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she’d stuffed into her apron half an hour earlier amid the wreckage of the kitchen. Then she looped a halter around his neck and guided him home like a stray calf. It was nearly dawn when they reached the cabin. Agatha led her husband through the door while the hushed boys looked on, and laid him out on the pallet like a corpse. Then she bound his feet. “Katrinchee,” she choked, her voice wound tight as the knotted cords. “Go fetch Mohonk.”
    Since she was at so great a remove from the centers of learning and quackery, and since the only physician in New Amsterdam at the time was a one-eyed Walloon named Huysterkarkus who lived on the isle of the Manhattoes, some six hours away by sloop, Agatha had no recourse to the accepted modes of diagnosis and treatment. Indeed, had the great physicians of Utrecht or Padua been present, they wouldn’t have been able to do much more than cut and pray or prescribe plucked axillary hairs in a glass of cinchona wine or the menses of the dormouse packed in cow dung. But the great physicians weren’t present—it would be some five or six years before Nipperhausen himself would draw his first breath, and that in the Palatine—and so the colonists had come to rely in extreme cases on the arts and exorcisms of the Kitchawanks, Canarsees and Wappingers. Hence, Mohonk.
    Half an hour later, Katrinchee stepped through the doorway, shadowed by Sachoes’ youngest son. Mohonk was twenty-two, addicted to sangarees, genever and tobacco, tall as the roof and thin as a stork. Hunched there in the doorway, the raccoon coat bristling around him, he looked like a dandelion gone to seed. “Ah,” he said, and then ran through his entire Dutch vocabulary:
“Alstublieft, dank u, niet te danken.”
He shuffled forward, the heavy musk of raccoon around him, and hung over the patient.
    Harmanus gazed up at him like a chastened child, utterly docile and contrite. His voice was barely audible. “Pie,” he moaned.
    Mohonk looked at Agatha. “Too much eat,” she said, pantomiming the act.
“Eten. Te veel.”
    For a moment, the Kitchawank seemed puzzled.
“Eten?”
he repeated. But when Agatha snatched up a wooden spoon and began furiously jabbing it at her mouth, a look first of enlightenment, then of horror, invaded the Indian’s features. He jumped back from Harmanus as if he’d been stung, his long coppery hands fumbling vaguely with the belt of his coat.
    Agatha let out a gasp, little Wouter began to snuffle, Jeremias studied his feet. The Indian was backing out the door when Katrinchee stepped forward and took hold of his arm. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s the matter?” She spoke in the language of his ancestors, the language he’d taught her over the backs of the cows. But he wouldn’t answer—he just licked at his lips and tightened the belt of his coat, though it was ninety degrees already and getting hotter. “My mother,” he said finally. “I’ve got to get my mother.”
    The birds had settled in the trees and the mosquitoes risen from the swamps in all their powers and dominions when he returned with a withered old squaw in dirty leggings and apron. Dried up like an ear of seed corn, stooped and palsied, her face a sinkhole, she looked as if she’d been unearthed in a peat bog or hoisted down from a hook in the Catacombs. When she was six years old and smooth as a salamander, she’d stood waist-deep in the river with the rest of the tribe and watched as the
Half Moon
silently beat its way up against the current. The ship was a wonder, a vision, a token from the reclusive gods who’d buckled up the mountains to preserve their doings from the eyes of mortal men. Some said it was a gift from Manitou,a great white bird come to sanctify their lives; others, less sanguine, identified it as a devilfish, come to annihilate them. Since that time she’d