“You’re doing fine. Keep up the good work,” he would say in Yengwe when he passed her. “It won’t be long now.”

And that was the way she thought it was working out when a white man in a black robe came up the river in a strange kind of boat. He carried in his hands two golden sticks crossed and fastened together. A charm of the same design hung around his neck. He set up a kind of table of boughs and stood in front of it doing incomprehensible acts and singing words in an incomprehensible tongue while the Indians watched gravely.

When it was over the Indian with a skewer in his nose talked with him, after which he brought him to see Stone Girl and Otter Boy. Then all went to the trader’s log house, where Black Robe and the Indian kept lifting bar lead, rings, combs, looking glasses, and scissors as they spoke, and she knew she was being traded for again, like one of the scalping knives on the log counter.

“Now you are free,” the trader told her in English when it was done.

But when she took Otter Boy and started for home on the path by which she had come, they ran after and stopped her. She couldn’t do that. She must stay with Black Robe now. He had paid for her. She and Otter Boy belonged to him, and now she had to stand while he put water on Otter Boy’s head and spoke outlandish words from a talking book in his hand. She told herself that he must have some design on her child’s shiny black hair, and that night when she and Otter Boy slept in the post with the smell of raw furs and the dye of cloth and other alien objects in their nostrils, her hands felt up on the log counter where she had seen a pair of trade scissors. Then she snipped off the Indian locks close to his soft head.

“Now he will find it hard to scalp you, Little Mouse,” she promised.

Next morning she was told to carry him into the long boat, not like the elm-bark canoe or heavy like the hollowed tree, but made of wide strips of wood fastened together and waterproofed with the hardened black sap of the Tree That the Lightning Likes to Strike. Instead of paddlers there were stout hairy men who spoke the same tongue as the man with the black robe and sang as they pulled on their wooden handles.

“Smile. You don’t know how lucky you are,” the trader in gold lace called after her when the boat pushed off.

But how could she smile? The boat was headed not south but north. Every minute it moved still farther into the unknown, away from the beloved Waldhoning and home. The river grew wider. She could see in front of them a frightening expanse of water. As they passed the last land, water lay to the east and water to the west while to the north stretched such a watery waste she could see nothing but waves as when from a hill she looked down on the green forest in a summer storm.