AT THE time of the French and Indian War the south-central Pennsylvania fields sometimes curved halfway up hillsides. With the unseen roots of a thousand things—wild onion, wake-robin, common grass, the corn and flaxseed her father had sown—the soil was held close to the gray shale that made up the sweepings of land. From beneath the rock, the earth’s pull kept the heavy red clay from flying up into a sky marked by scuddings of clouds.

BEFORE her capture, Mary had begun to think that although some things of fields—lilies, vines, choking patches of weeds—are mentioned in Scripture, yet they are not Scripture. The things of the fields are themselves. As Scripture is itself and holds only a partial account of the murderous, of good will, and of their frequent twinings.

God, she had ventured to think, may have given her the New World fields to balance the Scriptures and as a perfect refuge from the Presbyterian catechism.

“Consider the lilies of the field,” the Scripture said. The lilies did not toil nor did they spin, yet even Solomon “in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” And the lily lives just as it did in Israel, even though it has never brushed up against so much as one page of Scripture. That alone could keep her from going mad.

The lily in a field was a fact. For, she had thought, not even Scripture—in all its glory—was arrayed as one of those.

NOW THE party was on the run. The Shawnee and the French were brutally intent. They forced the colonists through sucking spring mud, over logs, up and down hills. At first the captives ignored low tree branches and the spiking shrub undergrowth pulling at their clothing, scratching their skin; toward the end of the day they felt even one brush of the smallest twig as insupportable.

A Shawnee lifted a restraining hand. The light was going; the shadows of the hemlocks began to lose their definition.

The neighbor’s son whined that he was thirsty. Two Shawnee looked at each other: one stepped aside, urinated into an empty box turtle shell, and offered it to Daniel. Mary took a step forward to protest, but her mother stopped her, saying only, “Mary.” The boy himself had already begun to drink, the thin curves of his lips at the uneven edge of the carapace, the urine spilling a little down his chin.

The captors spread a few boughs about; the dank ground was to be the communal bed for the night. There was no fire and no supper. Mary and her mother put the young ones between them; Thomas lay down somewhat apart, sighed, and rolled over, facing away from them.

The younger children drifted off. Occasionally, Jane would reach over them and touch Mary, whose moments of sleep were few.