The child’s father was a doctor of physic, and when his slim fingers were not probing deep into pulsing wounds for arrowheads and bullets, they served as a scaffold for playing cat’s cradle. This father, the doctor, had not taken his family to southwestern Pennsylvania.

“Southwestern Pennsylvania? My God, man,” he would say to a friend who had asked his advice, “that frontier is too fragile, much too exposed. If you value your wife and your children, wait until settlements are thick in the region, until a fort rises in that valley.

“Much too risky,” the father who was a doctor would say as he walked away.

And then he would come back to make his point emphatic, for he loved his foolish friend. “What can you be thinking of? Put the idea behind you. Promise me.”

MARY’S sisters, Branch and Slight-Wind, their eyes wide, paddled relentlessly, paddled as if the shores of the river were closing in on them from behind.

IN THE next days, lines fraught with images came to her from the Scripture and repeated themselves: “. . . For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as a hearth . . . my bones cleave to my skin. . . . For I have eaten ashes like bread. . . . For my days are consumed like smoke and my bones. . . .”

SHE DID that which Branch told her to do; she took all of Slight-Wind’s suggestions. The sisters looked for signs of at least momentary happiness in Two-Falling-Voices; they looked for frowns, for the softening of the eyes that comes with wonder; they looked for rapid breathing, an impatient movement of the hands. They looked in vain. She was almost completely devoid of gesture. Her face was blank, her voice was low and without inflection, she answered questions with the shortest of phrases. They never saw her weep.

When light the color of wheat touched the tops of the hills, she did not appear to notice. The children’s chanting games did not charm her, nor did the nonsense talk of babies. Barking dogs did not cause her to turn her head. When she had free time, she walked a short distance, sat unmoving among the white oaks, and looked up through the spaces between the clusters of foliage. She ate little.

Though Branch was always kind, she sometimes grew impatient with this persistent and bland behavior, for she sensed that her new sister had once been otherwise. “I know she has sorrow,” Branch said to Slight-Wind. “But sometimes I believe she is thinking about nothing except her plans for escape. And sometimes I think she is acting this way out of scorn.”