It took another two days for the elk to be butchered thoroughly, smoked and packed ready for carriage back to the village. After the first day a couple of fast-running braves had taken the first consignment back to the village for the elderly and the very young, and those too sick to travel into the forest. The skin was tanned and ready, the meat was smoked. The bones were gathered and tied into a great bundle. Suckahanna poured water over the fires and scuffed the embers with her foot. The women untied the saplings and they sprang back up. It was clear that there had been a house on the site but by spring there would be no mark on the ground; and that was what they wanted. Not only to keep their ways and their paths a secret, but because the forest must be a home to the elk as well as to the Powhatan, and elk will not come near a village nor even a trace of one.

When all the work was done John hesitated with his burden of meat. ‘I want to visit Bertram Hobert,’ he said to Suckahanna.

‘What for?’

‘I saw him while we were hunting. He is hungry and he is sick. His feet are falling off him. He was my friend. I should like to take him some meat.’

She looked at him with a long, worried gaze. ‘You cannot go looking like this,’ she said. ‘He will shoot you the moment he sees you.’

‘I shall leave a gift of meat on his doorstep,’ John said. ‘That was done for me once, and it saved my life. I should like to do the same.’

‘You ate yourself sick,’ she observed. ‘Take care you don’t kill him by accident.’

John chuckled. ‘He has a wife to care for him,’ he said. ‘Or at least he did have. He is my friend, Suckahanna.’

The look she turned to him was more powerful than tender. ‘He cannot be your friend now,’ she said. ‘You are a Powhatan.’

‘He can,’ John argued. ‘If a Powhatan could not be the friend of a white man then I would have died in the woods and I would never have been called Eagle by one of the finest hunters in the People.’

‘That was then,’ she said gently. ‘The river gets wider every day. The distance between one shore and the other is greater all the time. You cannot cross and recross, my husband.’

He put his hand out to her and barely touched her fingertips. As soon as she felt his touch her eyes flickered closed for just a moment at the pleasure of the warmth of his hand. John knew that he had won.

‘Shall I wait for you?’ she asked in quite a different tone, as low as a sleepy honey bee in winter.

‘Go with the People,’ he replied. ‘I will catch you up before you reach the village.’