O’Bail stared and Corn-planter went on. He said that his name was also John O’Bail, a name given him by Earth-shaker, his mother, but that he was commonly called Corn-planter.

“My scouts,” he said to his still staring father, “have been watching you, keeping track of your whereabouts since you came into this area many months ago. I was eager to see you, to greet you in friendship. I have taken you by force and in this sense you are my captive, but today we stand as equals in our nakedness, father and son. I, your colored-skin son, revere you. I wanted you to know this, but whether you live with me or with your white sons, that is your choice.”

Father and son spent many hours talking together. Then old John let it be known that he wished to live among his white family, and his son said, “Let it be accomplished. We will escort you home.”

This was the Corn-planter story.

AND THERE was a story about a surgeon in the Colonel Crawford regiment, which marched against the Indian towns of the Sandusky in July of 1782. Hiokatoo, before he sickened and died, had told her about this man, whose name was Dr. Knight.

Dr. Knight was captured with Colonel Crawford by means of an ambush, and he watched his friend and commander die a brutal death at the stake on the Sandusky Plains. Knight’s face was blackened with ashes from the fire that consumed Crawford, and he was thus given to understand that he would lose his life in the same manner the next evening on the Lower Sandusky.

Two Delaware set off in the rain for the new place of execution with the prisoner, and when they came to camp for the night dry firewood was scarce, so they released the doctor briefly to help them gather kindling. On the first small foray he delivered enough dry sticks that the Seneca were able to set to work building a fire. But the surgeon had also picked up a log which he had dropped just inside the clearing, and while his captors bent over their fire he retrieved it: with two urgent and powerful blows he felled them.

Then, deftly, and using the Delaware’s own scalping knives, he decapitated first the one and then the other, after which he laid the scalping knife to the crowns of those severed heads.

Dr. Knight, Mary would tell her audience, by means of walking in water whenever he could, made it back to his people without a single difficulty. And some who know said that two scalps hung above his doorposts until the day he died.

What she did not say was that the person who had blackened Dr. Knight’s face was Hiokatoo himself, the man whom she had married.

BETWEEN these zones, these latitudes, on these dates, in the midst of these weathers, a midworld was forming, and what odd lineaments: love-in-trading and shocking reunions; the sharpest of scalping knives in the hands of a literate white surgeon.