Then he had listened to the sounds of the others in their family compartments along either wall of the Wolf Clan longhouse. On the rack below him, his father—who’d returned unsuccessful from the attempt to catch the raiders—and his mother had slept almost as fitfully as he did. Only Okwaho’s little sister, snuggled in between them, had seemed to truly be resting.

I will go back to sleep, he’d silently said to himself each time he woke. This time when I dream, Tawis and I will escape. And when I wake up in the morning he will be standing by my sleeping rack, tickling me. Or maybe pouring a dipper of water over my head.

But each time the same thing happened. Tawis was captured as Okwaho ran. He would wake biting his lip, trying not to shout his lost friend’s name. Again and again and again it went on that way.

Why must I be only a boy, he thought. Why can I not be a grown man? One who can do something meaningful!

He reached one arm down to scoop up a handful of kernels of dried corn from the elm bark basket by his bed. It was the last of the corn saved from the harvest of the year before.

“Corn,” he whispered, “can you help me? Bring me a song to take my thoughts to a better place?”

Okwaho began to let kernels fall, one by one, from one hand into the other and back again. The whisper and rattle of one grain against another sounded like a voice. Like the rhythm of a song. So many things always made him think of songs—old ones and ones that wanted to enter his thoughts. Even now when anger was twisting in his head, the songs were still there waiting for him. Like the one coming to him now.

He took a breath and began to sing.

Corn, I thank you.

Corn, I thank you.

You and your two sisters

Bring us life.

And as he sang, a story came into his mind—the oldest story his people knew, the tale of how this earth came to be.

Long ago, a woman fell from the sky. She brought with her seeds from the sky tree. The water creatures had prepared a place for her by putting soil onto the back of the Great Turtle as it floated on the surface of the ocean. She let those seeds fall into her tracks in the moist earth as she danced with small steps—as the women of the five Longhouse Nations dance to this day.