THAT night deep in the forest Stone Girl thought she heard the faint distant bark of a dog. It could, she told herself, have been Gokhos, the long-eared owl. But yesterday she had glimpsed through the trees what looked like the Small Mountain she and Otter Boy had seen on the way out. Now it was early morning. The wind had turned to the east and before daylight very far away her ears caught the unmistakable crowing of roosters.

It was true then, she told herself, that her journey was almost over. A cruel feeling ran through her. Last time she had heard the Yengwe roosters Otter Boy had heard them with her. Now the bare ground around the stable would not know his small feet again. She would go to her room at night without him. The Great Spirit had given her Nan but had taken away the small valiant one.

It was like a white man’s trade with the Indians, she thought bitterly. The son had been straight and sweet. The small sister was crooked and sour. Perhaps the Great Spirit realized the unfairness and had given her the mother’s gold chain and cross to make up for it. Twice in anger Nan had thrown it away, once violently into Stone Girl’s face and another time, knowing it would distress her, into a muddy run. Stone Girl had gone in after it, combing the stones and mud with her hands until she found it, and this time she had kept it. Around her neck it gave her a strange feeling. It was as if the lady with the yellow hair was telling her to keep it. This was her amulet. It would help her lift her head among the white people, give her favor with them. The lady with the yellow hair herself might even go with it, for she was her Guka, mamma, as well as Nan’s, and when she, Stone Girl, was as small as Nan, she was the white lady’s Nitchan, or beloved child.

She felt grateful for the amulet when she and Nan came out of the forest. Before her lay the barefaced Yengwe land cleared of the forest. When she left, not a human but she and Otter Boy had moved across it. That had been the Month When the Deer Turns Red. Now it was the Month of Roasting Ears. Daily since she left she had dropped a small pebble into her deerskin pouch, a white one while Otter Boy lived and a dark one since he went into the ground. At the last count there had been nearly forty pebbles, and now the white man was back. From the forest came the high-handed sound of Yengwe axes felling the trees and of arrogant Yengwe shouts at horses dragging fresh logs for rebuilding. Hardly had she stepped out of the forest when a Yengwe guard sounded the alarm. Men with guns rushed on them as at the sight of wolves. They recognized neither her nor Nan, would scarcely believe when she told them who they were.