A String of Beads Read Online Free PDF

summer, they had made a pact to
     go on a trip the following summer, when they would be fourteen. They would travel
     as the old people had, speak only Onondawaga, and visit places that had not been changed,
     deforested, tamed, or demolished. Maybe they would learn something about who they
     were. In their fourteenth summer, they went.
    Jane and Jimmy had hiked only a few miles by the time they reached Route 5, but when
     they crossed the highway they became travelers, not kids going for a walk. They were
     going back to the indeterminate time before the arrival of white people, when the
     eastern woodlands still extended from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and from James
     Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. Whenever Jane and Jimmy stepped a hundred yards into the
     woods between the roads it could have been two hundred or ten thousand years ago.
    A couple of miles farther on would be the New York State Thruway. Jane looked at her
     watch when she reached it, and remembered. It had been noon by the time Jane and Jimmy
     had arrived on this spot. The thruway was a serious barrier. There was a high chain
     link fence, then a weedy margin about two hundred feet wide, and then a two-lane strip
     of highway full of cars driving sixty or seventy miles an hour toward the west. Next
     came a central island of grass and trees, and then the two-lane strip going east,
     and another weedy margin before the next fence. Kids from the reservation knew that
     the thruway was a fearsome barrier that kept deer, foxes, and other animals captive
     on one side or the other. The thruway was a toll road, so it had few exits a pedestrian
     could use for crossing. Some were thirty miles apart.
    Jane and Jimmy had stopped to eat their sandwiches and study the traffic on the thruway.
     Their maps said they’d have to go east as far as Le Roy to reach the next exit, or
     chance a quick run across the pavement. They had begun their journey already knowing
     which it would be, but they took their time sitting side by side in a bushy area outside
     the first chain link fence and watching the cars go by, the nearer ones from left
     to right and the farther from right to left. Jane knew a car going sixty covered eighty-eight
     feet per second. If they could start right at the moment when a car passed, they could
     be across the pavement before the next arrived, but there was a problem of visibility.
     If a state police car came by at the wrong moment, they’d be picked up and suffer
     serious but nonspecific consequences far beyond the anger of their mothers. In the
     end they climbed the fence, crawled close to the pavement, pushing their backpacks
     ahead of them, and waited. They watched cars coming, evaluating each one, and finally
     saw a break in traffic that was inexplicable but welcome, and dashed across the two
     westbound lanes into the stand of trees in the center margin. They sat and laughed,
     not because there was anything funny, but because their fear had made them giddy.
     A state police car passed on the side they had just crossed, and it was twenty minutes
     before they dared to make the second crossing.
    Grown-up Jane climbed the fence at a post, swung a leg over and set her toe in a link
     on the far side, lowered herself to the ground, then trotted across the field to the
     center strip and began to look to the right, barely pausing in the trees before she
     crossed the last two lanes. When she got to the second fence she dropped her backpack
     on the other side and stepped on the top of the fence to vault over. As she walked
     on, she thought about how easy it had been this time. Had she and Jimmy been smaller
     at fourteen? Probably Jimmy had, but he was fast, strong, and wiry, and could climb
     a tree like a squirrel. She guessed the fear of doing something they knew was illegal
     and dangerous must have weighed them down.
    Jane faded into a stand of hardwood trees on the other side and kept walking south.
     She remembered the trip as