John looked around for his clothes. Everything was gone except his boots. Suckahanna was standing among a small group of women, they were all looking at his nakedness with a cheerful curiosity.

Suckahanna stepped forward and held out a bundle of clothing to him. As John took it he saw that it was a clout – a piece of cloth to twist between his buttocks and tie on a strap around his waist – a deerskin kilt and a deerskin shirt. He recoiled. ‘Where are my clothes?’

Suckahanna shook her head firmly. ‘They smelled,’ she said. ‘And they had lice and fleas. We are a clean people. You could not wear those clothes in our houses.’

He felt ashamed and unable to argue.

‘Put those on,’ she said. ‘We are all waiting for you.’

He tied the strings of the clout around his waist and felt better with his nakedness hidden from so many bright black eyes. ‘Why are they all here?’

‘To find the herb for your hand,’ she said.

John looked down into his palm. The wound was cleaner from the sweating, but there was still a crease of rotting flesh at its centre.

He pulled on the shirt and straightened the kilt. He thought that he must look absurd with his big white legs under this beautifully embroidered skirt and then his own heavy boots on his feet; but none of the women laughed. They moved off, one trotting behind another, with the old woman at the front and Suckahanna at the rear. She glanced back at John. ‘Follow,’ was all she said.

He remembered then the unbearable steady pace she would use when they were in the woods together. All the women moved at that remorseless trot which was too fast for him to walk and too slow for him to run. He walked and then ran after them in short, breathless bursts and Suckahanna never turned her head to see if he could keep up, but just kept her own steady pace as if there were neither thorns nor stones under her light moccasins.

The old woman in the front was running and watching the plants on either side of the path. John recognised a master plantswoman when she stopped and pointed a little way into the wood. She had spotted the one she wanted, at a run, in the twilight. John peered at it. It looked like a liverwort, but a form that he had never seen before.

‘Wait here,’ Suckahanna ordered him and followed the other women as they went towards it. They seated themselves down in a circle around it and they were silent for a moment, as if in prayer. John felt a strange prickling on the back of his neck as if something powerful and mysterious was happening. The women held out their hands over the plant as if they were checking the heat over a cooking pot, and then their hands made weaving gestures, one to another, above and around the plant in a constant pattern. They were humming softly, and then the words of a song emerged, softly chanted.