She turned at that, as if she understood the tone of his voice. Turned and looked directly at him, without shame, as if she were about to ask him what he meant – if he were serious. J broke off and flushed. He managed an awkward smile.

‘Well!’ he said. ‘Just as well this all means nothing to you! Better be off!’

She rose to her feet and gestured to the river. Her half-tilted head asked: ‘Which way?’ South into the country, which neither of them knew, or upriver to Jamestown?

‘Jamestown,’ J said shortly, pointing north-west. ‘I have been rambling like a fool. Jamestown, of course.’

He seated himself in the canoe and steadied it with his paddle. It was easier now that they had gone out every day and he had grown skilful. She pushed off the prow of the boat and stepped aboard. They paddled as a team and the boat wove easily along the shoreline, and then they felt the stronger push of the river.

An hour out of Jamestown, where the river started getting dirty and the bank was pocked with felled trees, she called a halt and they ran the canoe ashore. Slowly, unwillingly, they washed off the grease in the water. She took a handful of leaves and scrubbed his back so that his white skin shone through the dark grease and the familiar smell, which he had hated so much on the first day, was dispersed. Together they put on the clothes they must wear in the town, and she shrank into the confines of the ragged shift and looked no longer like a deer in dappled sunlight but instead like a sluttish maidservant.

J, shrugging back into his shirt and breeches after the freedom of the buckskin loincloth, felt as if he were taking on the shackles of some sort of prison, becoming a man again with a man’s sorrows and no longer a free being, at home in the forest. At once the cloud of insects settled greedily on his sunburned arms and shoulders and face. J swatted at them and swore, and the girl smiled with her lips but with no laughter in her eyes.

‘We’ll come out again,’ J said encouragingly. He pointed to himself and to her and to the trees. ‘We’ll come out again some day.’

She nodded but her eyes were dark.

They got into the canoe and began to paddle upstream to Jamestown. J was plagued all the way by the biting moths and the sweat in his eyes, the tightness of the shirt across his back and the rub of his boots. By the time they came alongside the little wooden quay he was sweating and irritable. There was a new vessel in port and a crowd on the quayside. No-one wasted more than a quick glance on the little Indian girl and the white man in the dugout canoe.