“That’s why Indians fight, too,” Verrieul said. “To kill their enemies. They can’t understand it, many of them, when they’re asked to go out and kill enemies, and are then told it’s cruel to kill them when the opportunity presents. The way to kill enemies is not to be merciful to them, they say, but to kill them.”

“They’re a lot of dirty, underhanded red stinks,” Cap said.

“There’s another thing,” Verrieul explained. “The nations change a good deal. It depends on the Manitousiou—m’téoulin—or whatever a nation calls the man whose words it finds most acceptable. Sorcerer, maybe, you’d call him; or maybe magician. Shaman, the western nations say. The nations are almost like trading companies: under good men they’re better than under bad men. And as the years pass, they learn how to do things better. Even the Montagnais have learned to make leggins that don’t fall apart in a gale. I guess we were pretty bad three hundred years ago. I guess we were dirty, and superstitious, too, maybe; cruel, even. The Revrint Dr. Wheelock told me that when the Holy Catholic Church tortured people, it thought up worse tortures than any Indian ever imagined. Catholics have changed, the Revrint Wheelock said, and so have Indians. They’re better than they were a hundred and fifty years ago—better than when the Jesuit fathers first lived among them.”

“Just a lot of red stinks!” Cap insisted.

“One thing I quickly learned when I traveled with James Deane,” Verrieul said, “was that if you live with Hurons, you’re sure they’re the kindest people on earth, and Iroquois the most terrible; whereas if you live with Iroquois, you feel that no man ever had truer friends than the Iroquois, and that Hurons are wild beasts.”

“Buzzards!” Cap remarked. “Red buzzards!”

“Well,” Verrieul said, “if they’re buzzards, how do you account for the white children who have been captured by Indian nations, and liked them so well they refused to go back to live with white men again?”

“Listen!” Cap said. “When a man gets used to buzzards, he ain’t going to where there’s buzzards he ain’t used to, is he? He likes the buzzards he’s got used to now better than the buzzards he used to be used to, don’t he? Don’t it stand to reason? You answer me that!”