“Sister,” Simone said, “I am glad you told me not to give Allamuin, the scalp yell. The Great Spirit would not like me to frighten the Guka, mother.”

Stone Girl did not blame her. She was a Guka, mamma, herself. She could feel Nichenos, friendship, in this house. Peace lay under it. Peace lay above it. Peace surrounded it. Awaking next morning, it was the same. Birds sang. The sky arched overhead. Grass greened. Cows grazed. A horse stuck his slow head out of the stable door. Fruit trees waited with their fruit. The stream ran. The water wheel turned. The mill hummed. Farmers came bringing sacks of grain on their horses’ backs. The farmers sat and talked with the snowy dust faintly sifting over them. Otter Boy loved it in the mill, going down gravely with Simone’s father and sitting still as a mouse in the chair he was lifted in, his black eyes darting at the moving belts and wooden wheels and cogs, his coal-black hair whitening in the floury rain.

It was a hard day when they left but Père Le Clercq was impatient. He had the gold now that Simone’s father had paid for her return. The sun shone warm and yet it was like a day of Elmowank, winter, to Stone Girl. Otter Boy did not want to go. The two girls stared at each other.

“How will we breathe parted from each other?” Simone cried.

“I will carry you in my thinking,” Stone Girl said, hardening herself.

Simone’s mother gave her good-bye with sad eyes.

“I would not let you go except for your mother waiting,” she said. “I know how she looks down the path for you.”

From the mill they went back to the river named for the Sankhicani or Gunlock people that the whites called Mohawks. Now they worked their way upstream to a village where a wagon took them over a stumpy road to a lake they had not seen before where men and women from the German settlements were leaving to start a new life in the Quaker province. Stone Girl could understand nothing they said nor the talk of Indians they met along the way. At first logs clogged the stream but creek after creek swelled the small river until they floated easily at last on a broad bosom of water that took them by an old Indian town, then through endless, high, wooded hills and finally rugged mountains.

“Guka, Mamma. The people here must be very bad,” Otter Boy said. “Lennau, look! how the Great Spirit makes the earth hard and rough for them to travel on.”

“Otter Boy. I have heard of this place,” Stone Girl told him. “It is the white people who are bad, not our Indian people.”

Next afternoon another river, broad as their own, joined them from the west and now the river flowed very wide.

“Guka, Mamma. Why do we stop when it is not yet night?” Otter Boy asked.

“Otter Boy. This must be the place,” Stone Girl told him. “Never Laugh said it was where you could not see if a man or woman stood on the other side.”