The Light in the Forest

“Your father welcomes you back,” Del translated. “He thanks God you’re safe and sound.” When the boy’s lips compressed, he said, “Can’t you say you’re glad after all these years to see your own father?”

True Son’s heart felt like a stone. How could this fantastic and inferior figure in a long fawn-colored garment like a woman’s be possibly anything to him—this pallid creature who revealed his feelings in front of all! In the boy’s mind came the picture of his Indian father. How differently he would have looked and acted. With what dignity and restraint he could conduct himself in any situation, in peace or war, in council or the hunt, with pipe or tomahawk, rifle or scalping knife. This weak and pale-skinned man was nothing beside him.

“He’s not my father,” he said.

T
HE AUTHOR
acknowledges his debt to Heckewelder’s
Indian Nations;
to Zeisberger’s
History of North American Indians;
and to many other early volumes made available by Miss Nell B. Stevens, acting director of the Pennsylvania state library; by Miss Alice R. Eaton, librarian of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, public library; and by Walter B. Kuhn of the library of the University of New Mexico; also to the counsel of Paul A. W. Wallace, editor of
Pennsylvania History,
who read the manuscript and furnished material; to Anthony F. C. Wallace of the University of Pennsylvania, who made suggestions; to Donald H. Kent, associate Pennsylvania state historian, who furnished photostats of early maps and manuscripts; and to many others who lent aid and encouragement
.

The author wants to acknowledge further his gratitude to those readers who have sensed what
he was trying to do—not to write historical novels but to give an authentic sensation of life in early America. In records of the Eastern border, the author was struck by the numbers of returned white captives who tried desperately to run away from their flesh-and-blood families and return to their Indian foster homes and the Indian mode of life. As a small boy he himself had tried to run off to Indian country without the benefit of ever having lived among the savages
.

Not that the novel represents the novelist’s particular beliefs or opinions. He can understand and sympathize with either side. His business is to be fair to them both. If the novel has another purpose, it is to point out that in the pride of our American liberties, we’re apt to forget that already we’ve lost a good many to civilization. The American Indians once enjoyed far more than we. Already two hundred years ago, when restrictions were comparatively few with us, our ideals and restrained manner of existence repelled the Indian. I thought that perhaps if we understood how these First Americans felt toward us even then and toward our white way of life, we might better understand the adverse, if perverted, view of us by some African, European, and Asian peoples today
.

T
HE BOY
was about fifteen years old. He tried to stand very straight and still when he heard the news, but inside of him everything had gone black. It wasn’t that he couldn’t endure pain. In summer he would put a stone hot from the fire on his flesh to see how long he could stand it. In winter he would sit in the icy river until his Indian father smoking on the bank said he could come out. It made him strong against any hardship that would
come to him, his father said. But if it had any effect on this thing that had come to him now, the boy couldn’t tell what it was.

For days word had been reaching the Indian village that the Lenni Lenape and Shawanose must give up their white prisoners. Never for a moment did the boy dream that it meant him. Why, he had been one of them ever since he could remember! Cuyloga was his father. Eleven years past he had been adopted to take the place of a son dead from the yellow vomit. More than once he had been told how, when he was only four years old, his father had said words that took out his white blood and put Indian blood in its place. His white thoughts and meanness had been wiped away and the brave thoughts of the Indian put in their stead. Ever since, he had been True Son, the blood of Cuyloga and flesh of his flesh. For eleven years he had lived here, a native of this village on the Tuscarawas, a full member of the family. Then how could he be torn from his home like a sapling from the ground and given to the alien whites who were his enemy!

The day his father told him, the boy made up his mind. Never would he give up his Indian life. Never! When no one saw him, he crept away from
the village. From an old campfire, he blackened his face. Up above Pockhapockink, which means the stream between two hills, he had once found a hollow tree. Now he hid himself in it. He thought only he knew the existence of that tree and was dismayed when his father tracked him to it. It was humiliating to be taken back with his blackened face and tied up in his father’s cabin like some prisoner to be burned at the stake. When his father led him out next morning, he knew everybody watched: his mother and sisters, the townspeople, his uncle and aunt, his cousins and his favorite cousin, Half Arrow, with whom he had ever fished, hunted and played. Seldom had they been separated even for a single day.

All morning on the path with his father, crazy thoughts ran like squirrels in the boy’s head. Never before had he known his father to be in the wrong. Could it be that he was in the right now? Had he unknowingly left a little white blood in the boy’s veins and was it for this that he must be returned? Then they came in sight of the ugly log redoubts and pale tents of the white army, and the boy felt sure there was in his body not a drop of blood that knew these things. At the sight and smells of the white man, strong aversion and loathing came over
him. He tried with all his young strength to get away. His father had to hold him hard. In the end he dragged him twisting and yelling over the ground to the council house of the whites and threw him on the leaves that had been spread around.

“I gave talking paper that I bring him,” he told the white guards. “Now he belong to you.”

It was all over then, the boy knew. He was as good as dead and lay among the other captives with his face down. He was sure that his father had stayed. He could feel his presence and smell the sweet inner bark of the red willow mixed with the dried sumach leaves of his pipe. When dusk fell, a white guard came up. The other soldiers called him Del, perhaps because he could talk Delaware, the strange name the whites gave the Lenni Lenape and their language. True Son heard Del tell his father that all Indians must be out of the camp by nightfall. From the sounds the boy guessed his father was knocking out his pipe and putting it away. Then he knew he had risen and was standing over him.