Presently the boat turned away from the rising sun, where Never Laugh had said that her mother with the yellow hair lived, and moved toward the sun’s setting, where according to Smashed Head lived only foreigners like the Sauks and Fox and the faraway Sioux, who hunted the herds of the black bulls. She would not tell Otter Boy but in her own heart she had given up all hope. The white trader with gold lace had betrayed her. Getanitowit had washed his hands of her, for how could the Great Spirit have anything to do with a white man in a black robe like a woman, with two crossed sticks on his breast and his home in a nation of barbarous, hairy-faced men to whom he was taking her?

STONE GIRL had liked the sound of the words, the Great Sweet Water, when first she had heard them. In her mind she had seen a long stretch of river, like looking down the Waldhoning to the far bend where a canoe on the river was like Damaskus, the muskrat, swimming across. But now the name gave her fear for this watery world, unstable, desolate, and never still. Neither muskrat nor otter could be seen upon it, only their lone boat which the winds tried to break in small pieces and send to the bottom. Twice the hairy-faced rowers had to put in to a stony beach and wait for Tgui, the waves, to lose their anger. Then one morning the bateaumen started to sing again and not long afterward Stone Girl found the boat in the welcome shelter of a river with solid banks of her mother, Earth, on both sides.

“Little Mouse, we don’t drown after all,” she whispered. “I think that maybe we go home now. Little Mouse, your Guka, mamma, has heard the Muskingum is wide like this where it empties into the Beautiful River.”

But her hopes withered when she saw fields and more fields. The Muskingum never could have had so many. Now the hairy-faced bateaumen raised their voices lustily and coming around the bend she saw a frightening sight, a white man’s town with a high fence of upright poles around it. Strange off-the-ground cabins perched above the four corners and gate, and inside the stockade were the steep pitched roofs of curious houses with snow lying white upon them like on a hundred hills and gullies.

At a small village on the other side of the river Black Robe took her and Otter Boy into a long house where a sour-eyed woman with a red kerchief on her head listened to what he told her. The sour-eyed woman spoke to Stone Girl, but how could she answer when she understood not a word, only the shrugs and grimaces? She guessed the woman had little use for her and less for Otter Boy, for she kept throwing up her hands. In the end Black Robe took them in a canoe which he himself paddled across the river.