Night of the Full Moon by Gloria Whelan

1
    T HE WINTER of 1840 was a snowy tunnel. We entered it in November and couldn’t find our way out until April. Then spring surprised us. Almost overnight the white field by our cabin turned back into a pond. When Mama saw the last of the ice melt, she said to me, “Libby, it’s like something heavy lifting from my heart.”
    Black-and-white bufflehead ducks sifted down onto our pond. The blue heron was back stalking frogs. One morning we heard the oriole sing and saw it flash through the trees. Papa unraveled rope and hung the strands over branches. The oriole carried off the strands in its beak to weave into a nest that hung like a little bag at the top of an oak.

    By June all the rows had pushed out green in our vegetable garden. I was kneeling pulling out weeds when Fawn appeared, like she always did—as softly and suddenly as a butterfly lighting on a flower. Her name was really Taw-cum-e-go-qua, but that was hard to say. Fawn was the name my papa made up for her. “She’s like a young deer,” he said. “Graceful, with those long legs and big eyes. Wary, too. I’m always afraid of startling her into skittering away.”
    Each fall Fawn and her family, along with the other Potawatomi Indians in their camp, went north to their winter trapping grounds. They didn’t call themselves Potawatomi. They called themselves
Neshnabek,
which means “the People.”
    Fawn was splendid in a red and blue calico dress embroidered with red and bluebeads. There was beading, too, on her deerskin moccasins. Her dark hair was braided with a red ribbon. “You have a new dress,” I said. “And a ribbon.” I’m afraid I was a little envious, for my own pinafore seemed dull, and I had no ribbons. Papa says beauty has nothing to do with fancy adornments, but I would have given anything to look like Fawn.
    “The hunting was good this winter,” Fawn said. “Each day in the forest the spirits of the animals called to my father. They told him where to put his snares and traps. He brought back many skins. At the store where he sold them he bought calico for me and my mother. I have another ribbon. I’ll give it to you.”
    The Indians were always giving things away. When Papa was not able to find enough business as a surveyor to provide us with food for the winter, Fawn’s papa brought us corn and wild honey and smoked fish. “Where did you make your winter camp?” I asked.
    “We had to travel many nights’ journeyfrom here to find the mink and the marten and the fisher.”
    It was true we had fewer animals, for as more and more settlers arrived, the woods where the animals once lived were turned into farms. Some settlers came as we did by covered wagon. Some came by boat through the new Erie Canal. A steamer called the
Governor Marcy
came all the way from Buffalo. It chugged down the Saginaw River, sending the ducks and geese flying. Soon the train would come to Saginaw. Everyone was buying up property. Now Papa had lots of land to survey.
    “Did all the Indian families come back?” I asked Fawn. We had heard tales of smallpox in the north. The winter before it had spread like wildfire. Hundreds of Indians had died. Smallpox was a bad sickness for everyone, but because it was a white man’s sickness it was much more serious for the Indians. So many Indians died of the disease they couldn’t be buried properly and the wolves got at the graves.
    “Two families from our clan did not return.”For a long time Fawn was silent. When she spoke again it was in a voice so soft I could hardly hear her. “In the month of the longest nights my little brother, Namah, became sick. Sores covered his face and his body. He grew hot as though a fire burned inside him. He spoke in dreams. On the fifth day he died.”
    I remembered how Namah loved to trail after his father, Sanatuwa, and how his father had made him a small bow and arrows. I felt terrible.
    The sadness stayed on Fawn’s face. It only went away when she told me, “My mother