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and asked me to meet him here. I listened for my mother’s voice, and in my dreams I ask my grandmothers to guide me. I am a daughter of the Wolf Longhouse, and it is my right to choose a husband.”
    All the tension left Gabriel’s shoulders. The expression on his face was so full of emotion that Elizabeth felt it was an invasion of his privacy even to look at him.
    To Annie she said, “My son is very fortunate to have won your favor.”
    Annie closed her eyes very briefly and then she smiled. For the first time in this very difficult discussion, she smiled. There was nothing of nervousness or agitation in her smile, but a kind of quiet calm that soothed some of Elizabeth’s doubts.
    In the field beyond them the noise of the crowd rose and then fell off suddenly. In the still they could hear the creak of the swinging rope.
    Gabriel would follow in his father’s and his grandfather’s footsteps, and make his living hunting and trapping in the Kahnyen’kehàka tradition. He would never dream about leaving Hidden Wolf, as long as he had Annie with him. In his single-mindedness he was so much like his father at this age.
    “I am sorry about the school, and the money you paid to send me there,” Annie said. “But it wasn’t the right place for me.”
    “I wanted you to be sure,” Elizabeth said. “I thought you might like teaching.”
    “She’s not you, Ma.” Gabriel’s temper, so easily aroused, flared up.
    “And that is my misfortune.” Annie shot back at him. “Do you show your mother disrespect on the very day you take a wife?”
    The girl walked away and Gabriel watched her go, a stunned expression on his face. Then he ran to catch up to her. Elizabeth watched them both, and wondered how much she was to blame for this turn of events, and if at forty or fifty her youngest son would look back on this day and still find fault with her.

6

    O
n the mountain called Hidden Wolf the streams boil up, ready to breach their banks
.
    The ground is still frozen solid; a shovel wouldn’t get far, and neither does the rain. The earth cannot soak up anything at all, and so the water begins to move, dragged down and down by its own weight, pulling debris from the forest floor along for the ride: branches, rocks, a whole hawthorn bush trailing its roots like a hundred knotty legs. The rain fills the burrows where small things tend their young. The water flushes out the deepest fox holes, and rouses a young bear from hibernation. From deep in the forest a moose bellows its irritation, but the sound disappears into the swelling water
.
    The water moves, and everything must move with it
.

7

    T hey had a plan, and so the men who had gathered in Curiosity Freeman’s barn set out into the rain. The river had been high many times, and it had even breached its banks once when Daniel was a boy. It was hard to imagine anything worse, and yet they must.
    Ben Savard lent Daniel the use of a horse—his own horse, in fact, a big sorrel he called Florida. Daniel turned her toward the village and set off at a trot. He had to get the word out about school being closed, and it also fell to him to ask for volunteers to help with the sandbags. Too little and too late, but it was action. It was something.
    And if his shoulder screamed to the heavens, he would get this done.
    He headed straight for the trading post, the most logical place to find men who could be compelled into action. Daniel was wondering if there might be sacks somewhere in his mother’s cellar and if Hannah would be able to put her hands on them when he first heard it.
    A far-off sound, but big. Some large animal crashing through the underbrush. The hair on the back of his head stood up. Daniel turned inthe saddle but found nothing that could account for such a noise, as big as the sky and swelling.
    An odd memory came to him. One of the stories his grandfather Hawkeye had told about his years in the West. He had lived among the Crow for a few seasons, and hunted