id him from sight.
She remembered having once implored her nurse for a small plaster image
displayed in a shop. It could not speak, nor move, nor love her in
return. But she cried secretly all night to have it in her arms, ashamed
of the unreasonable desire, but conscious that she could not be appeased
by anything else. That plaster image denied to her symbolized the
strongest passion of her life.

The pigeons wheeled around St. Bat's tower, or strutted burnished on the
wall. The bell, which she had forgotten since sitting with the boy in
front of the blacksmith shop, again boomed out its record of time;
though it seemed to Eagle that a long, lonesome period like eternity had
begun.

BOOK I

AWAKING

I

I remember poising naked upon a rock, ready to dive into Lake George.
This memory stands at the end of a diminishing vista; the extreme point
of coherent recollection. My body and muscular limbs reflected in the
water filled me with savage pride.

I knew, as the beast knows its herd, that my mother Marianne was hanging
the pot over the fire pit in the center of our lodge; the children were
playing with other papooses; and my father was hunting down the lake.
The hunting and fishing were good, and we had plenty of meat. Skenedonk,
whom I considered a person belonging to myself, was stripping more
slowly on the rock behind me. We were heated with wood ranging.
Aboriginal life, primeval and vigor-giving, lay behind me when I plunged
expecting to strike out under the delicious forest shadow.

When I came up the sun had vanished, the woods and their shadow were
gone. So were the Indian children playing on the shore, and the shore
with them. My mother Marianne might still be hanging her pot in the
lodge. But all the hunting lodges of our people were as completely lost
as if I had entered another world.

My head was bandaged, as I discovered when I turned it to look around.
The walls were not the log walls of our lodge, chinked with moss and
topped by a bark roof. On the contrary they were grander than the inside
of St. Regis church where I took my first communion, though that was
built of stone. These walls were paneled, as I learned afterward to call
that noble finishing, and ornamented with pictures, and crystal sockets
for candles. The use of the crystal sockets was evident, for one shaded
wax light burned near me. The ceiling was not composed of wooden beams
like some Canadian houses, but divided i