But Mary said that Sheninjee had no right to name her or appraise her, that it annoyed her to have him speak in any manner of her, and as she spoke, her own words were a source of great surprise to her.

For months and months I had felt practically nothing, and now this, this thing, this thing like a speech that seemed to be almost an outburst.

MARY was scraping the damp flesh from a buck’s skin when Slight-Wind touched her on the shoulder. “Come.”

“Where?”

“Come with me.”

Outside the hut people were half-running, as if thrust forward by some force; they streamed across a small field and up a hillside. Mary and Slight-Wind fell in with them.

When she reached the top of the hill, it took Mary some time to make sense of what she saw—a group of men crouched over but perfectly, unnaturally still.

“What is this?” She stiffened. “Is someone going to run the gauntlet?”

“Sticks!” said Slight-Wind.

“Sticks?”

“Look.”

But first a great noise began. Mock crow calls. Brays. War whoops and the feigned pulsing cries of Canada geese. Dogs’ growls and sharp barks from the human mouth and tongue. One shout. Then a ball rose just as clear as a morning sun rises clear in its stepping up from and aside of a stand of hickories.

The men lifted nettings everywhere and the nettings themselves were attached to the curved ends of long carved sticks. The white priests called it lacrosse.

This was the Great Running, when a team with the ball, its opponents in pursuit, worked its way toward the goal, which was so far away Mary had to squint to see. She complained. “I can’t tell what they are doing way out there.”

“Playing,” her sister said.

“Way out there?”

“Yes.”

“But I can hardly see them.”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve noticed something about you.” Her sister turned and looked at her. “I have noticed that you think many things, and events belong to you. You sound now as if you think that the game is for you. But the crossing game is only partly for you and for your benefit.”

When the men played back past her, she became aware of a tangle of bodies, of dripping gashes on arms, of the rackety sound of stick on stick and, once, of a bone jutting through skin at a monstrous angle. Though she had never witnessed a battle, she knew what she was seeing was of the very texture of assault.