As the sun rose and warmed the air they would all gather for a breakfast of fruits or nuts or a gruel made from cornflour and berries. This was the hungriest time of the year – the winter stores were almost exhausted and the summer crops were not yet ripe – but even so no-one went hungry in the village. The stores had been put aside all through the rich fruitful time of the year, and then extra had been laid aside as well in the huge granary building filled with great bowls of dried pulses, huge netted sacks of dried maize, vats as big as a man filled with nuts. John wondered why they did not broach the great store, but no-one would tell him.

After breakfast the men would string their bows, oil their bodies, tie back their hair, paint their faces, and go out to hunt together. John watched the laughing camaraderie of the huntsmen with the knowledge that he would always be an outsider. The men did not speak to him, he did not know if they even understood English. The women understood everything he said, but their replies were brief. Inevitably, John was learning the rhythm of Powhatan speech, picking up individual words and names. He watched the men, understanding that they were planning the hunt. Suckahanna’s husband was among them, in the very heart of the preparations. He was acknowledged as a fine hunter, a man who could kill a deer alone, without the help of a hunting party. Other braves could drop a deer with a well-placed arrow when it had been driven from one cover to another and directed towards them; but Suckahanna’s husband could throw a deerskin over his shoulder, strap the horns to his head and move so skilfully and so deer-like with his tittupping step and his nervous, flickering head-tossing, with his sudden stag-like stillness, that he could go among a herd of deer and pick one off as it grazed beside him. A man had to be blessed by the deer god to manage such a feat. Suckahanna’s husband was treated with loving respect and he alone decided the course of every hunt. Even his name showed his nature. He was called Attone – the arrow.

As the men readied themselves to leave the village, the women gathered children and their gardening tools and went to the fields to plant and to weed. While John was weak from his illness and under Suckahanna’s special protection he went with her, and watched them planting. Their crop was set in a field which had been roughly cleared by burning. They left the tree stumps, left even the biggest living trees and planted around them. The edge of the field was ragged, where the fire had not taken hold. Its disorder offended John’s sense of how a tidy field should be set square on the landscape, its lines drawn clearly, hedged and ditched.