But he had left his tomahawk behind. What would he do without it? Learn new ways.

AND SHE tolerated it when Hiokatoo, at the insistence of his relatives, was buried with the tomahawk and a scalping-knife, a powder flask, flint, a piece of spunk, a corncake, and a cup.

Let those living who are still concerned with powder flasks and flint bury those whom they consider the dead. Let them bury your dead body this way if they so wish. What has your freed spirit to do with these things now?

Three days after his death, I heard Hiokatoo’s distinctive voice. He said, “But my freed spirit was partly formed by flint and a certain tomahawk, by corncakes and a special brown cup. They were the kindling by means of which my spirit flared up and burned in the world.”

And he said, “So as Hiokatoo and none other, I forever bear earthly marks as part of my formal dress even in this festive space where I now reside.”

NONE of the Seneca asked her why she was staying, but some of her white acquaintances did. She answered them with stories which they did not understand.

Why would she not want to rejoin white society, they wondered. Hiokatoo was dead. Why not find her relatives, some of whom were rumored to be in Virginia? She had no notion, some said, of what life would be like in Richmond, of peach silk dresses, crystal and pewter, hydrangeas and vines hand-painted on china. She had dusky eyes, which in certain lights looked the color of hazel; she had luxuriant auburn hair. She would be thought of, in a place like Richmond, as an Exotic. Surely she would marry. She was wealthy in land; she could still keep it. A man would find her strange tales charming.

And while they were thinking these thoughts, she was telling them odd and true stories.

ONE STORY concerned a Seneca who ambushed a white man named John O’Bail. The Seneca, named Corn-planter, made O’Bail strip off his clothes and then terrified the white man by casting aside his own garments—surely some grotesque wrestling match was about to occur.

But Corn-planter leapt up to the top of a boulder and gestured widely with his arm. He asked O’Bail if he had not in his young days passed through the Indian settlements that lay between the Great Hudson River and Fort Niagara, and the shivering white man said that he had. Corn-planter further asked if the man had not loved a certain “squaw” in one of the settlements, a certain woman whose name was Earth-shaker. O’Bail’s mouth dropped open, and he thought that this was his death, that the Indian must be a relative of Earthshaker’s. He had indeed become infatuated with her and had loved her for nights at a time on many trips.

Then the Seneca drew himself up and said, “I am your son.” He paused and then said, “And you. You are my father!”