‘One tells me that we may need the food later, though we are halfway through winter already and as hungry as we can be. The other tells me that the People do not eat their seed stores. But these are not seed stores. These are dried oysters.’ John felt the juices rush into his mouth at the thought of oysters, and swallowed, hoping that his hunger did not show in his face.

Attone took his shoulder in a hard, friendly grip and put his face close to John’s. ‘You’re right. It’s not seed. You’re right, it would be good to eat some of it now. Why do you think we have waited and worked and starved ourselves to store a year’s supply of food?’

John shook his head. Attone’s lips came closer to his ear.

‘In the time of the uprising when our king, Opechancanough, went against the white men, do you know what they did to our fish weirs?’

‘They tore them down,’ John said, as softly as the other man.

‘And what they did to our crops in the fields?’

‘They trampled them into the mud.’

‘They did worse than that. They let the women plant and weed them, so we thought that they would let us get them in. Then, after we had spent a year of our labour in tending the food they came at harvest time and set light to them and to the forest around them.’ He dropped back and looked into John’s face. ‘They burned anything, without thought,’ he said. ‘I would have understood it if they had stolen the harvest from us. But they did not do that. They just burned it where it stood, ripe and ready for picking. So that winter they went hungry themselves without our food to buy. But we – we starved.’

John nodded.

‘I buried my brother that year,’ Attone said quietly. ‘My older brother, who was like a father to me. He died with a belly full of frozen grass. There was nothing else to eat.’

John nodded in silence.

‘So now before any brave would lift his hand against a white man he would want to know that he has a year’s supply of food in his house. Don’t you think that, my Eagle?’

John gaped. ‘This is a supply for war?’

The grip on his shoulder tightened so hard it was like a vice. ‘Did you think we would let them push us into the mountains, into the sea?’

Dumbly, John shook his head.

‘Of course there will be war,’ Attone said matter-of-factly. ‘My son has to have a trail to follow. He has to have deer to kill. If the white man will not keep to his treaties, will not share the land, then he will have to be killed.’

John bowed his head. He felt a great sense of impending doom.

‘You grieve for your people?’ Attone asked.