‘Suckahanna is married to my brother,’ the woman with the bow on the string said precisely. ‘He went with her when she took her gifts of food to you. We did not realise that you would eat it all at once – like a pig with acorns. We did not mean to make you sick.’

John felt embarrassment burn under the skin of his face. ‘I was foolish,’ he said. ‘I was very hungry.’ The thought of these people discussing his greed, and perhaps watching him void himself and retch, made him want to close his eyes and be anywhere else, even back in his own little house facing death, rather than here with the woman looking at him in mild curiosity.

‘Why did Suckahanna not show herself?’ he asked. ‘I would be her friend now she has a husband.’ He looked at the arrow on the string again. ‘I never wronged her,’ he said hastily. ‘I wanted to marry her when I thought she was a maid.’

The woman’s face did not soften. John thought in sudden, rapid terror that perhaps they had saved him for some dreadful execution. There were stories in Jamestown of men having their bellies cut open and their guts dragged out before their eyes. ‘I meant her no harm,’ John said. ‘I meant none of you any harm.’

‘Your house is where we hunt,’ the other woman observed. ‘You have frightened away the game birds and the deer are making other paths in the woods to get away from your burned field and the smell of you.’

‘I am sorry,’ John said again. He thought of the governor’s map and the empty spaces of forest unmarked by any names. ‘I thought the forest was empty.’

They looked at him as if his words were simply incomprehensible. ‘Empty?’

‘Empty of people,’ John corrected himself. ‘I knew there were animals living there. But I did not think it was your land.’

‘The animals do not own the land,’ the woman with the arrow pointed at his body said slowly, as if she were trying to understand some alien logic.

‘No,’ John agreed.

‘But you know they are there, they pass through the forest.’

‘Yes.’

‘We pass through the forest too, we follow them when we hunt them, we clear land for a season to grow our food. How can land be empty?’

John swallowed on a dry throat, his head thudded sharply. ‘It is how we white men speak,’ he said helplessly.

The woman with the bow nodded, the arrow still pointing at his belly. ‘You people said you would come here for just a little while, look for precious metal and then go,’ she observed. ‘Now you tell us that the land is empty and you build your houses on the game trails and fell the trees of the forests and never let them grow again.’