Her youngest son came out into the open without being called, his expression carefully neutral. Twenty years old, the tallest of all the Bonner men, taller even than his father by a few inches. The most stubborn of all the children, which was saying quite a lot. Nothing of embarrassment or regret nor even a trace of remorse.

“What exactly is it that you were planning?” She heard the tremor in her voice but could do nothing to stop it.

“We were married not an hour ago,” Gabriel said. “By the dominie at the Dutch Reformed church.”

Elizabeth drew in a sharp breath. “Oh, Gabriel.”

“You eloped,” Gabriel said.

“The circumstances were very different,” Elizabeth said. A conversation they had had many times, and were about to have again while behind them a hanging ran its course.

“You and Da wanted to get married and your father disapproved,” Gabriel said. “Seems pretty much the same to me.”

“But I didn’t object to you getting married,” Elizabeth said, her voice rising and cracking. “All I was asking—”

“You ask too much, Ma,” Gabriel said.

Elizabeth tried to gather her thoughts. She turned to look at the girl. The youngest daughter of Many-Doves and Runs-from-Bears, a child she had helped deliver. On her deathbed Many-Doves had asked Elizabeth to look out for this daughter’s welfare, and Elizabeth had sworn to do her best. What she had never imagined was that her own son would get in the way.

“Annie. This is what you wanted?”

The girl raised her head. She was so much like Many-Doves that the sight of her always gave Elizabeth a jolt, joy and sorrow intertwined.

“Hen’en.” Yes. “I left the school.”

“Of your own free will?”

Gabriel began to protest and Elizabeth shot him her sternest glance. He scowled, but stepped back.

“Annie. Kenenstatsi.” Elizabeth switched to Kahnyen’kehàka, because it was the language the two used when they talked together. It was a language she spoke imperfectly, but she needed every advantage at her disposal.

“You must say what it is you want. It is your choice. Not Gabriel’s, not mine. It is not too late.”

A flash of anger lit up Annie’s face. She said, “Aunt, I know who I am. I am Kenenstatsi of the Kahnyen’kehàka Wolf clan. I am the daughter of Many-Doves and the granddaughter of Falling-Day. I am the great-granddaughter of Made-of-Bones who was clan mother of the Wolf for five hundred moons. I am the great-great-granddaughter of Hawk-Woman, who killed an O’seronni chief with her own hands and fed his heart to her sons in the Hunger Moon, in the time when we were still many, and strong.”

Her voice never faltered, but she paused, as if to gather her thoughts. Gabriel stood behind Annie, his posture stiff and his jaw set hard.

“Gabriel wrote to me and asked me to meet him here. I listened for my mother’s voice, and in my dreams I ask my grandmothers to guide me. I am a daughter of the Wolf Longhouse, and it is my right to choose a husband.”

All the tension left Gabriel’s shoulders. The expression on his face was so full of emotion that Elizabeth felt it was an invasion of his privacy even to look at him.

To Annie she said, “My son is very fortunate to have won your favor.”

Annie closed her eyes very briefly and then she smiled. For the first time in this very difficult discussion, she smiled. There was nothing of nervousness or agitation in her smile, but a kind of quiet calm that soothed some of Elizabeth’s doubts.

In the field beyond them the noise of the crowd rose and then fell off suddenly. In the still they could hear the creak of the swinging rope.

Gabriel would follow in his father’s and his grandfather’s footsteps, and make his living hunting and trapping in the Kahnyen’kehàka tradition. He would never dream about leaving Hidden Wolf, as long as he had Annie with him. In his single-mindedness he was so much like his father at this age.

“I am sorry about the school, and the money you paid to send me there,” Annie said. “But it wasn’t the right place for me.”

“I wanted you to be sure,” Elizabeth said. “I thought you might like teaching.”

“She’s not you, Ma.” Gabriel’s temper, so easily aroused, flared up.

“And that is my misfortune.” Annie shot back at him. “Do you show your mother disrespect on the very day you take a wife?”

The girl walked away and Gabriel watched her go, a stunned expression on his face. Then he ran to catch up to her. Elizabeth watched them both, and wondered how much she was to blame for this turn of events, and if at forty or fifty her youngest son would look back on this day and still find fault with her.

Chapter VI

On the mountain called Hidden Wolf the streams boil up, ready to breach their banks.

The ground is still frozen solid; a shovel wouldn’t get far, and neither does the rain. The earth cannot soak up anything at all, and so the water begins to move, dragged down and down by its own weight, pulling debris from the forest floor along for the ride: branches, rocks, a whole hawthorn bush trailing its roots like a hundred knotty legs. The rain fills the burrows where small things tend their young. The water flushes out the deepest fox holes, and rouses a young bear from hibernation. From deep in the forest a moose bellows its irritation, but the sound disappears into the swelling water.

The water moves, and everything must move with it.

Chapter VII