She shot him a quick, scornful look from under her dark eyebrows. ‘Because the earth and the women are together,’ she half-whispered. ‘That is where the power of the People belongs, not in the war councils or in the hunting parties. It is women who have the power to make things grow, to give birth. The rest – is pipesmoke.’

John felt his view, his comfortable view of the world, shift and rock. ‘Men have the power,’ he said. ‘God made them in his image.’

She looked at him as if he might be joking. ‘You may believe that your god did that,’ she said politely. ‘But we are the children of the Hare.’

‘The Hare?’

She stopped her work and sat back on her heels. ‘I shall tell you as if you were my little child,’ she said with a smile. ‘Listen. In the very beginning when there was nothing but darkness and the sound of the running water, the great Hare came out of the darkness and made both man and woman.’

John squatted down beside her in the damp earth, watched the smile move from her eyes to her lips, and the way her hair fell over her bare shoulders.

‘They were hungry. Men and women are always hungry. So the Hare put them in a bag until he could feed them. He ran through the darkness with the bag held tight in his mouth and everywhere he ran there was land made, and water made, and the great deer to walk the land and drink the water and feed the new-made man and woman. And everywhere he went there were fierce mouths biting at him from out of the darkness, hungry meat-eating mouths that would snap at his heels and at the bag he was carrying. But everywhere he ran, the mouths were destroyed, and fled back into the darkness until it was safe for him to do what he wished.’

John waited.

Suckahanna smiled. ‘Then, and only then, he opened the bag and let out the man and the woman. The man ran to hunt the deer. The man has the great richness of the deer. This is what he wanted. But the woman –’ she paused and gave him a sly sideways smile ‘– the woman has everything else.’

A year ago John would have called it a heathen tale full of heresy and nonsense. But now he listened and nodded. ‘The women have everything else?’

‘Everything but hunting and war.’

‘So what am I to do?’ he asked her.

Suckahanna looked momentarily surprised, as if he had moved the conversation onwards in one great bound. ‘You will get well,’ she said slowly. ‘And then you will decide.’

‘Decide?’

‘Where you want to live. What kind of man you want to be.’

John hesitated. ‘I thought I would get well and go back to my home – to my fields up the river.’