“It’s the water in the white man’s head. You know, Claire, that water is very soft. If you make marks on water they are soon gone and forgotten. Now the Indian head has no water. It is hard like the bark of a beech tree and marks on it will stay as long as he lives. But the watery head of the white man can’t remember is it time to eat or go hungry or is it time to go to bed or get up, so he makes himself a machine to remember for him.”

“But why does he have it call out to him in the middle of the night when he is asleep and doesn’t need to remember?” Stone Girl asked.

“Who can explain the white man?” Simone said. “He wants to know everything even when he is asleep.”

The Snow Month passed, after that the Month When the Trees Crack with Cold and the Month When the Ground Squirrel Looks Out on the World. It was plain that the snow season was getting old. Tocu, the cold, could be seen creeping out of the ground, and the Season of New Leaves hung ready to drop from the sky. In her mind Stone Girl could see Espan making his moccasins watertight for his journey to find her. When the Month of Many Fish Bones arrived, she felt sure he was on his way.

But the summer passed. Espan did not come and Stone Girl would have gone around like Tschipey, a ghost, if it had not been for Simone. Daily Simone filled her head with other notions including the peculiar sounds of the Plantscheman tongue that went up on the end like the tail of a cat. By fall Stone Girl knew it well enough to listen and understand when Simone was called into the front room. She heard Père Le Clercq tell Simone he had brought Madame Corbusier a letter from a brother priest at the other end of the Great Sweet Water. The brother priest had found Simone’s white father, a miller, in the Dutch province of New York, who had lost her to the Indians. Madame Corbusier was much moved when she told Simone that Père Le Clercq would take her home.

“I have a home here,” Simone protested quickly. “I don’t need another.”

“Hush, child,” Madame Corbusier reproved her. “You must go to your poor parents who have mourned you all these years.”

“I know you, Madame Corbusier,” Simone declared with vigor. “I know Claire and Otter Boy. But I do not know these people you and Père Le Clercq talk about. They are nothing to me.”

“Do not speak such impiety, Simone,” Madame Corbusier admonished. “God in his Holy Writ declares you must honor your father and your mother.”

“You are my mother, Madame Corbusier,” Simone said. “If you chase me out, I must go, but not to this faraway place of the foreign Yengwe who are enemies of the Indian and Plantscheman and where I am a stranger.”