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change,
     
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    they still failed to make the connection. The Indians were confused by it and feared that if it became known that violence was beginning to sweep through their ranks, they would be accused of drunkenness: the historical verdict of the white world, used to avoid any responsibility for Indian outrage.
    It was true that the growing aberration in behavior, which they called katahnas (seizures), resembled the effects of intoxication. Dizziness, hallucination, loss of coordination and, often, unexplainable outbursts of rage. One man turned on his own wife and children, another ran into Mary’s Lake and drowned. At first the incidents were isolated and infrequent, vaguely explicable in terms of the movement of the stars and the personalities of the men whom these katahnas struck. But now it was becoming more generalized-and more frightening because it was harder to recognize. The once dramatic symptoms were becoming muted, the entire community falling under a kind of lethargy and haze that would lift for periods of time and then descend again like a cloud of smoldering gloom.
    There was another secret kept by the Masaquoddy, too; unspoken because it brought shame to those who had suffered it. A growing rate of stillbirths and deformed children. By tradition the Indian women bore their children in the forest alone, and thus for a long time maintained the awful secret even from each other. The evidence of their changing chemistry was buried in shallow graves throughout the Manatee Forest.
    The first member of the tribe to gather enough evidence to become alarmed was Romona Peters, a full-blooded Masaquoddy woman, twenty-eight years of age, who bore the Indian name Oliana. It meant Spring Fawn. With her light skin and doelike eyes, she was given this name by her grandfather, Hector M’rai, the former chief and now oldest living member of the tribe. But Romona’s fawnlike appearance was misleading. She had the courage of a vixen. At the age of twelve she was raped by a lumberjack
     
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    in the forest and, by herself, went into the town of Manatee to report him to the sheriff. It was her first lesson that the word “justice” had little application to the American Indian.
    From then on, she strove to accumulate enough knowledge to become a force of change. But the goal remained elusive. Having to leave school at the age of thirteen, which was customary for Indian women whose labor was needed in the village, she used the Androscoggin Public Library as her school, spending every available moment there, poring over books that she rarely understood, attempting to grasp as much of the vocabulary and ways of the white world as possible. As she passed through her teens, the library was the focal point of her life, her heaven and her hell. She was often taunted by her white contemporaries there, snickered at as she trod a continual path from the reading room to the big dictionary on the pedestal, trying to understand what she was reading. The carpet was worn thin there and she was blamed for it, finally forbidden by the librarian to use the dictionary more than once a night. This random quirk of cruelty, more than any other factor, curtailed her one opportunity for progress. Eventually she gave up. The frustration and humiliation were just too painful.
    But now, as a result of recent events, she had gone back to the library. Having seen a woman return from childbearing in the forest in a state of near shock, with her arms empty and her stomach flat, Romona questioned her until the woman brought her to the grotesque remains. It was a stillborn fetus, almost full term. But it looked more like the product of a whelping than a human birth. The head was outsized, the eyes large and flat, without lids. The fingers were long and tapered, resembling claws; the legs were like hindquarters, rounded and much shorter than the arms.
    The woman begged Romona not to reveal her secret, and Romona agreed. But she persuaded the next