He knew there were wolves in the forest and soon they would get the scent of the elk, and so he built a rough fence of fallen branches around the carcase, and kept the fire lit. Now that he could eat well from the forest the immense labour of his English life seemed to him absurd. He could hardly remember how he had nearly starved in a wooden house set in a forest teeming with life. But then he remembered the hungry anger in Bertram’s twisted face and he knew that a man could live among plenty and never know that he was rich.

On the morning of the third day, as John methodically cut steaks of meat from the big animal’s body, he heard a tiny crackle of movement behind him and whirled around with his knife at the ready.

‘Eagle, I give you greeting,’ said Attone pleasantly.

Suckahanna was with him. John held out his arms to her and she came to him, her body as light as a girl in his grasp, her shoulders bird-like and bony.

‘I brought your wife and my children, and some others to help cure the meat and to feast. They were hungry at home,’ Attone said. ‘Build up the fire, they will come soon.’

John wiped Attone’s knife and returned it to him with a word of thanks and then he and Suckahanna piled John’s little brushwood fence on to his fire so that it flared up and crackled. As soon as it had burned down into hot embers Suckahanna brought large boulders from the river and heaped them with ashes to make them hot, then she laid dozens of small steaks of meat on the hot stones where they sizzled and spat. By the time the village had arrived – all those able to walk – there was meat cooked and ready for everyone.

Everyone ate a little, no-one ate to excess. Everyone sighed at the end of a couple of mouthfuls and said, ‘Good. Good,’ as if they had attended a banquet of forty-four courses in Whitehall. Then they all stretched out in the bright winter sunshine and dozed for a little while.

When the shadows lengthened, they set to work. The women made a temporary long house by pegging down saplings and weaving bark and leaves through the twigs. The men set up drying poles for the skin of the beast, and enlarged the fire for cooking and smoking the meat. The children were sent out to gather wood for the fires and for another, wider fence, to encircle the smoking meat and the long house. By sunset, when they all went down to the water to pray and to send the smoking leaves of tobacco downriver, glowing in the darkness, they had a little fortified camp: safe against wolves, defensible in case of attack.