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  In the two days and three nights while he waited John realised how much of a Powhatan he had become. The forest was no longer fearful to him. He thought how he had once seemed to be a little beetle crawling across a terrifying and infinite world. He now seemed no bigger, the Powhatan never thought of themselves as owners of the forest. He now felt as if this little beetle called John Tradescant, called Eagle, had found his place and his ordained path in this place, and that he need fear nothing since his place led him from the earth to birth and life and death and then to the earth again.

  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.

  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.’

  She nodded and picked up her burden of dried meat, and set off. John watched her rangy, long stride until the trees hid her, then he turned and set off at a hunting jog downriver to Hobert’s plantation.

  John slowed as he recognised the features of Hobert’s boundaries, a pine tree where they had slashed a crude ‘H’, a magnificent oak, bending over the path and shading it with its spreading branches, and then he saw the shingled roof of the Hobert house and a thin spiral of smoke coming from the chimney. John stepped back into the shade of the trees and hunkered down on his heels to watch.

  He saw a man bent low under a burden of wood come out of the trees and fling down the cord by the door and straighten up with a sigh. A black man: Francis the Negro slave. He saw the door open and it was Mrs Hobert, speaking sharply and then going indoors. He waited a little longer as it grew cold and the light started to drain from the sky. Bertram must be out late with his gun. John did not move even though the hairs on his arms and his chest stood up, and his skin prickled with goosebumps against the cold. Only when it was nearly dark did he decide that Bertram must already be indoors. He rose to his feet and went silently down the hill to the little house nestling on a piece of flat ground before the river.

  He hesitated at the door and then put his eye to the crack to peer into the firelit interior. It was a sparsely furnished room. A table before the fire; two stools and a hewed tree stump served as chairs. A box bed built into the wall was occupied by a man, his shoulder hunched against the room, his head tucked down. A ladder at the back of the room led to a sleeping platform, a string and a piece of sacking serving as a curtain between the two. John thought of the spick and span London house that the Hoberts had left for this venture and felt his heart ache for them, and surprisingly for himself too: another exile in this strange and remote land.

  He tapped on the door and called out at the same time: ‘A friend, John Tradescant.’ His own name was awkward in his mouth.

  Despite the reassurance he heard a little scream from Mrs Hobert and heard a stool overturn as Francis leaped to his feet.

  ‘Who?’ she demanded.

  ‘John Tradescant, your shipmate and neighbour,’ he repeated.

  ‘We thought you were dead!’ The door opened cautiously and Mrs Hobert’s white face peered out.

  John kept back in the shadows. ‘I was with the Powhatan,’ he said.

  ‘Savages?’

  He bit back a retort. ‘Yes. So I look strange …’