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  ‘Do you think I am afraid to die?’ she asked him as he brought her a bowl of suppawn.

  ‘I thought only that you were hungry,’ he said.

  ‘You thought right,’ she said sharply. ‘I am hungry for meat. So eat your breakfast, Eagle, and go out and drop from the sky on to a deer. The People need food. The hunters must do their work.’

  He nodded at the wisdom of what she was saying, but he could not understand how she could refuse a bowl of porridge when his own belly growled with hunger at the sight of it.

  ‘I love the People more than I love a fat belly on myself,’ she explained. ‘And I was fed from my grandmother’s bowl when she went hungry to feed me, and she was fed from hers.’

  John dipped his head and ate his porridge and gave thanks for the filling warm sweetness of it.

  When he looked up her bright hungry eyes were on him. ‘Now go and kill a deer,’ she ordered.

  It was not always easy to hunt. The days were short and icy cold, and when they had shot a white-coated hare, or a deer, or a skunk, or a foolish foraging squirrel there was less meat on the bones than on summer carcases. The fish weirs froze and the little treats which supplemented the Powhatan diet, the fruits and nuts and berries, were gone. There were edible roots which the women could dig for, and there was the great temptation of the storehouse.

  ‘Why can we not eat from the store?’ John asked Suckahanna.

  ‘We do,’ she said. ‘But we share it very carefully when there is no food to be had in any other way. It has not come to that yet. It may not come to it this year.’

  ‘But there is enough in the store to keep the village for the whole season!’ John exclaimed. ‘It will spoil if we don’t eat it!’

  She gave him a sly sideways smile. ‘No it won’t,’ she said. ‘The meat is properly smoked and the fish salted down in pots. The oysters and crayfish are smoked and dried and the seeds and nuts are dry and safe. You are pretending that the food will go bad to give you an excuse to eat.’

  John made an impatient noise and turned on his heel.

  ‘Why can we not eat the store food?’ he asked Musses.

  She shook her head. ‘That is the wealth of the People,’ she said. ‘Our inheritance. We saved it carefully, from good harvests and bad. We keep it through the winter and eat as little as we can. That is the way of this people. They are not Englishmen who eat their seed corn and then find in spring they have nothing to plant.’

  ‘Why can we not eat the store food?’ John asked Attone.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you asked Suckahanna?’

  ‘Yes, and Musses.’

  ‘And what do the women tell you?’

  ‘One tells me that we may need the food later, though we are halfway through winter already and as hungry as we can be. The other tells me that the People do not eat their seed stores. But these are not seed stores. These are dried oysters.’ John felt the juices rush into his mouth at the thought of oysters, and swallowed, hoping that his hunger did not show in his face.

  Attone took his shoulder in a hard, friendly grip and put his face close to John’s. ‘You’re right. It’s not seed. You’re right, it would be good to eat some of it now. Why do you think we have waited and worked and starved ourselves to store a year’s supply of food?’

  John shook his head. Attone’s lips came closer to his ear.

  ‘In the time of the uprising when our king, Opechancanough, went against the white men, do you know what they did to our fish weirs?’

  ‘They tore them down,’ John said, as softly as the other man.

  ‘And what they did to our crops in the fields?’

  ‘They trampled them into the mud.’

  ‘They did worse than that. They let the women plant and weed them, so we thought that they would let us get them in. Then, after we had spent a year of our labour in tending the food they came at harvest time and set light to them and to the forest around them.’ He dropped back and looked into John’s face. ‘They burned anything, without thought,’ he said. ‘I would have understood it if they had stolen the harvest from us. But they did not do that. They just burned it where it stood, ripe and ready for picking. So that winter they went hungry themselves without our food to buy. But we – we starved.’

  John nodded.

  ‘I buried my brother that year,’ Attone said quietly. ‘My older brother, who was like a father to me. He died with a belly full of frozen grass. There was nothing else to eat.’

  John nodded in silence.

  ‘So now before any brave would lift his hand against a white man he would want to know that he has a year’s supply of food in his house. Don’t you think that, my Eagle?’

  John gaped. ‘This is a supply for war?’

  The grip on his shoulder tightened so hard it was like a vice. ‘Did you think we would let them push us into the mountains, into the sea?’

  Dumbly, John shook his head.

  ‘Of course there will be war,’ Attone said matter-of-factly. ‘My son has to have a trail to follow. He has to have deer to kill. If the white man will not keep to his treaties, will not share the land, then he will have to be killed.’

  John bowed his head. He felt a great sense of impending doom.

  ‘You grieve for your people?’ Attone asked.

  ‘Yes,’ John replied. ‘Both of them.’

  The deer were fewer, hunting was hard. The men went out in twos and threes, looking for small game and birds. Attone and John left the usual trails and struck out downriver. Suckahanna watched them go, her baby strapped on her back. She embraced John and then she stood back and raised her hand in a respectful salute to her previous husband. He touched his forehead and his heart to her. ‘Suckahanna, guard my son and daughter,’ he said.

  ‘Go safely, both of you,’ she replied. ‘May the trail be smooth under your moccasins and the hunting rich.’

  The two men jogged out of the village. John was used to the steady half-running pace of the hunting party now and his calves no longer seized with cramp as his feet ate up the miles. But it was hard running in the snow. Both men were shiny with sweat when they paused to draw breath and to listen to the quietness of the winter woods all around them.

  There was a mild thaw. John could hear a steady drip drip of melting water from trees where dark-stained twigs were at last thickening with buds. Attone’s head was cocked. ‘What can you hear?’ he asked John.

  John shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

  Attone raised his eyebrows. He could never become accustomed to the insensitivity of the Englishman.

  At once he crouched and his hand went into the gesture with two raised fingers which meant, hare or rabbit. At once John crouched beside him and they both put an arrow on the bow.

  It came slowly, quite unaware of their presence. They heard it before they saw it because it was white against the white snow: a winter hare with a coat blanched like ermine. When it dropped on to its haunches the only sign that revealed its presence was the little dimples of dark footprints behind it, and the occasional betraying flick of an ear.

  Attone raised his bow and the little thwack of sound as the bow was released was the first thing that alerted the hare. It bounded up and the arrow caught it in the body, behind the foreleg. John and Attone were behind it at once but the animal raced ahead of them, the arrow jinking and diving with it, like a harpoon in a speared fish.

  Attone gave a sudden cry as he tripped and fell to the ground. John knew well enough not to check for a moment. He kept running, following the terrified creature, weaving in and out of trees, jumping over fallen logs, diving around rocks, and finally scrabbling on hands and knees through the winter-thin scrub to keep the wounded animal in sight.

  Suddenly there was a crack of a musket shot, loud and startling as cannon fire in the icy silence, and John flung himself backwards in terror. The hare was thrown into the air and fell down on its back. John rose up from the bushes, half-naked in b