Two of the Shawnee opened a deerskin bag and took out flattish, curved objects. Scalps cut from flesh, damp as they are, soaked with blood, spoil easily. Two Shawnee set them out near the fire with some hoops fashioned from saplings. Now they deftly stretched the circumference of thin skin at the edge of the scalp over the hoop and held the whole to the fire for a time for drying. Next they trimmed any excess of skin away as if it were a scrap of savory-pie crust.

They were careful: no bit of soft tissue escaped the knife’s cutting and scraping. Later, they combed the scalp hair and painted it red. But they did not paint her mother’s hair, for it already partook of the color red.

In this manner, Mary beheld the cloven flesh of her family; she could distinguish scalp from scalp by means of the differing patches of hair.

As it was written, “The very hairs of your head are all numbered.” But where was the God who, implying extravagant concern, had said that? Where was He who kept count of all the hairs of all people? Where was He now?

Daniel asked what the Indians were doing, but Mary turned her whole body away from the fire.

The young-looking Shawnee with the auburnhaired scalp turned it admiringly in his hands. In Shawnee he said, “Rare.” He said that it was perhaps a conjuring scalp, and he thrust it in the direction of Mary’s back and then raised his voice and said that a reddened head could conjure.

But the prisoner gave him no response. Angered, he shouted at the young woman’s back. “Reddened head,” he barked. “Reddened head! Reddened head could conjure.”

Her mother, Mary decided, had been right: better to die than to endure this. And her own first instinct had also been right when on the day she was taken she had not cared about being killed. Let them, just let them, she had thought. She should have died with her family.

In this fashion, she came to the decision to tell her captors that her life should be taken.

“I want to die.”

The Shawnee and French, smoking tobacco and sprawled about on the ground, looked at her.

She raised her voice. “I wish to die.” She swallowed, grasped her own long hair, pulled it up high above her head, and with the other arm made a swift cutting motion at the level of her scalp.

A Frenchman sat up.

She addressed him and repeated, “I wish to die. Kill me.” And then she said, “Please.”

The Frenchman turned to another Frenchman, who turned and said something undecipherable to a Shawnee. Then the second Frenchman said in a laconic manner, “Non.”

“Please.”

“Non,” said the Frenchman. “NON.”