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  The grandness of the name caused a murmur of admiration from the other braves at the honour being done to John.

  ‘Eagle?’

  ‘Yes. Because you kill a deer by dropping on it from the sky.’

  There was a scream of uncontrollable laughter and the men were clinging to each other for support again, John in the centre, Attone with his arms around him. ‘Eagle!’ the braves said. ‘Mighty hunter!’ ‘He who falls like an eagle without warning!’

  They turned and ran down to the river together to wash. The women pulled the smaller children out of the way of the laughing, shouting men. They plunged into the river together and splashed like boys before huskanaw. Then Attone caught sight of a shadowy tall figure on the riverbank and straightened up and looked serious.

  The werowance was watching them. Attone came out of the river and the men of the hunt followed him. They dried themselves and pulled on clean buckskins and then, when they were all ready, the werowance led the way to the dancing circle and the braves stood before him.

  ‘Did the man who wants Suckahanna kill his deer?’ the werowance asked in their own language.

  There was a moment’s complete consternation.

  ‘We brought three deer home,’ Attone said smoothly. ‘A fine day’s kill, and the man who wants Suckahanna was at my shoulder the whole day. He did not hang back, he did not fail, he did not tire. He planned the hunt and his plan was a good one. It drove the deer to the river and we killed three.’

  ‘Which one did he kill?’ the werowance asked.

  Attone fell silent.

  ‘We could have killed none without his plan,’ one of the other men volunteered. ‘He saw that we could drive them to the river. He showed us the way.’

  The werowance nodded leisurely as if he were prepared to spend all night on this inquisition. ‘And which did he kill?’ he asked. ‘One of the bucks? The doe?’

  John, following this interrogation as well as he could, understood that the hunters could not conceal his failure. He felt a great wave of disappointment wash through him: that the hunt and the laughter and his naming should all come to nothing because an old man, old enough to be his father, should stick to the letter of the law. He thought that the way of a brave would be to acknowledge his failure, like a man, and then walk away from the village and never look back. He stepped forwards, he opened his mouth to speak. He took a moment to think of the word which meant defeat in Powhatan and realised that he did not know one. Perhaps there was no word for defeat in Powhatan. He framed a sentence with the words he did know. Something like – ‘I have not killed. I cannot marry.’

  ‘Yes?’ The werowance invited him to speak.

  There was a cry from the women at the edge of the dancing circle.

  ‘Whose deer is this?’ someone asked.

  A woman came towards them. She had hold of the front legs of a deer and was dragging it towards them. From the loll of the head it was clear that the neck was broken.

  ‘That’s my deer!’ John exclaimed. He hammered Attone on the shoulder. ‘That’s my deer!’ He ran towards the woman and took the delicate legs from her hands. ‘This is my deer! My deer!’

  ‘I found it at the river’s edge,’ she said. ‘It had been washed downriver. But it had not been in the water long.’

  ‘The Eagle killed it!’ Attone announced. At once there was a ripple of laughter from the braves. The werowance shot a quick sharp look around them.

  ‘Did you kill this deer?’ he asked John.

  John could feel a bubble of laughter, of joy, rising up in his tight throat. ‘Yes, sire,’ he said. ‘That is my deer, I killed it. I want Suckahanna.’

  ‘Eagle! Eagle!’ The shout went up from the braves.

  The werowance looked at Attone. ‘Do you release your wife to this man, your wife and your first-born son, and your second-born child?’

  Attone looked straight at John and his hard, dark face creased into an irresistible smile. ‘He’s a good man,’ he said. ‘He has the determination of a salmon leaping homeward, and the heart of a buffalo. I release Suckahanna to him. He is my brother. He is the Eagle.’

  The werowance raised his ornate spear. ‘Hear this,’ he said so quietly that all the women at the edge of the dancing circle craned forward to listen, Suckahanna among them.

  ‘This is our brother. He has proved himself in the hunt and he is the husband of Suckahanna. Tomorrow we receive him into the People, and his name shall be Eagle.’

  There was a roar of approval and applause and people crowded around John. John had to fight his way through smiling faces and slapping hands to get to Suckahanna and fold her in his arms. She clung to him and lifted her face to his. As their lips met he felt a sudden jolt of passion, a feeling he had forgotten for many years, and a deep hunger for more of her; more, as if a kiss alone would not satisfy him, could never satisfy him, as if nothing would ever be enough but to fold her into his heart and keep her beside him for always.

  Suckahanna moved her face from his and reluctantly John released her. She rested her head on his shoulder and his senses shifted again to take in the touch of her slight body tucked beneath his arm, the way her long legs matched his side, the scent of her hair, the warmth of her naked skin against his cool damp chest.

  The people were cheering them, linking their names together.

  ‘Why do they call you Eagle?’ she asked, turning her head up to look into his face.

  He caught sight of Attone, waiting for his answer. ‘It is private,’ he said with assumed coldness. ‘Something for us braves.’

  Attone grinned.

  John could not sleep with Suckahanna that night, though she moved from Attone’s house to stay the night with Musses. Attone himself carried her deerskin, her baskets and her pots to Musses’s hut and kissed her tenderly on the forehead as he left her there.

  ‘Does he not mind?’ John asked, watching this affectionate farewell.

  Suckahanna shot him a quick, mischievous smile. ‘Only a little,’ she said.

  ‘I should mind,’ John observed.

  ‘He married me because he was advised to do so,’ she explained. ‘And then he had to keep me, and my mother, and we brought no dowry, no bride price at all. So he could never afford to take another wife, if he should like another woman. He was stuck with only one: me. And now everything has changed for him. He is a bachelor again, you will have to pay him for me, he will like that, and he can look about him and choose a girl he really wants this time.’

  ‘How much will I have to pay?’ John asked.

  ‘Maybe a lot,’ she warned him. ‘Maybe one of your guns that you left at your house.’

  ‘Are they still there?’ John asked incredulously. ‘I would have thought that everything had been stolen.’

  She nodded serenely. ‘Everything has been stolen. But if it is to be Attone’s gun I think you will find that it will be returned.’

  ‘I should like my guns returned to me,’ John observed.

  She laughed. ‘I should think you would. When you are adopted tomorrow, when you are one of the People, then no man or woman or child will steal from you ever again, not even if they are starving. But they took your goods when you were a rich white man, and now your goods are gone.’

  She looked at his half-convinced expression.

  ‘What would you want with them? What would you do with them here, when everything that a man wants can be got with a bow and arrow, a spear, a hoeing stick, a knife or a fish trap?’

  John thought for a moment and realised that his goods were part of the life he had left behind, part of his old life, better lost and forgotten than standing in the corner of his new Indian house reminding him of the man he had been, of the life he might have lived.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘If he can get them back he can have them.’

  John was woken just before dawn by Attone’s hand on his shoulder. ‘Awake, Eagle,’ the man whispered. ‘Come and wash.’

  They were early, only th