A String of Beads Read Online Free PDF Page B

fully as she could, bringing back details and finding others
     in the landscape as she went. She and Jimmy had stayed away from big north-south routes
     because they’d wanted to be in the woods and not on a road. In the old days, Senecas
     used to travel south on foot to the countries of the Cherokees and Catawbas to fight.
     They took canoes down the rivers and streams that ran south from Seneca country into
     Pennsylvania, and she had read in old sources after she’d grown up that they had also
     used a route along the crests of the Appalachian mountain ranges to strike as far
     south as Georgia. A number of times in the early 1700s the sudden appearances of Iroquois
     war parties in the high country had raised formal protests from the governors of the
     colonies of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.
    While Jimmy and Jane had walked, they spoke Onondawaga by advance agreement, forcing
     themselves to avoid blurting out something in English. But as the time passed, they
     spoke more comfortably, thinking less and less about it. Jane’s vocabulary was good,
     but a bit formal and archaic. Much of it had come from her grandfather and grandmother,
     who had taken over the job of teaching her after her father died when she was eleven.
     But Jimmy had always lived on the reservation, and his language was more flexible
     and functional, replete with borrowings from English.
    Now, as Jane retraced the route over twenty years later, she thought about the two
     fourteen-year-olds and their relationship. They had been very close at six, closer
     still at eight or nine, but then they had reached that strange age around ten when
     Jimmy stopped playing with her. She had gone back to her parents’ house for school
     at the end of one summer, and when she came back to the reservation in the spring,
     Jimmy and his friends had refused to have anything to do with her. At first she searched
     her memory for the crime she must have committed, but came up with nothing. Eventually
     her mother had asked her why she was alone all the time, and heard Jane’s story with
     sympathy. She explained it as “the way boys are. A time comes when they go away from
     us for a while. They fight a lot. It’s the last time in their lives they can do it
     without killing each other, so it’s probably okay. They play rough sports, they have
     secrets, they compete. There seems to be an agreement that girls don’t exist. It lasts
     two or three years, and then around seventh or eighth grade, they admit girls to the
     world again. It’s as though they couldn’t see us for a while, and then they can again.”
    Just as her mother had predicted, when Jane came back to the reservation in the summer
     of her thirteenth year, not only Jimmy but the other boys too were friendly again.
     Jane and Jimmy became close, but forever after there was a slight reserve between
     them. They had each discovered things during the break that made using the different
     pronouns “he” and “she” seem not nearly large enough to reflect the real differences
     between the sexes.
    Jane knew she was coming to a bad place as she walked today. The first night she had
     camped, just as she and Jimmy had twenty years ago, under the stars in an old apple
     orchard at the back of a farm. The second was so warm and still that they lay in a
     field under the stars, and she did the same on her second night. But on the third
     night the weather had changed. When they had decided to take a summer hiking trip,
     they hadn’t thought hard enough about rain. She remembered one of them saying, “We
     should set aside extra time in case it rains,” and the other replying, “The old people
     didn’t hide under roofs when it rained. They just kept going. Skin is waterproof.”
     She was pretty sure the stupid one was the fourteen-year-old Jane Whitefield.
    The rain began before first light on Jane and Jimmy’s third day and didn’t stop. They
     walked southward under a ceiling of