THE SHAWNEE who had been in the raiding party pushed their canoe into the shallow water. In motions that seemed synchronized they stepped into their bark and paddled out onto the Ohio. The two Seneca sisters, who sat with Mary in a smaller canoe, followed behind.

In the forward canoe, a Shawnee stopped paddling and pulled a skin bag to him. He opened it, took out scalps, and began to fasten them to a cut sapling, to string them as if they were pennants. Then he lifted the flexible pole to his shoulder for a few moments and carried it as if it were a yoke. A small wind blew across the water; the scalps moved back and forth, the hair fanning out.

Mary, at mid-canoe, turned her body away from the sight as much as she dared in the narrow confines of the birch bark. The older sister lifted her paddle and held it out in the air.

“Look,” she said in Seneca.

The younger sister glanced back and then in the direction in which the older sister had pointed. A heron stood on one foot on the shore.

“Heron,” the younger sister said in Seneca. And then she called to Mary, again in Seneca: “Heron!”

Mary sat unmoved, turned away, slumped down in the skin-blanket the sisters had given her.

The party of two canoes came around the bend. From a point about a mile down the river, smoke drifted up and entwined with the overhanging mist.

When they were almost parallel with the smoke, they saw, close to the water, forked sticks supporting a long pole on which hung the remains of several persons. Most of the body parts were roasted and burnt black; here and there they could make out a head, a leg, an arm, or some other fragment. Small flames sprang up and up and tried to fuel themselves with those body parts which were closest to the ground. On one charred finger, Mary thought she saw a gold ring.

The captive closed her eyes. The sisters put their paddles back in the water and swiftly turned the canoe away from the scene.

MARY had managed: she had succeeded in installing in her mind the great, pale blankness of non-thought. It was an actual thing, that blankness: it hung there like a great pearly fish in deep water; it hung untouched by a sky the color of purple. By dint of the slow-motion lashings of its massive tail, this fish confused, unhinged, and scattered both certain idea and clear feeling.

CHAPTER II

[ II ]

The Ohio Valley 1758 — 1762

THE LIGHT was giving over when the sisters swung the canoe toward shore. Cryptic shadows shimmered in patches either on the river’s surface or just beneath it. The raiding party canoe paused, and the Shawnee who had the pole of scalps lifted it above his head and then lowered it. And lifted it again in farewell. Mary turned away.