“You don’t need to worry about your son’s acceptance,” Grandmother Ama spoke up again.
She seemed to always know what Swift Deer was thinking.
“You and your sons were accepted long ago into Anisahoni, our Blue Clan,” Grandmother said. “When Yufala made you his wife, the wife of a Wolf Clan leader, any thoughts vanished that you might not be of our people.”
Swift Deer was always a mystery to many of the town’s people.
The legend said she came from, was once a part of, the Anigusa people in the lower lands, a beloved woman in one of the towns along the Anigusa Long Man. She was said to have fled her town after her husband was killed by British soldiers on a scouting mission.
It was also said Cornstalk was the son of her Anigusa husband and Timpoochee the son of a white trader with whom Swift Deer lived for a while after fleeing her town and dead husband.
No one knew for sure.
All the town’s people really knew was that while still a young man Yufala ventured south on a very long hunting trip to the lowlands and that when he returned he was not alone. He returned with Swift Deer and her very young sons. Timpoochee still a baby.
“He left a boy,” the town’s people used to say. “But returned a man - with a family.”