“Find your way home? In your own woods? To your own home? Why ever not?”

Ned shook his head, feeling embarrassed. “I get snow blind,” he said. “I can’t tell which way I am facing. If it snows heavily—I’m lost.”

“How can you not know where you are on your own land? It’s so strange.”

Ned could not argue that it was strange not to know the way to your own door. He shrugged, embarrassed. “Aye; but I don’t.”

“D’you want to come over to Norwottuck with me? We’re roasting venison.”

Ned hesitated, longing for company, a warm fire, a good dinner, and the sound of other voices. But he looked at the gray skim of ice and the banked-up ice floes frozen in the river. “How would we get there?”

“We’ll walk.”

Ned tasted fear in his throat. “On the river? How d’you know it’s safe?”

Wussausmon held out his hand. “I just do. Come on. I won’t drop you through it.”

Ned gripped the outstretched hand. “You’d better not.” He tried to smile. “I’d sink like a stone in these coats.”

Wussausmon led the way on the snow-topped pier, and then sat at the end, swung his legs round, and stepped down to the snowy river. He took half a dozen steps away into the middle of the river. “See?” he said to Ned. “It bears my weight. It will hold you.”

Ned clenched his teeth on his fear and followed his friend, putting his feet exactly in Wussausmon’s tracks. There was a creak from the ice and he froze, imagining at once the long snaking crack and his plunge down into deadly black water.

“It’s nothing,” Wussausmon assured him. “That’s nothing. That’s just it yielding to you. The warning noise is when it splinters, lots of little cracks at once.”

Ned could not answer, he slid as gently as he could towards the other man. “Go on, go on,” he said. “I don’t want to come too close. I daren’t stand still.”

Wussausmon turned and led the way, stepping over Ned’s ferry rope, frozen stiff with dripping icicles, passing the ferry’s snowcapped landing place, upstream, to where the white drifted snow of the bank met the white drifted snow on the river. There was no way of knowing when they were on the shore until Wussausmon beamed at Ned. “And here you are!” he exclaimed. “Dry land. We’re on the other side.”

Ned grinned and gave a little chuckle at his own fear. “Thanks be to God! You’ll think me a coward.”

“No,” Wussausmon said. “I don’t blame you for fearing it.” He led the way up the bank and away from the river, at a steady sliding pace, deeper into the woods, following a trail that was invisible to Ned, only stopping once, when they had to cross a strange rut, like a wagon wheel track, carved half a foot deep into the snow, curving through the forest from the south, running north towards the village. Beside it was a log tied to a rope and as they went past, Wussausmon picked up the rope, dropped the log into the rut, and towed it along, clearing it of drifted snow.

“What’s this? This track?” Ned asked. “What is it?”

Wussausmon glanced behind him, still towing the log, which slid easily on the bed of packed snow. “It’s for a snowsnake,” he said.

Ned recoiled. “A snowsnake?” he repeated. “You have snakes here? In the snow?”

Wussausmon laughed. “No. No, Coatman! Coatman! Are you mad? All the real snakes are sleeping; they would die of the cold. This is our track, we make it as the snow starts to fall. It’s how we send messages in winter. We make a deep icy narrow track from one village to another, like this—this is one. And then if we have a message which is urgent, we throw a spear with the message into the entrance of the track. It goes fast, sliding along, and someone picks it up and throws it onward. Like your letters that you send to one another.”

He saw Ned’s amazed expression. “Only our messages can go through snowy woods and yours cannot.”

Ned peered at the narrow rut, icy at the bottom, and imagined a spear whistling along it. “It goes fast?”

“As fast as a man can throw at the beginning—killing speed—and it rattles along, writhing like a snake as it slows down. Then when anyone sees it, they pick it up, read the message, and throw it again. Village to village.” Wussausmon laughed at Ned’s astonished face. “We’re not as savage as you think.”

“So even in winter, when us settlers are snowed in, you can send messages one to another, all around the country,” Ned said slowly.

Wussausmon nodded. “And smoke signals,” he pointed out. “We can send messages with smoke. On a calm day you can make a fire on Montaup and the signal will be seen at Accomack.”

“Montaup? Accomack?”

“You call it Mount Hope. Accomack you call Plymouth.”

“And you can travel in winter too,” Ned went on. “When we can’t go on the river or into the forests.”

“It’s not your home in winter, is it?” Wussausmon pointed out. “In winter it’s ours again, as if the land and the people had never been parted, as if you had never come.”

Wussausmon turned and went on and Ned labored to keep up with the steady shush-shush of his pace. The village came into sight ahead of them, a cluster of long low huts, walled with reed mats, roofed with thicker mats, the snow cleared all around them, a central fireplace with a huge fire and a whole deer roasting on a spit, a frame to the side where the hide was being cleaned, a big bowl of seething succotash in the embers. Fighting men were sorting spears and weapons in a corner of the village, a man, stripped to the waist because of the heat of the fire, was putting small metal bolts into the heart of red hot embers, drawing them out and hammering. Ned saw, with a pang of dread, that he was making pieces for a musket.

“See that?” Wussausmon indicated the half-built rearing wooden wall of a huge palisade.

“You’re walling the village, you’re building a fort here,” Ned accused him.

“Yes,” Wussausmon said. “So that no one can take this village and burn us out.”

“You mean like the English did at Mystic Fort? But that was years ago. Nobody would burn you out of here.”

“Then what is the Hadley militia drilling for?”

“They’re not drilling now,” Ned said.

“Just because you can do nothing in winter does not mean that our lives have to stop too.”

“So this winter, while we hibernate like bears, you’re preparing for war,” Ned accused him. “You send messages in ways that we can’t understand, we don’t even know! You’re bringing the tribes together: against us. You’re walling the village, you’re collecting weapons—I saw what he was making! You’re getting ready for a war.”

“Yes,” Wussausmon confirmed. “That’s why I brought you here—so you should see for yourself. We’re getting ready—here, and at Montaup, all round the country, all the other tribes are getting ready too. I’ve warned the governor over and over again but he won’t make a new peace treaty with the Pokanoket, he won’t listen to our complaints. But if you, a settler, a soldier, tell him you have seen this, you have seen us armed and ready, he will believe you. I can’t make him listen to me.”