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woman who was about to go into labor to let her serve as a midwife to the birth. It happened again.
     
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    A different variation this time, not so severe. But once again, the stillborn fetus had animalistic qualities. At the same time there were successful births; natural, normal children. But like a discordant tune played softly beneath an orchestration, the stillbirths and deformed fetuses continued to appear; occasionally some were born alive, their first outcries quickly muted by frightened mothers in the forest.
    It was Romona’s instinct to seek help, but her experience with the official white world was sufficiently frightening to make her hesitate. She did not want to go there until she was fully armed with as much knowledge as possible. It was for that reason that she returned to the library, certain that the answer to the changes in he physiology of her people could be found somewhere in that vast storehouse of information.
    It was difficult now, even more so than when she was a child, for Romona to steal time for her forays to the library. She had the full care and charge of her aging grandfather, Hector M’rai, who was also suffering from the crippling effects of the katahnas. In the last six months his mind had gone dim and his hands had begun to tremble. It was not merely the product of his age. From spending a lifetime at his knee and under his tutelage, Romona Peters knew that her grandfather was not a man destined for senility.
    Among the Masaquoddy people, Hector M’rai was a legend. He had lived through six incarnations, still spoke the ancient language, and was a storehouse of Indian lore.
    He lived apart from the rest, in a compound he’d built with his own hands, following construction designs that he alone remembered. He called his camp-side M’ay-an-dan’ta. The Garden of Eden. It consisted of three tenee-like shelters, built of rough-hewn logs and animal skins; they were as different from the falling-down corrugated-board shanties that his people lived in as night is from day. In the midst of this changing forest the camp was an oasis where time
     
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    stood still. A kind of museum. A shrine to a life that no longer existed.
    it was uuiicult for Romona to tear herself away from M’rai, for she feared each time she left that it might be the last time she would see him alive. But each night before sundown, she journeyed into town to pore through the encyclopedias and medical pamphlets at the public libary. She knew that the katahnas and the stillbirths were somehow linked together, and she sought always to find that link.
    It was in the preface to a book on nutrition that she caught her first clue. It said that food intake was the single most causative factor in both human health and behavior. Beyond that, it said that the actual cultural characteristics of an entire community of people could be influenced by what, as a group, they ingested. It described a tribe in Africa, called the El Molo, who had, in recent years, become aggressive and given to epileptic seizures when frightened, due to protein starvation in a land that had been poached of wild game. Protein, it said, bridged the synaptic gap in the command-chain of neuromuscular response.
    She cooied down every word she didn’t understand. On a single page there were sixty-seven of them. Some of them, like “synaptic gap,” weren’t even in the dictionary .
    The book also had a section on prenatal care. Once again there was a mention of protein, this time as a prime factor in the development of a healthy human fetus. Romona went to the card catalog that she had used as a child and found that there was an entire book on the subject of protein. At the back of the book there was a table of protein-enriched foods. Sud-denlv she was confused-highest on the list of protein-enriched foods was fish. There could not be a lack of protein in the Indians’ diet, for they were fishermen. E’fVitv oerrent of what they ate was fish. She