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neats leather shoes made over a cobbler’s last. And in her hands was a big piece of bread white as gray moose milk —
    Sayward moved away. You wouldn’t reckon, she told herself, that that girl pretty as a settlement lady had been their mother. Not to look at her now, puttering around this cabin in her old walnut shortgown that hadn’t been washed since Genny’s fingers had taken it in again. And still it liked to fall off Jary’s bones. Oh, her mother’s days were numbered. The slow fever burned off mortal flesh like a fire cooked meat off a bone. All day it never let you rest. Jary had four stout girls to do all the cabin chores and yet her bare feet kept scraping over the earthern floor that had been damped and tamped and topped with white clay to match the daubing on the chinking. Talking did no good. It went in Jary’s one ear and out the other. Her hair kept sliding down the side or back of her head, comingapart like a hanging bird’s nest in December. It made her look like she was in her second childhood and her mother only thirty-six or seven.
    “I’d thin it out, Mam,” Sayward told her. “It’s a mortal weight to lug around. Hair kin suck your strength like a blood sucker.”
    But Jary Luckett wouldn’t part with any of her hair. Not her. Once her hams had been plump as Achsa’s and her skin white as Genny’s, and Sayward’s breast were no firmer than her’s once were. All she had left that hadn’t shriveled up was her hair. When one of the girls tended it of a morning, it swept down from the bench over the earthen floor, heavy as China silk before it went to the loom. You couldn’t find a gray thread. No, she still had her hair and by Jeem’s cousin, she meant to keep it.
    “They kain’t be much wrong with me or it’d a fell out,” Jary told them, gaunt and jandered. “If I just had some wheat bread, I know I’d pick up.”
    Sayward had been shaving Worth to go to the Shawaneetown trading post. He sat a stool with his head thrown back against the trencher, the sides of his face yellow with soft soap made from game fat and white hickory ashes. Not a word did Worth say, but when Jary cast up twice that they had no bread, Sayward could feel his face settle into sharp grooves as if the lye had stung him. When he came in from renching off the soap at the run, his naked cheeks were flat as a man’s who has had enough ofa woman’s complaining for a while and is glad to be off to the woods.
    The young ones watched him pull his spring furs from trees and stretchers and work them in a pack with his knee. Jary came shuffling out.
    “I wa’n’t a sayin’ that at you, Worth,” she said apologetically. “You got your faults but nobody can make you out a poor provider. Few has better meat than us. Most times we have venison a hangin’ up. Then you give us special treats like gadd or duck. But a body that’s losin’ flesh is like one that’s a luggin a young’un. It hankers for queer victuals.”
    Worth strapped up his pack with whang leather thongs.
    “I mought be off five or six nights,” he told Sayward.
    It took no more than a long day, the girl knew, to tramp to Shawaneetown where Hough had a log house, a squaw wife and goods for the Shawanee and Delaware trade. Where Worth aimed to go with his pack of skins that would keep him five or six nights she couldn’t make out, unless it might be Bannock’s Mill on the Ohio. It came to her the Shawanees once said it took three days to go and three to come.
    The same notion must have crossed Genny’s mind, for she bent down and whispered to the younger ones who licked their chops and pushed up around their father, their eyes bright on him asyoung coons’, their lips shut tight so he wouldn’t see their mouths water.
    “Well, what do you want?” Worth demanded of them.
    They nudged little Sulie, for she was his favorite.
    “We don’t want nothin’, Pap,” she said, pleased as all get out, but before opening her lips she had to