Before she and the others hoisted the carcass, she had bent merely to touch it. Blood brought a warm coating to her fingers.

The man who had done the gutting said to her then, “No time can be wasted when the hunt is going on.”

Mary looked at him but he had already turned away.

AS IF in a dream there were trees wound in mist again and then an outline of a hulking shape: the fort, now named not Duquesne but Fort Pitt, since it had been taken by the British. The Seneca people had been invited to come and discuss a treaty.

In this way, Mary revisited the scene of her imprisonment.

Inside the fort there were groups of British this time instead of groups of French. Two white women stood together with a little girl. They, all three of them, studied Mary. Then one woman took the little English girl’s hand but smiled right at Mary and said, “Hello.” She paused and said in a louder voice, “Hello.” And then, “What is your name?”

Mary looked down at the small hand with its fingers curled around the larger hand.

“You were, perhaps, captured?” The Englishwoman waited, and after a moment she thought the silent young woman lowered her head in what could have been the smallest of nods. Then she asked Mary where she had been captured, and to this question she received no response at all. Leaning forward, she tried again: “What is your name?”

And Mary said, “My name?” Then she took a step backward.

“Yes. What is your name?”

“My name is—Mary.”

At the answer for which she was looking the Englishwoman surprised herself by raising her forearms and spreading her fingers as if to ward off a blow. The unimaginable had indeed happened.

Mary felt a hand on her arm and allowed herself to be led away by her older sister. In minutes they were out the door of the fort, in a canoe, and crossing the river to their temporary encampment. She stood as her sisters took their half-baked breads out of the coals, gathered up their belongings, rushed her back into the canoe, swung out, and headed downriver, back toward their village.

WHEN the Englishwoman had raised her arms, Mary had smelled sweet woodruff, that woodruff of the whorled leaves. The woman had thin, gathered silk at the neck of her dress and at the edges of sleeves that fell to her knuckles.

Mary saw images of the rooms in which that family lived. The mother would keep things neat and mend her family’s stockings. All of them took hot baths once a week; they owned soap and a sponge. The daughter, young as she was, could cipher, could in fact write all the numbers and letters. In the evenings, the family would speak in English about the puzzling parts of the Bible.