“He has only lost his way. He will find it again,” Simone promised.

But Stone Girl knew that Espan was no white man to get turned around in the woods. He would never foolishly think the sun rose in the west and set in the east. Besides, he was the one to do things quickly as when he had taken her and Otter Boy away from the white captain. One afternoon he had told her and that same night they had gone. No, something must have happened to him, something Machit, ugly. Before the first snow Père Le Clercq brought the gloomy tidings. The priest had been down to baptize and say mass at the village of the Northward Indians. They had told him that Smashed Head had been there asking about Stone Girl. Smashed Head told the trader with gold lace that Espan had gone on a war party against the Long Knives and had never come back. Three from his village had fallen. He did not remember the names of the others but the first to fall had been Espan.

SO ESPAN, her husband, was no more. The strong heart that had beat so steadily had stopped and his Tschipey, spirit, gone to Awossajame, the Joyous Hunting Land, the Place That Is Beyond Our Sight. Madame Corbusier and Père Le Clercq said it was up in le ciel, the sky. Stone Girl thought that a strange place for forests and rivers and jumping deer. On the other hand, she admitted that more than once she had seen blue mountains and pearly lakes in the sky as well as the shapes of fish and beasts and turtles, along with other stranger creatures whose names she did not know. And everyone knew that ducks and geese flew into the sky until they disappeared from view.

Stone Girl remembered that Machilek, her grandfather, had told her the Joyous Hunting Land lay to the south and west. He said an old friend of his, Hear Smoke, had once seen it. This was in the time of famine. Hear Smoke had gone unusually far hunting Achto, the deer, and had come to where the earth meets the sky. The two were tightly fitted together, he said, as leggings on a leg, but he found a place where a boulder had split under the sky’s weight and he could crawl through. Lying there with his feet in this life and his head in the next, he could smell the game, could see the deer leap and hear the pheasant drum. He itched to crawl all the way through and get a deer to bring home but feared that then he himself would become a Tschipey, ghost, and never be able to return. Besides, he said, the deer of the Joyous Hunting Ground were too big and fat to be dragged back through the small hole in which he lay.

Oh, Stone Girl had no misgivings about the good things in the Place Beyond Our Sight. It was the bad in this world that troubled her, that Espan had lost his life far from home in the country of the Long Knives. Had he been scalped, she wondered, and forced to go to the Joyous Hunting Ground without his hair? Had the Long Knives buried him suitably with rocks on his grave to keep away the wolves and wolverines? And had they left his gun, knife, and tomahawk for him to hunt with in the new land?