They were strewn about on the shore of a nearby island. It looked as if so many deaths had occurred there that nobody had been left to pick up the bodies.
“Our tracers didn’t know we’d drifted so close to Croatoan while we were talking,” Brendan whispered. “And they were trying so hard not to think about it. . . . They blocked it from their minds.”
“Because it’s too awful,” Antonio agreed.
“Did Second do this?” Jonah asked, his outrage building. “This massacre—”
“No, no,” Brendan began.
Katherine let out a huge gasp of air, as if she’d been holding her breath.
“They’re not human,” she said. “I thought they were human!”
Jonah blinked. He could see why Katherine had thought that. He had almost thought it himself. But he didn’t feel any relief as his eyes assured him that there were just animal skeletons before him—skulls and rib cages that must belong to deer, foxes, wolves, beavers . . . not humans. The bones were so numerous that they seemed to whisper, Death, death, everyone died. . . .
“This is so wrong,” Brendan said in a tight voice. “An abomination.”
“A desecration,” Antonio said.
Jonah thought that they’d slipped into Algonquian to say that, as if the English words weren’t quite strong enough.
“I don’t understand,” Katherine said. “You’ve killed animals. I mean—your tracers did. And not just fish. We saw the tracers back on Roanoke shooting that deer. They . . . slaughtered it.”
“After asking the deer’s permission,” Brendan said.
“Stop trying to explain,” Antonio said harshly. “They’re not going to understand!”
“No—I have to explain,” Brendan said. He looked directly at Katherine. “Our tribe sees itself in balance with nature. When we take a life, we do it with respect. We treat the animal with respect, even in death.” He made a rueful face. “No matter how it might have looked to you, we’re not savages.”
“The white men are the savages!” Antonio said. “The way they kill—without respect—”
“Antonio, you’re white too!” Jonah said, because he couldn’t take any more of this.
“I gave that up,” Antonio said, his face utterly serious. “I am a tribesman now.”
And then Jonah couldn’t argue with that. He could tell that Antonio wasn’t talking about skin color, but a mind-set, a way of seeing the world.
“So Europeans did this?” Katherine asked in a puzzled voice. She waved her hand toward the skeletons lining the shore. “Was it the English? The Spanish? Or—”
“Yes and no,” Brendan said.
“It was because of my people,” Andrea said in a haunted voice. “The Roanoke colonists. We brought death when we came here. Plagues. I read all about the diseases, but I didn’t understand. . . .”
Jonah had been so focused on the scene before him that he’d almost forgotten about Andrea. She’d been sitting there so silently. Even now she looked like a statue, her face gone pale beneath the sunburn, her eyes glittering with pain. Jonah knew nothing about art, and didn’t often think about it, but he could imagine someone making a sculpture of Andrea right now.
The title of the sculpture would be Devastated.
“You mean, the Roanoke colonists brought some plague, some disease, that killed all these animals?” Katherine asked, still sounding baffled.
“No, their diseases killed people,” Brendan said. “Lots and lots of people. In some villages, so many people died that the survivors just fled, leaving the bodies where they fell.”
“And to us, to tribesmen—that’s a terrible sin,” Antonio said. “Sacrilege.”
“Our tracers know to avoid those villages,” Brendan said. “They believe the evil spirits linger.”
Jonah noticed that Antonio didn’t correct Brendan this time about calling the germs evil spirits.
“But here, at Croatoan, this is the worst place,” Brendan said. “As people were dying, they put out animal carcasses on the shore, to warn travelers away, to warn of the evil. Because this is evil too, treating dead animals this way.”
He gestured at the skeletons, the rows and rows of the dead.
“And all the people died, so their bones are still here too?” Katherine asked, horrified.
Brendan shrugged helplessly.
“That’s what our tracers think,” he said.
“Don’t show my grandfather this,” Andrea burst out. “Please, I’m begging you, don’t let your tracers show my grandfather what happened here.”
Jonah had stopped thinking about the tracers. It had completely slipped his mind why they’d come here—because John White had asked Walks with Pride and One Who Survives Much to take him to Croatoan Island. Because John White thought he would find his family and friends there.
Jonah forced himself to look past the skeletons littering the shore. Just beyond the shoreline, rows of native huts were falling in on themselves, clearly abandoned. They looked so much worse than the Indian village back at Roanoke. So much sadder.
This would not be the scene of the happy family reunion that John White—and Andrea—were longing for.
“Andrea,” Brendan said apologetically. “We can’t control our tracers. We don’t know how to stop them.”
Andrea bent down and hugged John White’s shoulders.
“Oh, Grandfather, I’m so glad you’re not conscious for real!” she said. “I’m so glad you’re going to miss this!”
For the moment, he was completely joined with his tracer, the tracer’s eyes closed just as tightly as the real man’s.
“Didn’t the tracer boys tell John White what he’d see here?” Katherine asked. “Didn’t they warn him?”
Antonio shook his head.
“They tried, but—they’re not communicating very well,” he said. “Our tracers can’t speak English, and John White doesn’t know much Algonquian.”