“America is a large country,” said Bellenger, smiling.

He took the boy by the hand, and made his adieus.  The old De Ferrier deeply saluted the boy and slightly saluted his guardian.  The other De Ferrier nodded.

“We are making a mistake, Philippe!” said the uncle.

“Let him go,” said the nephew.  “He will probably slip away at once out of St. Bartholomew’s.  We can do nothing until we are certain of the powers behind him.  Endless disaster to the child himself might result from our interference.  If France were ready now to take back her king, would she accept an imbecile?”

The old De Ferrier groaned aloud.

“Bellenger is not a bad man,” added Philippe.

Eagle watched her playmate until the closing gate hid him from sight.  She remembered having once implored her nurse for a small plaster image displayed in a shop.  It could not speak, nor move, nor love her in return.  But she cried secretly all night to have it in her arms, ashamed of the unreasonable desire, but conscious that she could not be appeased by anything else.  That plaster image denied to her symbolized the strongest passion of her life.

The pigeons wheeled around St. Bat’s tower, or strutted burnished on the wall.  The bell, which she had forgotten since sitting with the boy in front of the blacksmith shop, again boomed out its record of time; though it seemed to Eagle that a long, lonesome period like eternity had begun.

BOOK I

AWAKING

I

I remember poising naked upon a rock, ready to dive into Lake George.  This memory stands at the end of a diminishing vista; the extreme point of coherent recollection.  My body and muscular limbs reflected in the water filled me with savage pride.

I knew, as the beast knows its herd, that my mother Marianne was hanging the pot over the fire pit in the center of our lodge; the children were playing with other papooses; and my father was hunting down the lake.  The hunting and fishing were good, and we had plenty of meat.  Skenedonk, whom I considered a person belonging to myself, was stripping more slowly on the rock behind me.  We were heated with wood ranging.  Aboriginal life, primeval and vigor-giving, lay behind me when I plunged expecting to strike out under the delicious forest shadow.

When I came up the sun had vanished, the woods and their shadow were gone.  So were the Indian children playing on the shore, and the shore with them.  My mother Marianne might still be hanging her pot in the lodge.  But all the hunting lodges of our people were as completely lost as if I had entered another world.