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moderately successful. More often than not they killed enough to keep themselves alive, and the times when food did run out they were welcomed into villages whose people Comet Elijah knew. But as they began making their way back, they ran into an awful storm. People would talk about it for years to come, how it was the worst outbreak of snow, wind, and freezing cold those mountains had seen in more than a hundred years.
    The men had started setting up their camp earlier than usual that afternoon, knowing from how fast and hard the temperature was dropping, and from a certain uneasy feeling in the air, that they might have to stay there for a while. Harry remembered how he went walking off to investigate a sound he had heard in the forest as the first flakes came down. Before he knew it, the camp, along with the men, were gone. Lost in a grainy gray haze of wind-driven snow.
    He later pieced together what had happened next. As soon as somebody noticed him missing, they fanned out to search. Each man went in a different direction. All Harry remembered was night falling around him and the snow getting thicker on the ground, the snow whipping around him so hard that he could not see beyond the closesttrees. He finally lay down beside a rotted-out log for a nap and woke up an unknown time later feeling warm and safe and well under a makeshift shelter of tree branches and slabs of bark. At the entrance a small fire burned cheerily despite the wind gusts. Encircling him were the strong arms of Comet Elijah.
    “I have you to thank for teaching me to be a man, Comet Elijah. You and Natty.”
    “You were a good learner.”
    “We guessed you’d gone on another of your long hunting trips, or maybe to visit your people, the ones who went to Canada. But you never said good-bye and you never came back.”
    “It was time to go. I had nothing more to teach my people. Or you.”
    Noah and Blinn had been following this exchange with looks of surprise and curiosity. Harry said to them, “I think what he means is I wasn’t listening to him anymore. Or to Natty or anybody else, for that matter.”
    “I also wanted to see my relatives the Haudenosaunee, the ones the French call Iroquois. The Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca, Oneida, Cayuga, and my own Tuscarora cousins who survived the uprising and went up to live with them.”
    “Comet Elijah was an important man,” Harry said, directing himself to Blinn, who had arrived in New Bern from England only four years earlier and had shown scant interest in the town’s history. Harry realized he himself knew little more than Blinn, tales from the old days just not striking him as information he needed to have. But he did know Comet Elijah’s story. He had heard it over and over again from Natty.
    “He was the young king of a Tuscarora band that lived north of New Bern. When the southern group attacked the Swissers, he kept his people out of the fight, and by doing so saved many lives. King George himself rewarded them with unquestioned ownership of their land. Some—the ones who didn’t move away to Canada—still live on it to this day.”
    “The king gave them their own land?” asked Noah.
    “Well, yes. It sounds strange now, but that’s what happened.”
    “I decided I would go up to Canada for a visit,” Comet Elijah said. “See if they were still angry with me for not helping them kill the whites. By the time I got up there nobody seemed to care anymore, so I was safe. I stayed for a good long time and even took a wife, but she died one winter. Then after a while I got tired of it. It’s too cold up there. I wanted to come back home, see the old places again. See how you came out. Has the young warrior gained wisdom to go along with his knowledge of the tomahawk?”
    “I’ve changed, Comet Elijah. Mostly for the better, I hope.”
    Blinn made an impatient noise in his throat. Curiosity satisfied, Harry guessed. “I am sure we all got a lot to talk about,” Blinn said. “First,