the careful washing of the face: eyes, mouth, nostrils, and ears. Then the meticulous washing of armpits, and crotch, and then finally a deep immersion in icy water, while rubbing chest, back, thighs, calves, and feet. Attone emerged blowing water and flinging back his long hair.

He waded for the shore, John followed him. There was a little fire built on the pebble beach and a handful of the tiny Indian tobacco leaves piled beside it. Attone took up an abalone shell, took up a leaf, lit it at one of the glowing embers, and, blowing on the spark, walked back into the river with the burning leaf outstretched and the abalone shell cupped beneath it to catch the sacred ash. He faced toward the sun and murmured the prayer. John copied him exactly, and got very close to the prayer as well, invoking the sun to rise, the deer to eat well and be happy, the rain to come, the plants to grow, Okee the cruel god to withhold his anger, and the People to tread lightly on the earth and to keep the love of their mother. Then he scattered the ash and embers on the water and turned his face to the shore. John followed suit.

Waiting there was Suckahanna, her face grave. When John went to his clothes, the hand-me-down buckskin he had been given on his arrival at the village, she shook her head wordlessly and held out for him a new buckskin clout made of soft new leather, and a little buckskin apron exquisitely embroidered.

John smiled at her, remembering the little girl she had been when she had first showed him the Indian clothes and how reluctant he had been to part with his breeches. She crinkled her eyes at him but she did not smile with her lips, nor speak. It was a moment too solemn for speech.

John stepped forward and let her dress him as she wished, and then let her and Musses paint him with the red bear-grease ointment so that his skin was as dark as theirs in the graying light of the dawn.

From the village they could hear the roll of drums and then a steady, insistent beat.

“It is time,” said Attone. “Come, Eagle. It is your time.”

John turned, expecting to see Attone laughing at the name, but the brave’s gaze was steady and his face was grave. There was not even a smile in his look.

“My time?” John asked uneasily.

Suckahanna turned and led the way back to the village, but when they approached the dancing circle she fell back and joined the crowd of women who were waiting at one side. They linked arms around her so she was at the center of a circle of women with arms interlinked, like a country dancer in the middle of the ring.

John found himself surrounded by braves, his friends of yesterday. But none of them greeted him with a smile. Their faces were unmoving, as hard as if carved from seasoned wood. John looked from one to another. They no longer seemed like friends; they seemed like enemies.

The door to the werowance’s hut was drawn back and the old man came out. He was terrifyingly dressed in a costume completely made of bird feathers, sewed so skillfully that John could see no seams and no cloth. He looked like a man transformed into a dark, glossy bird and he stalked on his long legs with the arrogant pace of an ill-tempered heron. Behind him came the two other elders, wearing black capes that gleamed with beads of jet. They chinked as they walked, they were laden with amulets and necklaces of copper and abalone shells.

At a gesture from the werowance’s richly carved spear two young men came awkwardly from his house, carrying something low and square between them. For a moment John thought they had brought a mounting block, a post, or a pedestal for the werowance to stand on and address the people, but then he saw that the center of it was hollowed to take a man’s chin, and the wood on either side had been sharply cut with an ax. With a sensation of dull horror John recognized what it was. He had been on Tower Hill often enough, he knew an executioner’s block when he saw one.