Once when Branch was especially impatient, she turned to a friend of hers and said, “I think she is hollow inside, as a dead tree grows hollow. Let us pretend that instead of adopting Two-Falling-Voices we had decided to take her life. No matter how hard or in what place we had laid the hatchet to her body, we would not, I am certain, have drawn a single drop of blood.”

“Her skeleton,” the friend said, “is beginning to poke through her skin. Look at her elbows. Look at her kneecaps.”

The next day the friend returned. “I think,” she ventured to Branch, “if I were you, I would turn to the Society of False Faces. I know you think they have gotten away from some of the old False Face ways. But you need to do something quickly.”

MARY woke to the presence of three masked figures carrying small drums. When they saw that she had opened her eyes, they started to howl.

She sat up. Almost immediately she knew she was not dreaming: her new sisters had positioned themselves in reassuring fashion at the door of the hut. And when she looked down she recognized the thin, burnscarred legs and disintegrating moccasins that belonged to the Seneca who had shown her how to separate the deer from its befouling insides.

His mask was both hugely wide and elongated; it had a thin, bent nose and was black with red ovals of tears painted on its cheeks. The open mouth was formed as an almost perfect “O.” The wearer of this Weeping-Face had craned his neck when he started howling, and the mask was thus tilted up as if it were a shield against whatever might lurk in the air above.

The mask on the second person was smaller, the face painted red with black streaks running from beneath the cheeks up to the outer corners of the eyeholes. Just above the chin were the lips, the lower one protruding much more than the upper one; these were widely parted so that the appearance was one of an open-mouthed pout.

The third mask face was completely red except for black eyebrows on the broad forehead; these eyebrows slanted down toward those corners of the eyeholes which lay next to the nose. The mouth’s lips were also parted but turned down in anger or disgust.

The Pouting-Face masked man stopped his howling and began to circle the remains of last night’s cooking fire, into which Branch before retiring had unaccountably thrown some tobacco. He scooped up a good quantity of ashes, brought them to where Mary sat, positioned his mask mouth on a level with the ashes in his hand, and with great force blew them in her direction. She sat unmoved.