The two little lakes were glassy and greenish. The tall, thick trees along the bank away from the road grew out of the water from submerged roots and protected the ponds from the tiniest breeze. The only ripples came from long-legged water bugs that skittered across the surface now and then.
Three hundred feet away, up the grassy bank, a mother with very white legs and feet sat in the shade of a sunhat and big dark glasses, watching her two little golden-haired children digging with plastic shovels in the muck. If the mother wasn’t careful, they might actually find something, Jane thought. The People had lived here once. That black mud made it easy to grow corn, beans, and squash with a digging stick, and the weeds came right up with a tug.
The village was called Dayodehokto, a phrase that meant “a bend in a creek,” so the rows of longhouses had probably been close to the stream on the far side of the trees, but the cultivated fields had stretched for a couple of miles in all directions. A Dutchman who came through here in the 1670s counted 120 longhouses with twelve or thirteen fires in a line down the center of each one. On opposite sides of each fire were a pair of compartments, where two adult women slept with their husbands—when the men were home—and their children. After allowing for the usual exaggeration, Jane guessed the village would have contained nearly three thousand people on June 23, 1687, when this quiet little spot had its moment of importance in global politics.
For twenty years, Louis XIV, the Sun King, had been ordering successive governors of New France to exterminate the five Iroquois nations, but particularly the Senecas, who lived the farthest west and were most disruptive to the fur trade with the Indians of the western Great Lakes.
He had received no satisfaction in the past, but this time he had found himself a soldier. The Marquis de Denonville efficiently assembled the total military force of New France—probably a thousand soldiers, traders, and trappers. The Sun King sent him two thousand French regular troops, half the number he had requested, along with a regal apology about being strapped for cash. Denonville gathered six hundred allies from the Indians of the west—Miamis, Illinois, Potawatomis, Hurons, Ottawas. They all met at Fort Niagara, where the river emptied into Lake Ontario, traveled in four hundred boats and canoes to Irondequoit Bay, and marched south along the trail to this village.
The army was confident that the people they were attacking were almost all women and children. Seneca men were out in the forests for most of the year, hunting or raiding distant tribes. The Senecas had no reason to expect an attack, because they had been assured that Louis XIV and their ally the English king James II were friends at the moment.
On the first day, the French expedition made good progress down the trail toward this spot. They marched with half the Canadian woodsmen and Indians in front, then the French army, and then a rear guard of Indians and woodsmen. On the second day they reached the edge of the cornfields but found them strangely deserted. At this time of year, the Month of Strawberries, the corn was still unripe and needed constant tending. The fields should have been full of women, chattering as they weeded and turned the soil. The marquis conceded that his tactic of surprise had failed, but he was sure the mission might still succeed if his men were quick enough. The French force ran toward the village in their eagerness to cut down the fleeing women and children before they could vanish into the forest.
The front of the column passed within a few yards of something they were not expecting—a group of Seneca warriors lying on their bellies in the brush. The Senecas waited until the vanguard had moved on, then tore into the center of the column, where the French soldiers were, first firing their rifles and then falling on the soldiers with tomahawks and war clubs. The French fell into disorder, firing at trees, bushes, or their Indian allies and then scattering along the trail in both directions. The Senecas killed over a hundred and then disappeared into the forest again.
It took the marquis the rest of the day to rally and reassemble his men, then force them to set up a secure camp for the night. In the morning he cautiously advanced into the village of Dayodehokto and discovered 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.