Another day and the girl found the hills failing under her feet. The next afternoon they came to a desolate place where no trees would grow. On the far side of the barrenness lay a cheerless village. The cabins stood unlike any Stone Girl had ever seen before. The river flowed north instead of south. And the people spoke a language unintelligible as that of the jay and the gray wolf. Only when they brought out the strangest thing of all, a white man with gold lace on his red coat, did she catch any of the words. He was the interpreter, the bridge between the two nations, and now she heard Smashed Head tell him to recite to the village people all the good things Espan had told Smashed Head’s wife about Stone Girl and the work she could do. There was much palavering. She saw Smashed Head leave with a deerskin sack of corn on his back. Then a Northward Indian with a silver skewer in his nose took her to his cabin, where a woman lay stiff with the Sickness That Freezes Joints. Here she was ordered with signs what to do.

What was she now? Stone Girl asked herself that night when allowed to he down and rest. Was she a prisoner again to be made over in the image of her captors? It had not been hard when she was very young and pliable like the wands of the willow. But she was no small child any more. And how could she be a prisoner if she were still Indian? Had she become white again or perhaps black like the slave in the village below Mahonink? His owner, Three Suns, used to dress him in a long shirt of vermilion strouding and march him up and down the village behind him like a squaw. Had she been Indian, she speculated, the Great Spirit of the Indians would not have forsaken her. And if she were white, the white trader in a red coat and gold lace would not have stood indifferently by while one of his own race was bargained for like a blanket in his post. No, she must be black now and a slave, she reasoned.

The following day the trader accosted her from his post door in the language of Never Laugh, which Stone Girl barely remembered.

“Can you understand me?” he asked, and when she nodded slowly, “Do you want to get out of here? Then listen. When they show you how to do anything, you must do it badly. When they teach you their language, you must say the words wrong. You must be stupid in everything, but don’t tell them I said so.”

“I could never do that,” Stone Girl told him.

“Then you will stay here till hell freezes over,” the trader said, turning away, and Stone Girl lay awake half the night pondering.

This was the hardest thing she had ever taken on herself to do, to make her hands spoil good hide and meat, and her tongue words that her ears heard plainly enough. It was harder still to see the faces of disgust and the flash of anger in Indian eyes. But the worst was the way they treated Otter Boy. When she first came he had almost been as one of their own. Now they scorned and abused him. Hardly could she have carried on except for the trader in gold lace.