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nothing.”
    Blue Water Woman smiled sweetly. “That is exactly my point.”
    Shakespeare could not help it; he cackled. She was the only woman he had ever met who could hold her own in banter that most women would not abide and some could not understand. The Bard, after all, was an acquired taste. Shakespeare liked to think of old William S’s works as a fine wine distilled from the vineyard of the human condition. All there was to know, for those who wanted to know, could be found in the Bard’s recitals of humanity’s foibles and passions.
    It was one of Shakespeare’s great regrets that he had never made it to England. A visit to the Bard’s own country would be heaven. He had it on reliable authority that people over there, by and large, adored the playwright, and read his plays for the pleasure of the reading. On the American side of the pond, William S had his partisans, but it was nothing like in Britain.
    At this moment, though, seated on the bench in the steeple with the sun poised on the western brink of the world, Shakespeare was not thinking of the genius from Avon. He was scanning the lake from end to end through the spyglass. He saw fish jump. He saw ducks. He saw geese. He saw gulls. He sawa pair of red hawks. At one point a golden eagle dived and snared a fish in its great talons, then took wing again, flapping powerfully to gain altitude.
    It was the eighth evening after the steeple’s completion. Shakespeare had spent every minute he could on the lookout and not seen any sign of his quarry. He had begun to think that maybe his wife was right and he had gone to a lot of trouble for nothing, that perhaps their sightings of the thing would be no more frequent than before.
    Then, as he was sweeping the spyglass from west to east, a tingle of excitement coursed through him.
    The wind was still, the lake a mirror, its surface as calm as calm could be. But suddenly, out toward the middle, the water swelled upward as if something were pushing it from below. Shakespeare watched in fascination as the swell moved to the west, leaving broad ripples in its wake.
    â€œI’ve found you, by God!” Shakespeare exclaimed. He waited with bated breath for the thing to show itself, but all he saw was the swell. After sixty or seventy feet it grew smaller and smaller until finally the lake’s surface was as flat and smooth as a mirror again.
    â€œDamn!” Shakespeare grumbled. What were they to do if the thing never showed itself? Some fish, after all, rarely left the depths, and when they did, they never broke the surface, but swam below it where searching eyes could not see them.
    Still, Shakespeare was hopeful. He related his sighting to Nate the next day in the steeple as they sat talking over the best way to see the thing up close.
    â€œThe only way is to be out on the water when the creature comes up,” Shakespeare said.
    â€œIt is too bad you and I do not have a canoe,” Nate remarked. They rarely traveled by water, so he saw no need for one.
    â€œYes, that is too bad,” Shakespeare agreed, and smiled a devious smile. “But we know someone who does.”
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    The Nansusequas loved their new home. The tall trees, which had never been scarred by an axe, reminded them of the dense eastern woodland from which they came. The Nansusequa had always dwelled in the deep woods; it was why they called themselves the People of the Forest.
    Only five escaped the massacre of their tribe. Wakumassee, the father, and Tihikanima, the mother, and their three children: Degamawaku, their son, who had been seeing a lot of Evelyn King; Tenikawaku, their oldest daughter; and Mikikawaku, their youngest.
    The family always wore green. Their buckskins, their blankets, their robes—everything they owned was dyed green out of reverence for the source of the green world in which the Nansusequa lived. That Which Was In All Things, they called it, or simply the