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.

When God brought the animals to Adam and Eve to name, did they then not love the beasts the more? When Eve called the lamb “lamb”—for I was certain it was Eve who named the lamb—did she not love the creature almost desperately afterward? It was more different from the other animals after she named it than it had been before.

SHENINJEE regarded his wife. “What is the matter?”

“I am not certain about a name.”

“I have thought of some names for you to consider. If the child is a boy we could call him ‘White Fox.’ ”

“White—?” She recoiled.

“Or,” he continued, “if a girl, ‘Red Snow.’ ”

Mary looked at him sidewise, in disbelief.

“But,” he said, leaning back, for he was enjoying himself, “there may be better names. For a girl— perhaps,” and he spoke a name that was inaudible.

“What?”