She went to her mother’s hut and was greeted by her lovingly; they embraced and kissed each other as they always did when they met, however brief the separation had been. Her mother asked her: “Have you been to your wood, Va?” Va nodded. “Yes.” She had told her mother, and the Village Mother, about the wood, but no one else. It was her secret—the wood itself, the pool where she bathed, the animals that had learned to come and feed from her hands. None of the other girls in the village had such a secret, because none of them liked to slip away on their own as she did. But she, as she knew, was a special person, the only granddaughter of the Village Mother whose wisdom guided the life and destiny of all their people. She thought of telling her mother about the boy she had found, or who, rather, had found her—of how she had run away when he chased her, and then he had fallen and lain still and she had gone back to find him unconscious, and afterward had tended him.
