Free Girl in a Buckskin by Dorothy Gilman Page A

forbidden to see each other, for the law of all Indian tribes forbids cousins to marry. But Moonkeek and Shoonkeek continued to meet secretly and to lay plans to run away and seek another tribe that would allow them to marry.
    On the night of their departure Moonkeek reached their meeting place on the island first and beaching her canoe stood waiting on the shore for her lover. But Obiway, one of her many spurned suitors, had noticed her leaving and followed. Halfway to the island he met Shoonkeek on the water and suspecting that the two were about to run away together he shot an arrow at Shoonkeek, who fell silently, without a word, into the black water. But his canoe glided on until it passed the island where Moonkeek waited, and seeing it slip past so mysteriously Moonkeek guessed what had happened. She climbed into her own canoe and paddled after his, calling in a heart-broken voice, “Shoonkeek, Shoonkeek!” And from the water came the answering voice calling softly, “Moonkeek, Moonkeek!” When the girl reached the place where Shoonkeek had slipped from his canoe she laid down her paddle and joined her lover in the black water. But her canoe glided on and on and on to join the empty bark of Shoonkeek.
    “And it is said that even now on dark nights,” Eseck told her, “one can hear them out by the island calling to each other across the water. Calling Shoonkeek, Moonkeek.” Becky shivered. “What a sad story,” she said. “I wish they had gotten away. And yet—”
    “Yet what?”
    “Yet if they had gotten away,” Becky said practically, “the lake would never have been called Shoonkeekmoonkeek. It might have been named something quite different, like the name of the Indian who sang at the fire when we were at Wnahtakook.”
    Eseck smiled faintly. “You mean Unhaunnauwaunnutt?”
    “Aye,” she said, “and I could never have pronounced it.”
    Eseck laughed and lay down. “Go to sleep,” he said, and on the other side of the fire Becky pillowed her face on the hemlock and listened to the noises of the forest, to the wind in the trees overhead and the cry of the whippoorwill.
    They were gone in the mountains nine full days but when they returned they carried many skins with them and no longer was Becky afraid of the woods. She could not tell at what moment her fears began to slacken but she knew exactly when she became aware that those fears were dead, for one day when Eseck was gone she had lain on her stomach beneath a poplar tree and listened without care to the heart-shaped leaves rustling in the breeze. Suddenly sitting upright she had stared about with surprise as she realized that for the first time she had turned her back on the forest, forgetting its very existence. A week ago she would have sat with her back to a tree and nervously peered behind her lest some wild thing creep stealthily toward her from the rear. Each sound would have made her start and she would have felt sick and empty when Eseck returned.
    Yet this day she had lain on the ground oblivious to the noises of the forest.
    Delighted, Becky had swung herself on a low limb of the poplar and straddling its trunk seated herself in the fork to think about this. It was not that the woods were so silent; when a person knew how to listen and what to listen for the woods hummed with activity all day and all night. Yet by listening with an inner ear she might at once know of another human’s presence: a bird might fly suddenly from a branch, beating the leaves with its wings; a squirrel would run chattering to the top of the highest tree, and an unnatural silence would descend around her, as if the forest held its breath. Discovering this awareness was like discovering a sixth sense. It was a magic box in one’s mind that all day filed away noises until suddenly it shouted NO—-this one does not belong.
    And so she had continued to sit in the tree with no terror at all, and when Eseck was long in returning she had climbed to the top