When all the work was done John hesitated with his burden of meat. “I want to visit Bertram Hobert,” he said to Suckahanna.

“What for?”

“I saw him while we were hunting. He is hungry and he is sick. His feet are falling off him. He was my friend. I should like to take him some meat.”

She looked at him with a long, worried gaze. “You cannot go looking like this,” she said. “He will shoot you the moment he sees you.”

“I shall leave a gift of meat on his doorstep,” John said. “That was done for me once, and it saved my life. I should like to do the same.”

“You ate yourself sick,” she observed. “Take care you don’t kill him by accident.”

John chuckled. “He has a wife to care for him,” he said. “Or at least he did have. He is my friend, Suckahanna.”

The look she turned to him was more powerful than tender. “He cannot be your friend now,” she said. “You are a Powhatan.”

“He can,” John argued. “If a Powhatan could not be the friend of a white man then I would have died in the woods and I would never have been called Eagle by one of the finest hunters in the People.”

“That was then,” she said gently. “The river gets wider every day. The distance between one shore and the other is greater all the time. You cannot cross and recross, my husband.”

He put his hand out to her and barely touched her fingertips. As soon as she felt his touch her eyes flickered closed for just a moment at the pleasure of the warmth of his hand. John knew that he had won.

“Shall I wait for you?” she asked in quite a different tone, as low as a sleepy honey bee in winter.

“Go with the People,” he replied. “I will catch you up before you reach the village.”

She nodded and picked up her burden of dried meat, and set off. John watched her rangy, long stride until the trees hid her, then he turned and set off at a hunting jog downriver to Hobert’s plantation.

John slowed as he recognized the features of Hobert’s boundaries, a pine tree where they had slashed a crude “H,” a magnificent oak, bending over the path and shading it with its spreading branches, and then he saw the shingled roof of the Hobert house and a thin spiral of smoke coming from the chimney. John stepped back into the shade of the trees and hunkered down on his heels to watch.

He saw a man bent low under a burden of wood come out of the trees and fling down the cord by the door and straighten up with a sigh. A black man: Francis the Negro slave. He saw the door open and it was Mrs. Hobert, speaking sharply and then going indoors. He waited a little longer as it grew cold and the light started to drain from the sky. Bertram must be out late with his gun. John did not move even though the hairs on his arms and his chest stood up, and his skin prickled with goose bumps against the cold. Only when it was nearly dark did he decide that Bertram must already be indoors. He rose to his feet and went silently down the hill to the little house nestling on a piece of flat ground before the river.

He hesitated at the door and then put his eye to the crack to peer into the firelit interior. It was a sparsely furnished room. A table before the fire; two stools and a hewed tree stump served as chairs. A box bed built into the wall was occupied by a man, his shoulder hunched against the room, his head tucked down. A ladder at the back of the room led to a sleeping platform, a string and a piece of sacking serving as a curtain between the two. John thought of the spic-and-span London house that the Hoberts had left for this venture and felt his heart ache for them, and surprisingly for himself too: another exile in this strange and remote land.

He tapped on the door and called out at the same time: “A friend, John Tradescant.” His own name was awkward in his mouth.

Despite the reassurance he heard a little scream from Mrs. Hobert and heard a stool overturn as Francis leaped to his feet.

“Who?” she demanded.

“John Tradescant, your shipmate and neighbor,” he repeated.

“We thought you were dead!” The door opened cautiously and Mrs. Hobert’s white face peered out.

John kept back in the shadows. “I was with the Powhatan,” he said.

“Savages?”

He bit back a retort. “Yes. So I look strange…”

She stepped a little farther out, female curiosity driving her onward. “Like a savage?”

“Don’t be afraid,” John said and came toward the light.

She clapped her hand over her mouth at the sight of him but her eyes widened with terror. “Is it really you?”

“I swear it,” John said. “Just dressed as a Powhatan.”

“You poor, poor man,” she said and took hold of his hand and drew him indoors. “Good God preserve us all from such a fate. How did you get away from them?”

“I was not captured,” John said. He nodded at Francis, who stood frozen in horror at the sight of him.

“It is me,” John repeated.

Francis nodded, gave a little bow in reply and restored a wood-chopping ax to its place behind the door.

“Sit down, sit down,” Sarah begged him. “Your hair! and – dear God – they have even stained your skin to their color!”

“That’s bear grease,” John said. “It keeps off insects in summer and keeps out the cold in winter.”

“God preserve us! How did you get away?” Then her constant terror of the savage men struck her and she shot a frightened look at the thin wooden door. “Are they after you?”

“No, no,” John reassured her. “They let me go freely.”

“Are you hungry?” The anxious glance she threw at the cookpot suggested that there was not much to be had, even if he was.

“I have eaten,” John said steadily. “But I brought you some meat. We killed an elk.”

“Meat?” She choked as the saliva rushed into her throat. “You have meat?”

John reached for the bundle strapped into the small of his back. “Here,” he said. “It’s smoked; but you could seethe it in a little water.”

She fell upon it and tossed it into the cookpot as it stood by the hearthside. John, remembering his sickness from food heated and reheated in the same pot, winced a little. But she was already stirring in water from a pitcher, and greedily tasting. “Bertram, Bertram!”

The shoulder in the bed shrugged still higher, and then the man rolled over on his back and glared into the room.

“We have meat!” she said triumphantly. “Can you sit up while I spoon you some broth?”

“Meat?” Hobert’s voice was a rough croak.

“Neighbor Tradescant has brought us some steaks from an elk,” she said. “He has been living with the savages but has got away from them now, praise God.”

Hobert heaved himself up to one arm. His face was marked with pain. In the little room John could smell the flesh of his snow-rotted feet and the stench of unwashed blankets.

“John Tradescant?” he asked wonderingly. “Is that really you?”

John went to the bedside and took the man’s hand. “I have been living with the Powhatan and I dress like them and hunt with them,” he said. “They treat me as a friend. I saw you in the woods the other day, and I thought you might be in need. I have brought you some meat and I can bring you more. They have medicines as well which would make you well. I would have come sooner if I had known you were in need, Bertram.”

The man’s red-rimmed eyes wandered over John’s face. “A savage,” he said, bewildered.

“I am indeed John Tradescant,” John said. “But I could not live alone in the forest. Thank God I fell among the Powhatan and they have treated me kindly.”

Sarah Hobert came to her husband’s bedside with a delicate pot filled with gravy. John recognized at once the work of the People: the perfectly smooth walls of one of their dainty black pots.

“That’s Powhatan made,” he said.

She gave him a swift disapproving glance. “We used to trade with them, but they became too demanding and dishonest,” she said. “Now my husband will not have them near his land.” She turned to the wreck of the man in the bed. “Will you taste, Bertram?”