“That’s the grease you can smell. Indians use a lot of it. Hell, they kill an animal, don’t matter if it’s a rabbit or a bear, there’s not one part of it they can’t find a use for. Fur keeps them warm; meat keeps them fed; grease keeps them slippery. Means an enemy can’t grab a hold.”

Wyatt had laughed at the boy’s expression. “Well, that’s not all they use it for. Bear fat’s good for cooking. It doesn’t turn rancid, so it keeps longer. They smear it on themselves for all sorts of reasons. Keeps mosquitoes away – vermin, too – if they’re sleeping outside. It protects their skin from the sun and keeps water out of their moccasins. They use it to mix their war paints and to keep their guns oiled. The women like it because it makes their hair shiny; the men, too. Tewanias might not have much hair, but what he has he looks after – which is more than can be said for most white men!” Wyatt had laughed as he’d said that.

The boy wondered where Lieutenant Wyatt and the other Rangers were now. And who was the Indian he had shot? Tewanias had as yet offered no explanation and the boy had felt too intimidated to enquire.

Despite his wounds, Tewanias’s first action on seeing his enemy slain had been to drag the dead warrior out of the stream and place it on the bank. At first the boy had assumed this was a mark of respect, but then he recalled Will Archer doing something similar once, back at the farm. They had come across a dead buck sprawled in a creek, upstream from the cabin. The deer looked as if it had died of old age. Archer had taken hold of the antlers and pulled the carcass out of the water, telling the boy that if it were left in the water anyone taking a drink downriver might be poisoned.

“How do you know there aren’t more dead animals tainting the flow further up?” the boy had asked.

“I don’t,” Archer had replied. “But that doesn’t mean we should leave this one where it is.”

After depositing the body on the bank, Tewanias had collected the Oneida’s weapons, including the carbine that had fallen in the stream and the tomahawk that had struck the tree. He’d also relieved the body of its ammunition pouch, which he had given to the boy.

Only after he’d gathered the weapons had Tewanias turned his attention to his wounds. It was as he was examining the gash in his shoulder that the boy, without thinking, had blurted, “I have a needle and thread.”