“Daughter,” he told her, “Espan should have waited. I could have given him instructions. Not only the Lenni Lenape but the Shawanose must give up their white sons and daughters. The word has been spoken. Daughter, you are not safe here. If you don’t go back to the Yengwe, I must take you to the Northward Indians. There you can hide under a bush till the storm blows over.”

They left in the morning. The first journey had been hard enough. It had not been easy to sever the green vines that had bound her to the village so long. She had felt herself a bush torn up by the roots and thrown away to wither. But that going away had been preferable to this. Then her husband had journeyed with her. He had led her to the lodge of his friend and when he left had promised soon to return for her. Now she had to journey with a stranger, to be led by him to an unknown land of strangers somewhere at the ends of the earth. What would happen to her and Otter Boy there nobody knew.

That night with her back to the trunk of a huge sycamore and her child in her arms she dreamed that a great white bird flew over her head calling her name. But when she answered and ran out there was nothing but a white mist through dead vines swinging back and forth in the wind like the hair of the ancient scalps they had seen on the way from Mahonink. Next day they came to a shaking asp grove with limbs bare to the sky where she raised a silent voice to Him Who Is Above All.

“Here I go again. I am Stone Girl and this is my son!” she called. “Can you see us being taken away?” But nothing flew over her head but Waapalane, the bald eagle, and there was no answer, except once she thought she heard the great bird scream.

In the afternoon she and Smashed Head reached the Long Path. Turn to the right on it, and she knew it would take her back close to Espan and the home village. Smashed Head turned to the left.

“Nocha, Father,” she asked, “can you tell me where we go now?”

But all he would tell her was that the path led to the Great Sweet Water, adding the names of nations that had tramped it, the Northward Indians, whom the Yengwes called Wyandots and the Plantscheman called Huron, who were the strong friends and allies of the Shawanose although they had no blood ties between them and spoke a different tongue, so that they needed an interpreter together. The Miamis also knew the path, and their cousins, the Picts or Pickwaulines, who lived at Pickawillany on the Sciota, where they called the Lenni Lenape grandfathers and could speak to them without a go-between. Other feet on the path had been those of the Ottawas and Chippeways of the north wind; the Puttowatomies, who lived west of the Star That Did Not Move; the Illinois, the We’as, the Kickapoos and Plankeshawes, who ate serpents. Even some of the faraway Fox had tramped it, as had the Sauk and Menominees, the Conesdagas and Cochnawagas, the Abrakies, Oswegatchies, and Meposages. Smashed Head recited the names of tribes she had never heard of, the Mascoutens, Peanguieseins, the Paccouarias, Ayouz, Sioux, and Tintons, rolling the strange names over his tongue as if they gave him strong pleasure. But they gave Stone Girl dull despair. These were the Echokike, the ends of the world, to which she was being taken. Home had become no more than a dream behind her.