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present the doe continued on, and when she was about twenty paces from him he released a level breath and squeezed the trigger. The doe collapsed onto her side, then began to paw at the air with slow and rhythmic kicks. He pushed his way through the briers and ran toward her. His ball had flown wide but she was shot through the neck.
     
    AT DUSK HE sat by the fire with the others. Little Horn had cut himself a long green stick, and the redstick was roasting the deer heart when he made a clucking sound with his tongue and pointed. “Look there,” he said.
    Kau followed his gaze and in the fading light he saw a spotted fawn walking alone in the oak grove, cold-trailing its dead mother through the leaves. The fawn trotted into the camp like a pet goat, then began to nuzzle the wet doe hide that lay crumpled nearby.
    “Sad,” said Little Horn.
    Morning Star threw a coiled length of rope to Blood Girl, and she tied the confused fawn’s leg to a sapling. She walked back to Morning Star, and the fawn folded itself atop the comforting deerskin.

    Kau looked across the fire at Little Horn. “If there had been a child with me, would you have killed him?”
    Little Horn bounced the deer heart over the flames. “What kind of child?”
    “A white child. A boy.”
    “A baby white child?”
    “No.”
    “How big?”
    Kau placed the flat of his hand two widths higher than his own head.
    Little Horn laughed and the fawn’s head lifted at the sound. “That is no child,” he said.
     
    HE SAT UP that night watching the caught fawn sleep, wondering whether the creature knew that its mother was dead, whether the little deer realized that it was only waiting for the moment of its own slaughter. Morning Star was tossing through a nightmare, and Kau saw him shiver and then kick at the ground. The fawn awoke with big blinking eyes and though Kau considered slipping its noose he knew that there was no point, that tether or no tether it would never leave this place that smelled of its mother.
     
    MORNING. THE REDSTICKS woke late and lazed in the camp eating venison and passing pipefuls of tobacco cut with sumac. The deer meat had begun to ripen in the sun, so a rack was fashioned from green limbs. The hungry fawn went to bleating as they smoked the remains of the doe, and its cries brought a horned owl swooping
like some gigantic bat. The owl settled into an oak, watching the fawn until the owl itself was spotted by a crow, and then these ancient enemies fought in the treetops like courting dragonflies until more crows came calling and at last the day-roving owl was chased off.
    The redsticks watched all of this and after a while even they could no longer bear the cries of the starving fawn. Morning Star whispered to Blood Girl and then handed her his ball-headed club. The fawn cowered as she walked toward it.
     
    THAT NIGHT THE three redsticks planned their next raid while the skewered fawn cooked on a crooked length of dogwood that had been stripped of its bark. He listened to them plot. A company of thieves was living in a cave back across the border, not far from the federal road. The redsticks would kill these highwaymen and ride to Pensacola, buy weapons and supplies from the Spanish and then fall in with the other redsticks—those who had already fled deeper into Florida. Little Horn bit at his fingernail. “We will find them and together we will fight a running war. I have learned from our mistake at Horseshoe Bend.”
    Kau watched the eyeball of the skinned fawn begin to bulge and then split from the heat of the embers. He sat up on his horse blanket and the redsticks looked at him. He was thinking that maybe there was another lesson to be learned that day at Horseshoe Bend. “What if the Americans cannot be defeated?” he asked.

    Little Horn leaned closer to the red coals, and his flat skull-face gleamed in the firelight. After a long while he spoke. “Your tribe must have been a very peaceful one,” he said.
    Kau