Had she given up? Stone Girl asked herself. Well, she had, she reckoned, after Never Laugh died. While the white woman lived it was not too hard to think that perhaps she, Stone Girl, was white also. But once the white woman had been put in the ground, her words had gone into the ground, too. Besides, her grandfather, Machilek, had reminded her who she was.

“You must not believe what Never Laugh tells you,” he had said. “She is white. She has never been made one of us. She is too old to be adopted. She is tied by dead vines to white ways. She can understand nothing of the red people. But you are different. You are young and have become our daughter and granddaughter. You understand us. You speak our words and breathe our air. You are one of us. You are Lenni Lenape, the original people.”

Then it was a fierce joy for Stone Girl to think and know she was Indian.

“I am Lenni Lenape, too,” the blue-eyed son of Munache the Badger told her. “I will never go back to the Yengwe devils. And no one can make me.”

But back he went in the hands of his father and uncles to the white captain, and Stone Girl felt the blood in her veins run slow. What would happen to her and her child, Otter Boy, now?

“Is my life to go from here?” she asked Espan, her husband. “And that of your son and likeness?”

“Do not let such in your head,” he answered. “Never will I give you and Otter Boy to the white captain.”

“Then I stay?” Stone Girl said, and a great joy seized her, for Espan was a man of honor and long experience against the white man.

“You will stay,” he agreed. “But first you must go from the village. My friend Smashed Head is one of the Shawanose where the sun sets in summer and is not bound by the white captain. I will ask him and his wife to keep you and Otter Boy. When the white captain leaves, I will bring you back to my cabin. But of this you must breathe to no one.”

“I will not breathe,” she promised, but in her heart fresh despair seized her. So she was to be taken away after all? What difference did it make to be dragged toward the setting or the rising sun? Either way she and her child would be torn from Espan and her home village.

IT WAS DEEP in the pit of night when they left the cabin.

“Now tread with a light foot,” Espan instructed her.

She knew what he meant, not the light foot that goes with a light heart. No, even with a heavy heart and the burden of her child on her back, her foot must crack no stick on the ground. None in the village dare hear them go and say that Espan had disobeyed orders of the white captain. She must simply disappear. Then if the white soldiers came looking for her and Otter Boy, all that anyone in the village could tell was that one day Stone Girl and her small son were here and the next day the earth had swallowed them up.