Virgin Earth

Winter 1643, Virginia

John had not thought it possible that he could become one of the Powhatan, but by the autumn he felt as if his London life was left far behind him. There was so much for him to learn that every day was completely absorbing. He was all but fluent in the language – an easy task since once he was adopted into the People not one of them would speak English to him. Within weeks he was speaking nothing but Powhatan, and within months he was thinking in their rich natural imagery. It was not just the language he had to master, but their very way of thinking, of being. He had to learn the pride of a man whose land has been directly given to him, as a favor from the Great Hare. He had to learn the joy of providing food for his family, and for his village to eat. He had to learn the tiny pleasures of family and village life, the easy jokes, the sudden flare-ups of irritation, the appeal of gossip, the danger of making mischief, the delight of Suckahanna’s growing boy and baby, and the dark, constant pleasure of the coming of the night.

They never talked when they made love. They never spoke of it. With his first wife, Jane, it had been that some things were not to be mentioned because they were secret, almost shameful; but with Suckahanna the pleasures of the sleeping platform where anything was possible, where any pleasure might be sought and any sensation given, were pleasures of the darkness and silence. In the daytime and during speech they were in abeyance, waiting for the darkness that would come again.

John had thought in the first months of his marriage that he would go insane, waiting for the sun to set and the children to sleep so that he could take Suckahanna into his arms. Then he was glad that the autumn season made the nights longer, and that the cold weather drove the families of the village indoors earlier and earlier. The children would be rolled together in a thick rug on their sleeping platform, the fire at the center of the house would glow with a warm light and fill the little house with hot smoke, and in the darkness and warmth Suckahanna would enfold him and hold him in her mouth, in her body, until he ached with the urgency of his desire and then finally found the rush and release of his passion, as she closed her eyes and slid into her own joy.

Even on the coldest days the braves went hunting. When the snow was thick on the ground they wore thicker moccasins on their bare feet and buckskin jerkins for warmth. They would laugh at John when they came home if his lips were blue with cold. They threatened to send him stalking stripped naked since his white skin blended so well with the snow.

Attone had John’s old gun, but there was no powder for it. However, he insisted on carrying it on every hunt, and after he had felled a wild goose or duck with a superbly placed arrow and it came spiraling to earth, he would pull the gun from the deerskin holster he had made to carry it on his back, sight the falling bird and solemnly remark “Bang.”

“Good shot, sir!” John would say in English, the words awkward and alien on his tongue.

And Attone would turn and beam. “Good shot,” he would confirm.

Attone was at John’s side for all of the autumn hunts, prompting, reminding, explaining. But all of the Powhatan people were quick to teach John the things he needed to know to live among them. That ceremony of adoption and marriage in one had been all they needed. John was one of the People.

He shared their dangers as well as their pleasures. As autumn turned into winter the stores grew low and the people began to go hungry. The food was set aside for the strongest small children and for the braves on the hunting parties. Old people, the weak, and the sickly accepted that when there was scarcity, the food had to go to those most likely to survive. John offered his portion to Musses but she laughed in his face.

“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 onto 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 carcasses. The fish weirs froze and the little treats that 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 labor 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 backward in terror. The hare was thrown into the air and fell down on its back. John rose up from the bushes, half-naked in bear-grease-stained skin and buckskin kilt and jerkin, and looked into the wan, half-starved face of his old friend Bertram Hobert.

He recognized Bertram at once despite the marks of hunger and fatigue on the man’s face. He was about to cry out in greeting but the English words were sluggish on his tongue; and then he realized that Bertram was pointing his musket at John’s belly.

“That’s mine,” Bertram snarled, showing his black and rotting teeth. “Mine. D’you hear? My food.”

John spread his hands in a quick deferential gesture, aware all the time of his razor-sharp reed arrows nestling in the quiver in the small of his back. He could have one on the string and loosed long before Bertram could reload and prime his musket. Was the man mad to threaten with an empty gun?

“Step back.” Bertram waved him aside. “Step back, or by God I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

John went back two, three steps, and watched with silent pity as Bertram hobbled over to the dead hare. There was precious little meat on it, and the rich guts and heart had been blasted out by the shot on to the snow. The silvery pelt, which would have been good to trade, had been destroyed too. Half the hare had been wasted by killing it with a gunshot, whereas Attone’s reed arrow should have gone straight to the heart and left nothing more than a farthing-size hole.

Bertram bent stiffly over the body, picked it up by the limp ears and stuffed it in his game bag. He bared his teeth at John. “Get away,” he said again. “I’ll kill you for staring at me with your evil dark eyes. This is my land, or at any rate, near enough mine. I won’t have you or your thieving people within ten miles of my fields. Get away with you or I’ll have the soldiers out from Jamestown to hunt you down. If your village is near here we’ll find it. We’ll find you and your cubs and burn the lot of you out.”

John stepped back, never taking his eyes from Bertram. The man’s face was a twisted ruin hammered from his old sunny, smiling confidence. John had no inclination to step forward now, to greet his old friend and shipmate by name, to make himself known. He did not want to know this man, this weak, cursing, stinking man. He did not want to claim kinship with him. The man threatened him like an enemy. If his gun had been reloaded John thought that it would have been his blood on the snow, and his belly blasted away like the hare’s. He bowed his head like a servile, frightened, enslaved Indian and backed away. In two, three paces, he was able to lean into the curve of a tree and know that a white man’s eyes would not be able to pick him out from the dapple of white snow and dark tree shadows and speckled bark.

Hobert glared into the shadowy forest which had swallowed up his enemy in seconds. “I know you’re there!” he shouted. “I could find you if I wanted.”

Attone came up beside John so silently that not even a twig cracked. “Who’s the smelly one?” he asked.

“My neighbor, the farmer, Bertram Hobert,” John said. The name sounded strange and awkward on his lips, he was so accustomed to the ripple of Powhatan speech.

“The winter has rotted his feet,” Attone remarked.

John saw that the brave was right. Bertram was painfully lame and instead of shoes or boots his feet were encased in thick wrappings tied with twine.

“That hurts,” Attone said. “He should wear bear grease and moccasins.”

“He does not know,” John said sadly. “He would not know that, and only your people could teach him.”

Attone gave him a quick smile at the unlikeliness of such a meeting and such a lesson. “He has our hare. Shall we kill him?”

John put his hand on Attone’s forearm as he reached for his arrow. “Spare him. He was my friend.”

Attone raised a dark eyebrow. “He was going to shoot you.”

“He didn’t know me. But he helped me build my house when I came to the plantation. We traveled across the sea together. He has a good wife. He was once my friend. I won’t see him shot for a hare.”

“I would shoot him for a mouse,” Attone remarked, but the arrow stayed in his quiver. “And now we will have to cross the river. There will be no game here for miles where he is stamping on his rotting feet.”

They caught no game though they stayed out for three days, traveling along the narrow trails which the People had used for centuries. Every now and then one of the trails would spread itself to double, even treble, the necessary width and then Attone would scowl and look out for a new house being built, a new headright created where this wide path would lead. Again and again they would see a new building standing proud, and facing the river and around it a desert of felled trees and roughly cleared land. Attone would look for a moment, his face expressionless, and then say to John: “We have to go on, there will be no game here.”

They struck away from the river on the second day, since the plantations chose the riverside so that the tobacco could be floated down to the quayside at Jamestown. Once they broke away from the riverbanks things were better for them. In the deeper forest they found traces of deer again and then on the third day, as they were bearing around in a wide circle for home, a great shadowy bush caught Tradescant’s eye and as he watched, it moved. Then he felt Attone’s hand on the small of his back and his breath as he said: “Elk.”

Something in the quiver of the brave’s voice set John’s heart racing too. The beast was massive, its antlers as broad as the outspread wings of a condor. Moving almost unconsciously, John fitted his arrow to his bow and felt the thinness of the shaft and the lightness of the sharpened reed arrowhead. Surely, this would be like shooting peas at a carthorse, he thought. Nothing could bring this monster down.

Attone was moving away from him. For a moment John thought they were to make the traditional pincer movement of deer-stalking, but then he saw that Attone had slung his bow over his shoulder and was climbing the lowest branches of one of the trees. When he was stretched along it with an arrow on the string he nodded to John with one of his darkest smiles.

John glanced back at the grazing elk. It was calm, unaware of their presence. John made a pointing upward gesture: should he climb too? Attone’s teeth flashed in a grin, white in the darkness. He shook his head. John should shoot at ground level.

John realized at once why this was apparently amusing. When the elk was struck it would look around for its enemy and it would charge the first thing it saw. That would be John. Attone, in the safety of the branch of the tree, would rain down arrows, but John on the ground below would serve as decoy: as bait. John scowled at Attone, who gave him the blandest of smiles and a shrug – it was the luck of the hunt.

John set his arrow on the string and waited. The elk sniffed the forest floor, searching for food. It turned full face to John and lifted its head for a moment, scenting the air. It was a perfect opportunity. Both arrows flew at the same second. John’s arrow, aimed for the heart, pierced the thick skin and layer of fat at the chest, while Attone’s plunged deep and unerringly into the beast’s eye. It bellowed in pain and plunged forward. A second arrow from Attone’s bow pierced its shoulder, severing the muscle of the foreleg so the animal dropped to one knee. John’s shaky second shot went wide and then he was running, dodging behind the trees as the beast came on, stumbled on, blood pouring from its head. Attone let fly one more arrow into the head again and then jumped from the tree, his knife in his hand. The flow of blood was weakening the animal, it was unable to charge. It fell to both knees, its head moving from one side to the other, the great sweep of the antlers still a danger. John peeped out from behind a tree and came running back, pulling his hunting knife with the sharp shell blade from its safe pouch. Either side of the wounded animal the two men watched for their chance. Attone, whispering the word of blessing on the dying creature, dived behind the moving antlers and plunged his knife between its high shoulders. The head slumped and John reached down and jabbed a hacking, sawing cut into the thick throat.

The two men jumped clear as the beast rolled on its side and died. Attone nodded. “Good and quick,” he said breathlessly. “Go, my brother, we thank you.”

John rubbed the sweat from his face with fingers that were wet with fresh blood. He dropped to sit on the snowy forest floor, his legs weak underneath him. “What if you had missed?” he asked.

Attone thought for a moment. “Missed?”

“When the beast was charging at me. What if you had missed your shot?”

Attone took a breath to answer and then John’s aggrieved face was too much for him; he could make no sensible reply. He whooped with laughter and dropped back on the cold snow. He laughed and laughed his great belly laugh of joy and John, trying to keep a straight face, trying to stay on his dignity, found it was too much for him and he started to laugh as well.

“Why ask? Why should it matter to you?” Attone demanded, wiping his eyes, and bubbling again. “You wouldn’t care. You’d be dead.”

John howled at the logic of this and the two men lay like lovers, side by side on their backs in the winter forest, and laughed until their empty bellies ached while the blue winter sky above them was darkened with the passing of the geese and the wood was louder with their honking than with laughter.

John was left to guard the carcass while Attone started the long run back to the village. It would be two days before he could bring the braves back to carry the meat into camp. John made himself as comfortable as he could for the wait, built a little bender tent of a pair of saplings and thatched it with thin winter fern, made himself a hearth at one side of it and let the tent fill with smoke for the warmth, and started the work of skinning and butchering the great beast. Attone had left his hunting knife with John, so that when John’s knife was blunted cutting the thick hide, fat and meat he would not have to waste time sharpening it. He worked from sunrise in the morning when he rose and said the Powhatan morning prayers at his morning wash in the icy water. At noon he gathered nuts and berries and ate with his dark gaze on the river, watching for shoals of fish. After his dinner he gathered firewood and set to work on the elk again. At night he cut a thin slice of elk meat to barbecue over the fire. John had lost completely the white man’s habit of gorging when food was available and starving when times were thin. He ate like one of the People, conscious all the time of the river that brought fish to him, and the winds that blew the birds to him and the woods that hid and offered the animals. It was not the way of a Powhatan to plunge into a trough of food like a hog into acorns. Food was not a free gift, it was part of a giving and taking, a balance; and a hunter must take with awareness.

In the two days and three nights while he waited John realized 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 carcass, and kept the fire lit. Now that he could eat well from the forest the immense labor 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 birdlike 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 onto 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 recognized 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 goose bumps 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 spic-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 neighbor,” 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…”

She stepped a little farther out, female curiosity driving her onward. “Like a savage?”

“Don’t be afraid,” John said and came toward the light.

She clapped her hand over her mouth at the sight of him but her eyes widened with terror. “Is it really you?”

“I swear it,” John said. “Just dressed as a Powhatan.”

“You poor, poor man,” she said and took hold of his hand and drew him indoors. “Good God preserve us all from such a fate. How did you get away from them?”

“I was not captured,” John said. He nodded at Francis, who stood frozen in horror at the sight of him.

“It is me,” John repeated.

Francis nodded, gave a little bow in reply and restored a wood-chopping ax to its place behind the door.

“Sit down, sit down,” Sarah begged him. “Your hair! and – dear God – they have even stained your skin to their color!”

“That’s bear grease,” John said. “It keeps off insects in summer and keeps out the cold in winter.”

“God preserve us! How did you get away?” Then her constant terror of the savage men struck her and she shot a frightened look at the thin wooden door. “Are they after you?”

“No, no,” John reassured her. “They let me go freely.”

“Are you hungry?” The anxious glance she threw at the cookpot suggested that there was not much to be had, even if he was.

“I have eaten,” John said steadily. “But I brought you some meat. We killed an elk.”

“Meat?” She choked as the saliva rushed into her throat. “You have meat?”

John reached for the bundle strapped into the small of his back. “Here,” he said. “It’s smoked; but you could seethe it in a little water.”

She fell upon it and tossed it into the cookpot as it stood by the hearthside. John, remembering his sickness from food heated and reheated in the same pot, winced a little. But she was already stirring in water from a pitcher, and greedily tasting. “Bertram, Bertram!”

The shoulder in the bed shrugged still higher, and then the man rolled over on his back and glared into the room.

“We have meat!” she said triumphantly. “Can you sit up while I spoon you some broth?”

“Meat?” Hobert’s voice was a rough croak.

“Neighbor Tradescant has brought us some steaks from an elk,” she said. “He has been living with the savages but has got away from them now, praise God.”

Hobert heaved himself up to one arm. His face was marked with pain. In the little room John could smell the flesh of his snow-rotted feet and the stench of unwashed blankets.

“John Tradescant?” he asked wonderingly. “Is that really you?”

John went to the bedside and took the man’s hand. “I have been living with the Powhatan and I dress like them and hunt with them,” he said. “They treat me as a friend. I saw you in the woods the other day, and I thought you might be in need. I have brought you some meat and I can bring you more. They have medicines as well which would make you well. I would have come sooner if I had known you were in need, Bertram.”

The man’s red-rimmed eyes wandered over John’s face. “A savage,” he said, bewildered.

“I am indeed John Tradescant,” John said. “But I could not live alone in the forest. Thank God I fell among the Powhatan and they have treated me kindly.”

Sarah Hobert came to her husband’s bedside with a delicate pot filled with gravy. John recognized at once the work of the People: the perfectly smooth walls of one of their dainty black pots.

“That’s Powhatan made,” he said.

She gave him a swift disapproving glance. “We used to trade with them, but they became too demanding and dishonest,” she said. “Now my husband will not have them near his land.” She turned to the wreck of the man in the bed. “Will you taste, Bertram?”

Eagerly he sat up and reached for the pot, eagerly he sucked at it and gulped until the pot was empty.

“Rest now,” John said, remembering his horrors of illness after he had eaten too richly on a starved belly. “You can have more later, and I will bring you other food, corn and berries and nuts.”

Sarah reached out and caught his hand. “Praise God for bringing you back to us,” she said. “For that which was lost is found.”

John hesitated. “I must be a visitor only,” he said.

Her face was shining with relief and happiness, deaf to his reluctance. “Praise God for returning you to your true people,” she said.

It was out of the question for John to leave that night, or even the next day. He slept in the attic on the same side of the makeshift screen as the Negro Francis. In the morning Hobert was in a fever, groaning and counting aloud, counting the sums of money he must save to buy headrights in the new land, counting the percentage of profit he might hope to make, counting the wages he must pay to get his land cleared and tobacco planted.

“Is he mad?” John asked Sarah.

She shook her head. “It’s the fever again,” she said. “When it comes on him he acts like a madman but then the fever breaks and he is coolheaded again. Francis has to tie him up sometimes.”

“This is impossible,” John said. “You will have to go back to Jamestown. You cannot stay here with only a sick man and a slave.”

She looked up, her face shining with new hope. “That’s what I had feared,” she said. “But now you are come, sent by God to help me. You will help me plant the fields, won’t you, John? Help me until Bertram is well again? He will be well now that you can bring him food, and when the summer comes he will be well and strong again. He is a man of much strength. This is only the dreadful seasoning of Virginia. They all say that. A man must be seasoned to work under the hot sun. Bertram is burning up now, no sun will ever be too hot for him again.”

“I cannot stay,” John said awkwardly.

“Where else could you go?” she asked. “Your own headright is overgrown and the savages will have stripped your house of everything you ever owned.”

John felt completely incapable of telling her that he had a new house in the Indian village, and a wife and children waiting for him.

“A cup of ale, for the love of God!” Bertram called loudly from his bed.

Sarah turned and poured him a little pot of water from the pitcher.

“I’ll get you some more,” John muttered, and took the pitcher and went outside.

He walked slowly down to the river, filled the pitcher, and strolled back, taking the chance to think. If he left Sarah to fend for herself he was signing her death warrant as clearly as if he were the king in Whitehall condemning some poor soul in the Tower. She and Bertram and Francis would die in the forest and the trees would grow through their earthen floor and the trumpet vine strangle their chimney. There was no chance at all that they would survive in this fruitful, overwhelming land without help. In contrast, Suckahanna and the children would be guarded by Attone, and fed and protected by the village. The land was no danger to Suckahanna, she fed from it as easily as a deer nibbling green shoots in the woods.

John squared his shoulders, picked up the pitcher and went back to the house.

Francis was outside, stacking firewood. “Go in and guard your master,” John said. “I must take Mrs. Hobert out into the wood and teach her how to gather fruits and roots and berries. You have been starving in the midst of plenty here. Why did you not tell her?”

“Me? How should I know?”

“You must have eaten nuts and berries in your own country,” John said irritably. “Gathered them in the forests?”

The man raised one eyebrow. “My own country is not like this one,” he said. “So we don’t have the same fruits. And in any case, I had my meals served to me by my wife or by my slave. I didn’t go out clambering in trees for cashew nuts like a monkey.”

“You’re a savage!” John exclaimed. “What d’you mean, slaves, and being served?”

The black man looked from the remnants of his own breeches and shirt to John’s embroidered buckskin loincloth and his stained and tattooed skin.

“I see only one savage here,” he remarked.

John swore under his breath and pushed open the door. “Mrs. Hobert!” he said. “Come out and let me show you how to find nuts and roots for your dinner.”

She brought a basket, Indian made, John observed, and she was quick to learn how to identify roots which could be cooked and eaten, and roots which could be sliced and eaten raw. John showed her nut-bearing trees and pointed to the wild plum and the wild cherry trees which would blossom and bear fruit later in the year. They came home with a basket full of good things and she sliced the roots to supplement the remainder of the elk in the cookpot for their dinner.

Hobert had lapsed into a deep sleep, the sweat thick and cold on his forehead.

“We won’t wake him,” his wife decided. “The fever may be breaking and he will need his rest.”

“The Powhatan have physic,” John said. “For fevers and also for frostbite. I could ask the werowance, or one of the physicians, to come and see Bertram. Or there’s a wise woman very gifted with herbs, she made me well. She might come.”

Sarah shook her head in absolute refusal. “They would poison us and hack us up to eat,” she said. “You may have been lucky, John Tradescant, that they chose to keep you alive. But they have been our enemies since we came here. At first we traded with them and gave them little trinkets for food and for goods. Then we tried to make them come and work for us, clear the land and dig the fields. But they were lazy and idle and when we whipped them they stole what they could and ran away. After that Bertram has shot at them whenever he has seen them. They are our enemies. I won’t have them near me.”

“They have skills that you need to learn,” John persisted. “This dinner you are eating is Powhatan food. You have to learn how they live in the forest in order to live here yourself.”

She shook her head. “I shall live as a God-fearing Englishwoman and I shall make this land into a new England. Then they can come to me to learn.” She closed her eyes briefly in a prayer. When she opened them she was looking sharply, critically, at John.

“I have unpacked a shirt and pair of breeches belonging to Bertram,” she said. “You can have them in return for the service you have done us by coming to our door in our time of need. You will not want to walk around half naked as you are.”

“This is how I live now,” John said.

“Not in a Christian home you don’t,” she said sharply. “I cannot allow it, Mr. Tradescant, it is not fit. It is lechery to show yourself like this to me. If my husband were well and in his right mind he would not permit it.”

“I had no thought of lechery, Mrs. Hobert-”

She gestured to the clothes spread at the fireside. “Then dress yourself, Mr. Tradescant, please.”

John stayed with the Hoberts for a full week, dressed in English clothes again, but still barefoot. The shirt chafed at his neck, the breeches felt hot and constricting around his legs. But he wore them out of courtesy to Sarah’s feelings, and he did not feel he could leave her until Bertram was well again.

The fever broke on the third night, and the next day Bertram was well enough to hobble down to the river, leaning on John’s arm.

The little green tobacco shoots were showing through the earth of the nursery beds. Bertram paused and looked at them as dotingly as if they were sleeping children. “Here is my fortune, Tradescant,” he said. “Here is my fortune growing. If we can survive the rest of this cold weather without starving, without falling to the savages, then this will be the making of me. I shall see it sold on the quayside at Jamestown. I shall see it packed and sailing for England. I shall hire a servant, a brace of servants, and I will make myself a life here.”

“God willing,” John said.

“Stay with us,” Hobert said. “Stay with us and you can take a share in this, John. I doubt I can manage without you and Sarah cannot do it all on her own. Francis has no skill with plants, I am afraid to let him touch them. If I am sick when they need planting out who is going to do the work? Stay with me and see my tobacco plants safely into the field.”

“I can’t stay,” John said as gently as he could. “I have made a different life for myself in this country. But I can come back to you and see that you are well. I’ll come back gladly and work for you. I’ll set out the seedlings for you and show you how the Powhatan plant their food crops so you never need go hungry again.”

“You’ll come back to plant out my tobacco? You swear it?”

“I swear,” John said.

“Then we won’t need food crops,” Hobert said buoyantly. “We shall buy all we need with what I can earn from the tobacco. And I’ll see you right, John. Next season I shall come to your headright and work for you, as we promised, eh? As we always said we would do.”

On that promise John left the Hoberts and crossed the river just above the falls where he could jump from boulder to boulder in the fast-moving stream. On the far side he stripped off the breeches and the shirt that he had been given and bundled them up into the crook of a tree. It reminded him of Suckahanna’s girlhood and her attempt to live in the two worlds. She used to wear a long gown and sometimes a bonnet in Jamestown, but when she was free in the woods she wore her buckskin pinny and nothing more.

The air felt good on his skin again, he felt more of a man in his nakedness than he ever could do in his breeches. He stretched as if he were freed from a constriction greater than a linen shirt, and set off at the Powhatan hunting stride for his home.

Suckahanna greeted him with the careful courtesy of a deeply offended wife. John neither explained nor apologized until they were alone on the sleeping platform, in the darkness of their house, when the soft sighs from both children showed that they were asleep.

“I could not come back when I said I would come,” he said to her smooth naked back. “Bertram was sick, his wife was hungry and their slave didn’t know what to do.”

She said nothing and did not turn to him.

“I stayed to feed a hungry woman and nurse a sick man,” John said. “When I showed her how to get food and when he was better I came home again, as soon as I could.”

He waited.

“Would you have wanted me to leave them to die?” he asked.

At last she turned back to him. “Better now and by their own failure than later,” she said simply.

John gasped as the words struck him. “You speak like a heartless woman,” he protested.

She shrugged as if she did not much care whether he thought her heartless or kind; and then she turned her back on him again and went to sleep.