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themselves, laughing and joking and singing. Caucus-Meteor tells Nathan that they’re Squakheag réfugiés.
    â€œTheir families once lived in the river valley where your farm is, Nathan Blake.”
    â€œIn 1736 when I built the first log cabin, no one challenged my claim to the property,” Nathan says.
    â€œMost of the Squakheag proprietors were driven out by the pagan Mohawks, the same people who are now the English allies. Just as you have never stepped foot in Old England, these brothers had never stepped foot on their ancestral lands until the day they burned your town, and that is why they are jovial.”
    The canoes ride low, but move fast, since each person paddles. Only the old American cheats at paddling. As the hours slip by, Caucus-Meteor finds himself thinking about matters long interred in memory. It’s this captive, his enslavement to me, that has disturbed my mind, he thinks.
    As a slave in boyhood, Caucus-Meteor had moments when he no longer wanted to be an American, but he didn’t want to be a Frenchman or a Dutchman either, and certainly not an Englishman or an African. He thought maybe he wanted to be a Spaniard. At night, he would lie still in darkness, trying to remain awake to think, for only the moments before drifting off to sleep were his own. He would imagine himself in armor, face painted gold and silver, ears decorated with brass crucifixes, a ring in his nose, as the pope might wear. In those days he thought the pope was a Spaniard. He enjoyed picturing himself in full armor. He didn’t know whether in the interest of accuracy he should picture the shiny metal armor he heard tell Champlain wore, or the stick armor of American warriors before the age of firearms, or the strange cloth armor he saw in his dreams. He settled on a compromise, stick armor painted shiny. How did a Spaniard behave? With that question, he had realized he had no understanding of such matters. The whole idea fell apart in his head. He was no Spaniard. He was not an anything or an anybody. Goaded on by that notion, he’d started planning an escape from slavery. He wonders now whether his own slave is having similar thoughts.
    Later that night the company reaches Missisquoi at the northern end of Lake Champlain. A few Abenaki leave the troop, for this village is their home. Under the stars and moonlight one can see a couple of log huts and maybe a dozen stick-frame structures covered with layers of birch bark, pine needles, and grass tufts between the layers for insulation. St. Blein visits with Father Etienne Laverjat, the priest who operates the mission. Caucus-Meteor muses that the gatherings of Frenchmen, though admirable for their intimacy, leave out natives.
    The company camps under some pines in a cove sheltered from the wind on the eastern shore of the lake. Caucus-Meteor sets up his camp out of sight from the others. The warriors sit around a fire, chewing their pemmican; Caucus-Meteor can hear them talking of war, women, weapons, wagering, and weather. The mild south wind pushing the canoes has turned them into giddy optimists. Caucus-Meteor wants nothing to do with people in such a mood, so he’s content to guard his prisoner.
    Caucus-Meteor sits on a log, raps it with a middle finger. It’s not hollow, no good for drumming. The sounds of laughter and easy talk come to him worse than taunts. He’s thinking about his wife, his grandchildren, his mother, his father, scores of fallen comrades—all the dead ones. Why have I lived so long? he wonders. He decides to walk down to the shore, where the sound of the waves will drown out the sounds of happiness. “Come, let’s have a drink of water,” he says in English to Nathan. He hobbles the captive’s feet with thongs. As he ties Nathan’s wrists to the stake across his back, the old abrasions open and he feels Nathan’s blood on his hands. He pulls up his sleeves and rubs the blood against his