Free Lake in the Clouds by Sara Donati Page B

and hoped that he was telling the truth.
    Hawkeye picked up his rifle. “I’ll just go have myself a little walk. If you don’t need me.”
    “Looks like rain,” Nathaniel said not to his father directly, but to the room, and still Hawkeye gave him a grim smile. Nathaniel knew that he sounded like Elizabeth when she was trying to distract one of the children from some undertaking that made her uneasy, but then he had legitimate reason to worry.
    The truth was, Hawkeye had always walked the mountain in the evening no matter how bad the weather, but in the last few years he had been going farther and staying out longer. Sometimes he didn’t appear again till dawn, and once in a while it occurred to Nathaniel that his father might take it into his head to walk west and just keep going.
    When he had gone, Squirrel looked up from the basket ofdried greenery she was sorting. “He doesn’t sleep well indoors,” she said. “You needn’t worry about him.”
    Nathaniel bit back a smile. His oldest daughter had never been a difficult child, but recently he found himself hard-pressed for the right words, especially when she took it upon herself to teach him something she thought he didn’t know. Now she was sending him a sidelong glance, not without an edge of guilt and some impatience to it.
    He said, “You’re not in any trouble, if that’s what you’re worried about. I just wanted to set some things straight between us.”
    The crushed chamomile filled the air with a sharp, almost bitter smell. In a quieter tone Squirrel said, “I don’t know anything more about Liam than you do, Da. What is there to talk about?”
    Nathaniel smiled. “You ain’t slow-witted, Squirrel. Don’t play at it, it don’t suit you.”
    Her mouth twitched in annoyance, but she said nothing at all.
    “You know it ain’t Liam I’ve got on my mind right now. It was Splitting-Moon who told you about the runaways in the bush, wasn’t it?”
    A little sound escaped her, the kind of sigh that you might hear from a woman when she puts down something she shouldn’t have been carrying in the first place.
    “When did you figure it out?”
    “Don’t take much figuring. Twenty-some house slaves and farmhands, surviving eight winters in the bush and keeping hid. That’s not something they could do on their own, at least not to start with. They had to have help, and no white man I know in the bush would go to the trouble, much less keep quiet about it. That’s when Splitting-Moon came to mind. It’s in her nature to help any hurt creature she comes across. Did she come out and tell you about Red Rock?”
    Squirrel hesitated while she put down the basket and rubbed her hands. Her gaze fixed on the window over the desk, as if she could see through it and farther. “When she came in the fall to trade she had a little boy with her. He had a Kahnyen’kehàka face—” She touched her own cheekbone lightly. “But his hair was kinked, and he was as dark as Galileo. He called himself Joshua, but she called him Renhahserotha’.”
    He makes a new light.
    “It was the boy who mentioned Red Rock to you?”
    “To Many-Doves,” said Squirrel. “But long before we ever saw him, we knew there must be others with her. When Splitting-Moon brought us her medicines to trade, she asked for things in return … things you wouldn’t think she’d have any need for.”
    Nathaniel let this news settle for a moment, and Squirrel thought that he was looking for more information.
    “That’s all I know. Many-Doves wouldn’t ever let me ask her any questions in the fear she wouldn’t come back again. You know her better than I do, Da.”
    “Not anymore, I don’t. I haven’t seen the woman since the summer before the twins were born.”
    Splitting-Moon had left Good Pasture to go live the life of a hermit deep in the bush a year later. She was rarely seen, but stories of the Mohawk medicine woman who roamed the endless forests were told as far away as