Then, laughing, she ran over to her father, who scooped her up into his arms. And Dirk van Dyck the Dutchman realized that he never had been, and never would be, as proud of any child as he was of his elegant little Indian daughter at that moment.

“I touched her,” she cried with glee.

“You did.” He hugged her. To think that he should be the father of a child who was perfect. He shook his head in wonderment.

They sat together for a little while after that. He did not say much, and she did not seem to mind. He was wondering whether it was time to move on when she turned to him.

“Tell me about my mother.”

“Well,” he considered. “She was beautiful. You are like her.”

He thought of their first meeting at the camp on the sound where her people used to collect shellfish in summer. Instead of the usual long-houses, her people pitched wigwams by the shore. They would dry the shellfish, scrape them out of their shells, bury the shells and store the dried oysters, mussels and clams to be made into soup at a later date. Why should he have been so struck by this particular young woman? Because she was unattached? Perhaps. She had been married but lost her husband and her child. Or was it something, a special light of curiosity in her eyes? That too. He had stayed two days there, spent a whole evening talking with her. The attraction had been mutual; but he had business to attend to and nothing more than conversation had passed between them before he had continued on his way.

A week later, he had come back.

It was during the time he had spent with her that he had truly come to know the Indians. He came to understand also why some of the first Dutch settlers, having no women of their own, had married Indian women and afterward refused even the most powerful religious persuasion to give them up. She was lithe as a wild animal, yet if he was tired, or angry, she would be gentle as a dove.

“You loved her very much?”

“Yes. I did.” It was true.

“And then you had me.”

It was the custom of her people that there was always a place for such extra children in the extended family of the mother’s clan.

“If you had not had a wife in the White Man’s trading post, you would have married my mother, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course.” A lie. But a kindly one.

“You always came to see her.”

Until that terrible spring, three years ago, when he arrived at the village and learned that Pale Feather’s mother was sick. “She was in the sweat lodge yesterday,” they told him, “but it did no good. Now the medicine men are with her.”