“What d’you do?”

The man grasped Ned’s hand and hauled him over the threshold and up the big bank of snow, helped him balance to put on his snowshoes. “Look around,” he said. “That’s what I do. I look around and I think all the time about what I am doing, not what I will do later or tomorrow, or any dream of tonight. I am here like a bird circling in the sky and always looking down, as the wolf going quietly through the woods, ears up, hackles up, scenting the wind, like the woods themselves always knowing. So I don’t misstep or let a branch fall on me because I am watching all the time where I step, what the wind is doing in the trees, what is around me, every moment of the time.”

“You watch for accidents as if they were enemies?” Ned asked.

“As if they were companions. They come with me everywhere I go, everything can always go wrong. I walk in a world where I am safe at this moment but who knows what happens next? I watch to see that accidents don’t surprise me—but I know they are always there. I make sure they do not creep up on me while I am dreaming of something else.” He looked into Ned’s face. “You be the same. Don’t be in a hurry, like Coatmen always are. Pause, watch, listen, smell, taste, hear, and use that other sense, wolf sense that tells you that something strange is happening even hundreds of miles away, bird sense that guides hundreds of them to move as one, turning at an invisible moment. You have to be dead to your wandering thoughts, never thinking of what has gone or what is coming next year, you have to forget the last step or the next, you have to be locked into here, now.”

Ned thought. “Now? The wind now and the trees now?”

“Now, and now, and the next now after that. Where your feet are, and the snow under them, what is above your head and is anyone behind you?”

Ned nodded, thinking of awareness of the world around him, suddenly vivid and bright.

Wussausmon took his arm and looked into his face. “Now, can I teach you to fish?”

Ned grinned. “Yes, you can. And teach me how to watch all the time, as you do.”

“You can try,” the man promised. “But you are a people whose mind never stays on one thing at a time. Unless it is money.”

“I will try,” Ned promised.

“Follow me then,” Wussausmon ordered. “And follow in my tracks, don’t wander like a child.”

Feeling the reproof, Ned followed exactly in his tracks through the deep snow, around trees, through clearings, crossing frozen swamp smoothed white under the drifts of snow until they came to a clearing in the forest and a small frozen lake.

“This is a good fishing lake,” Wussausmon told him.

“I come here in summer,” Ned said uneasily, thinking how deep and still the waters were, even in the heat of summertime.

“So in winter the fish are still here, under the ice.”

Ned nodded. “I suppose so. I never thought.”

“Of course. So watch: this is how we catch them.”

Ned stood back as Wussausmon dropped his fishing pack, a buckskin bag, onto the snowy ice. He selected a tool like a long-handled hoe, showed Ned the bone blade on the end, and then scraped and stabbed. Ned flinched at the first blows, anxiously listening for a warning crack below his feet, but the ice was thick and silent, and as Wussausmon wore a hole through the ice he saw, disbelievingly, the black water slop into the hole inches below. The sides of the ice hole were clear and thick, little pieces of ice broke off and puddled in the bottom. Kneeling on his bag Wussausmon picked them out with a ladle.

“Pass me the decoy,” he said over his shoulder, and Ned rooted in the open end of the bag till he found a piece of wood with twine twisted all around it and a little mock fish made of shells, wonderfully jointed so that it moved tail and fin. He handed it to Wussausmon who unwound the twine.

“Spear,” he demanded.

Ned drew out a three-pronged spear, on a long pole, and put it into Wussausmon’s hand.

“First you look,” Wussausmon instructed, rising to his feet and stepping back so Ned could take his place, kneeling on the kit bag, peering into the wet darkness of the hole. He could see nothing; he felt the icy breath of the water frosting his hair, and blinked against the cold in his face. Then slowly, as his eyes made sense of shadows in darkness, he could see the outline of sleeping fish at the bottom of the lake, the pale flank of one, the outline of another. There was something extraordinarily beautiful in the silent sleep of the dormant creatures.

“There are fish!” he whispered, lifting his face to Wussausmon. “I see them.”

“Indeed,” the man confirmed with a smile. “Now, I am going to catch one, and then you are.”

He took up his place leaning over the hole and released the decoy fish into the water, tweaking the twine up and down to make the fish move in the water as if it were swimming. Within moments the big fish had risen up from the depths, Wussausmon had the spear ready and in complete silence, barely even breathing, he made a steady thrust and plunged the spear into the water, brought it back, pulled it out, and laid it on the ice at Ned’s feet, a fat writhing large-mouthed bass, speared through the middle.

“Give thanks and kill,” he said shortly.

Ned, at a loss for an impromptu prayer, just said: “Thank you, fish, thank you, lake, thank you, Wussausmon,” and feeling like a fool clubbed it on the head so it lay still.

“There,” Wussausmon said smiling. “You have your first fish of winter. Now you can catch your own,” and he stood up from the bag, gestured that Ned should kneel down, and waited, unmoving for a good hour, while Ned jiggled the decoy, speared into the darkness, cursed, got his hands wet, and tried all over again.

NOVEMBER 1670, AT SEA

Sarah had feared she would be seasick, and homesick, but she found that the movement of the boat lulled her to sleep and so the first night was quickly behind her, and when she woke in the morning she could walk easily on the moving deck, and she found the creak of the sails and the constant roll of the waves under the keel were exhilarating. Captain Shore allowed her to sit at the prow of the ship, as long as she did not distract the sailors from their work, and she spent days leaning over the side and watching the waves slide under the keel.

They ate well. Sarah was allowed to put out a line to fish. There were no vegetables or fruit after the first few days, but they took on extra stores in Lisbon. The seas were rough in the Atlantic and a buffeting wind drove the galleon through the water, making the sails strain and the sheets crack, but when they turned into the Mediterranean it grew calmer and even though it was winter in faraway England there were bright sunny days, and Sarah borrowed Captain Shore’s big tropical hat when she leaned on the edge of the boat to see dolphin playing in the bow waves. She hardly thought what lay ahead of her, she avoided thinking about it. The enormity of the lie to her mother, the secret voyage, and the task ahead of her, was too much for her to imagine. Sarah let herself revel in the time at sea and not worry about the destination.

DECEMBER 1670, LONDON

Johnnie, coming out of his master’s counting house with half a dozen other clerks for his weekly evening off, was astounded to find Livia waiting, the long-suffering Carlotta behind her, at the merchant’s door.