Shadow Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

that the ambush had been a
delaying tactic. The longhouses were already in ashes. The only
living things left were two old men who had stayed to exercise the
privilege of dying while defying their enemies. They were obligingly
cut into pieces and boiled to make soup for the French allies.
    It took Denonville’s army
six days to burn all of the cornfields here and the fifty thousand
bushels of dried corn that had been stored. When that had been
accomplished, the marquis, less optimistic now, marched on to two
more deserted villages, then returned to Montreal to contemplate what
a lot of trouble he had gone to just to cook up two old men.
    The Senecas and the rest of the
five Iroquois nations retaliated by making New France from Mackinac
to Quebec a very dangerous place for a couple of years. They attacked
Frontenac and Montreal, killing hundreds and carrying off hundreds
more. French traders traveling in the far north disappeared. It would
be a hundred years before the villages in Seneca country would be
raided again. The next time it would be the Americans, and again the
women would lead their children into the forest in time to escape the
scheduled extermination, leaving the enemy to be satisfied with
burning cornfields.
    Jane gathered her nail
clippings, smiled and nodded at the woman and her children, and
walked along the perimeter of the pond into the trees until she came
to Honeoye Creek. The area around the pond was a favorite picnic spot
for people from Rochester, and not one in a thousand knew anyone had
ever lived here. It had become one of the secret places.
    Jane took out the package of
tobacco she had bought in the airport. “Jo-Ge-Oh, it’s
me,” she whispered. “Jane Whitefield.” She
sprinkled a pile of brown shreds on the flat bank where the Little
People would be sure to find it. “Thanks for the break in Las
Vegas. Pete Hatcher is gone now.” There was no such thing as a
prayer of supplication in the old religion, only ways of giving
thanks.
    She scattered the crescent
fingernail clippings along the muddy bank. “This ought to keep
the possums and raccoons away while you light up.” The Little
People had a terrible tobacco addiction, and they prized human
fingernails because the scent kept away the animals that were
bothersome to anyone that short.
    Since she was a child, Jane had
particularly admired the Jo-Ge-Oh, because they took the hunted, the
wounded, and the defeated and hid them from their enemies. Time was
different for the Jo-Ge-Oh, so the person they helped would simply
vanish and then emerge from the forest thinking he had been with them
for a day, but find it was now many years later, after all his
enemies were dead and buried.
    Jane liked to visit the Little
People in places where Senecas had once needed to fade into the
forest. The three hundred years that had passed on Honeoye Creek
might not make much difference to the Little People. It might be a
few days to them. And here was a Seneca woman, not changed much from
the last one they’d seen on this spot, coming to bring them the
customary present, as women like her had been doing for thousands of
years.

3

    The
bus labored up Delaware Avenue out of Buffalo, building its momentum
slowly after each stop, then coasting to the next one, until Jane saw
her corner. She stood up, and the driver pulled over to let her out
under a streetlamp. She walked along the uneven sidewalks across the
south end of Deganawida in the dark, her canvas bag over her
shoulder, her feet feeling without effort the places where the
concrete slabs were pushed up by the big old trees, as Jane had
learned to do when she was little.
    She walked along Erie Street,
unconsciously noting what was going on behind the lighted panes of
glass without staring at them. She probably knew the occupants of
every third house in the little city. Her parents had known more of
them, and her grandparents still more, because they could have told
her who was related to whom for