“I feel strong,” she said.

“Are you certain?”

In answer, she slipped one strap of her undergarment off her shoulder and let it hang loosely against her arm.

Close against him, she traced the curves of his chest with her slim fingers. She traced slowly, in ever-descending arcs.

WHEN the seasonal afternoon light the color of corn silk lay on the hills, Mary and her husband often picked up gouged lacrosse sticks and moved a ball back and forth between them. Later they walked together, and sometimes Sheninjee withdrew somewhat from her to scan both the far landscape and the clumps of trees that lay afield near the creek.

She had lately learned to turn from excessive studying of her husband’s face to study the trees, the underbrush, and the sky.

In this way, my world opened and I began to comprehend all lineaments, even my husband’s, better.

SHE SAW, one late afternoon, a red-tailed hawk before Sheninjee did, and she laid her hands, fingers splaying, flat on her rounded abdomen and told the new child in her womb that a hawk was present and that its tail had the coloring of chokecherries, that it could properly be called the chokecherry hawk, that the vibrance of red and the perils of choking might be a suitable name for a hawk.

She wanted now always to live in these fields or fields like them where living creatures breathed, moved, changed, died; but where curves, hollows, projections thick as bluffs or slender as tree-stalks, remained largely stable.

A field of spaces, she thought, beset by form, color, and texture; spaces beset by odd or ecstatic or violent movements: scuttlings, fallings, startled flights, crawlings, hesitations. A field where the foreignness of revisitings was most appreciated in a familiar setting.

A thought seized her: she wanted to own land.

I flushed and glanced at my husband. He would be incredulous to hear of this, he would frown. Own land? Could any idea ever sound as foreign as this idea to this man?

BUT LAND and the desire for land could be a loose strainer, a context, a catchment not least of all for the naming they did, for the tongues they spoke, both English and Seneca, despite their differences, despite their partings of speech.

ONE DAY a month or so later, Sheninjee said to his wife that he guessed she was thinking about a name for their child. Mary made no reply.

“Is that not so?” He looked into her face.

“Is what not so?”

“Have you been thinking about a name for our child?”

“Yes. A little.”

“Well?”

“Well—”

I had thought that if we named this child, then should it die after birth as our first child did, we would feel even worse. We would not just lose a child; we would lose a person, someone to whom we had given a name and who therefore had clearer features.