In the days that followed I watched the mother, who often spoke to me and who had a habit of touching me lightly on the hand when the talk was over and we were about to part. How to think of this woman? As my sisters’ mother? As The Mother? As an adopted mother? As my mother?

I thought of the mother at that time with the English words which lay close to the meaning of her Seneca name: Bending Tree.

TREE WAS lean and had face bones that rose to meet the outer edges of her eyes. Men everywhere stared at her, and she met their stares with a gaze that was as formidable as her bearing. Ultimately, the men looked away.

SHENINJEE in a gesture reminiscent of a marriage ceremony handed his wife over to the Seneca town, to Tree, to her sisters, to a river and valley thick with people, and then he withdrew from Genesee for several months to trade pelts. He promised Mary that he would return in the spring.

And he added, “Whites come and go here. English and Seneca are both freely spoken. While I am away, don’t gaze too much at the white men.”

And she replied and said that he himself had not looked enough, that had he been discerning he would have seen that it was the New York Seneca men who were, both in limb and in visage, the handsome ones.

AFTER Sheninjee had been gone for two weeks, Tree noticed that Mary’s spirits were downcast and so she said to her, “If you like, we can cook together.”

She taught Mary how to find the wild asparagus, yellowdock, poke, and milkweed and how to use them in cooking. The puffball mushroom, she said, made good sauce or soup; it also tasted better with a little salt and oil on it, and she cautioned about the difference in taste and texture between sunflower oil and bear-grease oil.

The two women bent over the remains of a hearthfire and the older showed the younger how to bake apples in it and how to catch the apple drippings so they would not be wasted. She demonstrated how to make an elderberry syrup to give to people who had fevers and a Juneberry tea as a blood-loss remedy for women.

“You know so much,” Mary said to Tree.

“My mother and others taught me. Food is a gift I give to others.” And she told Mary that since food was usually eaten quickly by those who were hungry, some grew tired of making it. But those tired ones must have tired eyesight as well, she said.