IN BLOODLETTING, some say, Leviathan-like fevers are broken. And if so, what of the power of the naming of bleeding and of one’s own blood: this is my blood.

What of the power of hurt? And what, in the midst of that, of the power of someone’s unexpected touch and of their saying the one right word?

The word was “blood,” the blood was mine, the skin rubbed away by the cutting tool was mine, the pain was mine, the fingers were mine, the hand held by Slight-Wind was mine, the arm was mine, the body belonged to me alone.

In grasping the fact of my flesh I began to think again. My flesh was as a field: it had persisted in spite of me. I began to think more distinctly, it seemed, than I had ever thought before.

I came to grasp what I had merely come to know: that the people with whom I lived were not Indians but Seneca, that I was already speaking Seneca, that I had been captured by Shawnee but given to Seneca, that my sisters had lost a brother to the white colonists. According to custom, I stood in a brother’s place, though I may just as easily have been scalped, since satisfaction and justice came either through the taking of life or by means of adoption.

THE SENECA broke camp and sailed up the Ohio to a place called Wiishto, where they planted corn and then settled into summer. In time they were joined by a party of Delaware who had brought five white prisoners with them.

So she spoke Seneca and she spoke English, out of her older sister’s hearing, with the whites. Her thoughts in both languages increased as she tended the bearded corn. She also taught her younger sister some English.

MARY sat with the white captives one evening when Branch had gone on a short journey. As she drew near to their fire (for some one of the Delaware had out of kindness given them this separate fire), she heard one of the two men speaking and she stopped still.

“And next the farmer came to a tiny drawbridge, sure, and he saw that it had been pulled away to let a boat pass, but he thought this was passing strange since he could see no little boats anywhere on that blue-green thread of a river. And the farmer said to his nag, whose name was Coinn, ‘Now, Coinn, look at that drawbridge. Just what in our Holy God’s name is it doing agape like that, do ye think?’