Chesapeake by James A. Michener Page A

the startled crab, lifting it as it tried to fall away, and plopping it, all legs wiggling and claws snapping, into the canoe.
    Pentaquod was stunned by the performance, and when his wife continued to haul in her line, catching crab after crab, he realized that here was a brand of fishing totally unlike any in which he had ever participated. ‘Why don’t they swim away from the bait?’ he asked. ‘Can’t they see you’re going to catch them?’
    ‘They like us to eat them,’ Navitan said. ‘Manitou sends them to us for that purpose.’
    Pentaquod gingerly touched one and found the shell extremely hard, but he could not examine it closely, for the fierce claws snapped at him. He was even more perplexed when Navitan carried her two dozen crabs to camp and pitched them into a pot of boiling water, for within moments they turned bright red. She then instructed him in how to pick meat from the carcasses, and when she had a clay bowl filled she told him to stop, for she knew that picking crab was a tedious and demanding job: a dozen crabs produced only a handful of meat.
    But when she took this meat, as her mother had taught her, and mixed it with herbs and vegetables and corn meal, and formed it into small cakes and fried them in sizzling bear fat, she produced one of the finest dishes this river would ever know. ‘Cakes of crab,’ she called them, and Pentaquod found them subtle and delicious.
    ‘There is better,’ Navitan assured him, and when he doubted, she told him to wait until the crabs began to shed, and one day she brought himfour that had newly cast their shells, and these she fried directly in hot bear grease, without first boiling or picking them.
    ‘Do I eat legs and all?’ Pentaquod asked, and she goaded him into trying them; when he had finished the four he declared them succulent beyond belief.
    ‘Now you are one of us,’ Navitan said.
    While Pentaquod was initiating himself into such pleasant customs he made a discovery which disturbed him: he found that what Scar-chin had reported was true. This tribe never defended itself from enemies, and when the Susquehannocks intruded from the north, or the Nanticokes from the south, no attempt was made to protect the village. The villagers seemed not to care what happened; they mounted no sentries, sent no patrols to check the frontiers, engaged in no self-defense maneuvers. He was not surprised, therefore, when children ran in one morning to report, ‘Here come the Nanticokes again!’
    No one panicked. Everyone placed essential goods in deerskin pouches, hid supplies of food in the nearby forest, and fled. The werowance marched at the front of his people, as gallantly as if heading for battle, and took them deep into the fragmented, river-cut area northwest of their village. They had learned from frequent experience that the Nanticokes were reluctant to follow them into that chopped-up area, so they marched with a certain confidence that after a decent interval, during which the invaders would steal everything left behind and then retreat singing victory songs, they could return to their homes and resume life as it had been.
    Pentaquod was staggered by this attitude. When the children first reported the invasion he had wanted to storm out to engage the enemy, teach them a lesson and drive them back to the southern regions, but the old werowance would have none of this, nor did any of his people wish to face the sturdier men from the south.
    ‘What do we lose, doing it this way?’ one of the women asked Pentaquod as they fled to the land of the broken rivers.
    ‘We lose my wigwam,’ he said in some anger.
    ‘A wigwam we can build in a day. The dried fish? Who cares. The salted duck they won’t find. We stowed it among the oaks.’
    When the tribe had hidden for seven days, it was deemed likely that the Nanticokes had done their damage and retreated, but to confirm this, scouts had to be sent back to ensure that they had really gone. No volunteers