into thick fur and the body widening into a lynx, the jaws now chewing to get free of the hand.
Jane swung hard and woke to the light streaming through the white curtains onto the polished hardwood floor of the bedroom. She held her eyes open in the glare, her breaths coming fast and shallow, afraid that if she closed her lids the dream would still be there. She spun her head and saw Carey, then slowly began to calm down. She was wet, covered with sweat so her nightgown clung to her. She sat up and waited for the dizzy feeling to pass, then eased her weight off the bed. She looked at the clock radio on the nightstand. It was almost six. She walked down the hall quickly, turned on the shower in the guest bathroom, pulled the nightgown off over her head, and threw it on the floor. In a few minutes she would be clean and clear-minded, and Carey could awaken to hear her making his breakfast downstairs.
As she stepped into the shower, she tried to get over the dream. Since she was a child she had heard people clicking their tongues and saying that dreams of the Old Time had begun to come back. The pessimists said it happened only to Senecas who had begun to forget who they were and what they were supposed to do. They were paying the price for repressing their true inclinations. There were others who said the dreams were returning because the supernaturals had stayed on the land with the Senecas all this time and finally gotten used to the way things were now, just as the Senecas had. They recognized that the people had not changed in any way that mattered, and so they had begun to touch them more often in sleep.
Jane felt the terror and claustrophobia of the dream beginning to wash away with the hot water and mental exercise. There wasn’t much mystery about it. She had been holding down a quiet tension since the night when she had agreed to marry Carey. She had done the little she could do to make herself unobtrusive. She had taken a new name and moved into a house that no runner and no chaser could know about. She was living as quiet a life as a woman could. She had even been careful to leave untouched all of the things that pertained to Jane Whitefield: the old house looked occupied, the telephone was connected, the mail carrier still came every day.
She had told Carey that she had kept the house as it was because she couldn’t think of a way to keep her old life from popping in to alarm the new tenants. It had not been exactly a lie, but it was part of the truth. What she had not mentioned was that anyone—victim or persecutor—who was able to satisfy himself that she had moved out of that house, and not merely gone on a trip, might keep looking and find this one. The old house kept them one extra step away from here—not much protection, just something that might buy her the time to see them before they saw her.
The dream had been her subconscious mind protesting, reminding her that the few small obstacles she had placed to hide her own trail were pitiful. No matter how fervently Mrs. Carey McKinnon wanted to ignore it, Jane Whitefield could not forget that the trail behind her was full of wolves.
9
Jane parked her car in the gravel driveway in front of the small frame house under the big hemlock tree. When she got out she stepped into a little cloud of dust that settled on her shoes. A dog in the back yard began to bark, then dashed toward her with menacing yaps. It was a little black mongrel with brown eyebrows, the kind that she had seen running around yapping on the Tonawanda reservation since she was a child, so she knew what it would do before it did. It ran up until it was five feet away, then straightened its forelegs, skidded to a stop on the grass, and began to hop up and down, wagging its tail.
“Maggie,” came a deep voice from the porch. “Come.” The little dog trotted happily around Jane once, then scampered up the steps onto the porch and ran through the open screen door to alert the others in the Peterson house. “Hi, Janie,” said the man. He stood up from his rocking chair so Jane could see him over the railing. He was very tall and had the square-chested, long-legged look that she remembered noting in his father when she had come here with her own father for visits in the old days.
“Hi, Billy,” she called. “Is this a good time?”
“There is no bad time,” he said as he put a sprig that had fallen from the hemlock into his book to mark the page, set it on the stack on the wicker table beside him, then folded his reading glasses into his shirt pocket.
He met Jane on the walk and let her hug him, then leaned his head down and turned his cheek to catch her kiss. “Married life agrees with you, Janie.”
He said it in Seneca, so Jane answered in Seneca. “The old man wanted to come too, but I made him go to work so I could keep being a grand lady who wanders around doing nothing.”
As they stepped up onto the porch, he saw her notice his books, and reverted to English. “Just some reading for my undergraduate course in the fall. Basic abnormal psychology.”
“What we used to call Nuts and Sluts.”
“That’s the one,” he said. “The department makes me take a turn every third year.”
The little dog pushed through the screen door again with its nose, and then a woman nearly as tall as Billy with hair like Jane’s came out from behind it holding three glasses of lemonade on a tray. “Hi, Janie,” she said. “I thought you might like a cold drink.”
Jane took a glass. “Thanks, Vi,” she said, and they exchanged pecks on the cheek while Billy took the tray to keep the other glasses level.
Violet Peterson sat on the porch swing with Jane and smiled. Jane looked around her. “Did you sell the kids?”
Violet said, “They’re in school, believe it or not. Veronica’s taking a computer class every morning, and Delbert’s doing art.” She glanced at her watch. “I pick them up in an hour.”
“So serious,” said Jane.
“It’s great,” said Violet. “If I don’t make them do something in the summer they run around in the woods like—”
“Like we did,” said Jane.
“Exactly,” said Violet. “Kids are wonderful, but anybody who says they don’t drive you nuts is in a state of denial.” Her lips pursed and she said slyly, “You’ll see.”
Jane sipped the cold lemonade and listened. The red-winged blackbirds at the edge of the marshland a hundred yards away were calling to each other.
Billy said, “You have something on your mind?”
“You must be a psychology professor,” said Jane. “It’s kind of a delicate problem. Delicate politically.”
“Politically?”
“I came to see my friends Billy and Violet, but before I go, I want to do some lobbying with Sadagoyase.”
She could feel the weight of ages as he stared at her. Sadagoyase meant Level Heavens. It was the name that had been given to the member of the Snipe clan who held that sachemship in each generation since the first Sadagoyase, one of the forty-nine who had sat at Onondaga with Hiawatha and Deganawida to establish the Iroquois League. Each of them for a thousand years had probably sat in front of the doorway of his wife’s house on a day like today, with the blackbirds calling in the hot sunshine, and listened to a woman like her who had come to talk politics.
“Is this about the gambling?” asked Violet.
“Yes, I’m afraid it is,” said Jane. “I’ll bet you’re both sick of it.”
“Not at all,” said Sadagoyase. “It’s good that you came, because I’ve been meaning to give you a call about it.”
“Me?” asked Jane. “I thought I was being clever sneaking around to the sachem of another clan. Why would you call a Wolf?”
“You said it was delicate politically. It’s been voted down four times, but it keeps coming back up. I need to know what key people think, the ones who are educated and can sway public opinion.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Everything I see about it tells me to leave it alone and let other people decide. I’m not here to offer advice about the general issue. I just wanted to make one little point and skulk away.”
“But I’m asking your advice.”
“I’m not the one to ask. Whitefields haven’t lived on the reservation in three or four generations.”
