Moon Water spoke in a frightened tone. She looked about at the partially excavated ruins and asked, "But what has happened to our village?" She faltered, "Is this the way it will look in the future?"
"It is the way," Good Fox informed her sorrowfully.
"I weep for our people," she said. "I do not want to see it." She hung her pretty face over her bare body, then, in a moment, raised it resolutely.
Good Fox shook the long scraggly black hair away from his eyes and told the white men, "We did not mean to harm you. We did not know what else to do upon finding you here and our village buried."
Ignoring that in his excited interest, Sidney asked, "What year are you?"
"Year?" asked Good Fox. "What is this word?"
Both Sidney and George tried to get over to him what year meant in regard to a date in history, but Good Fox, Huk, and Moon Water, and none of the others could understand.
"We do not know what you mean," Huk said. "We know only that we live here in this village—not as you see it now—but one well built and alive with our people. As the medicine man I am known to have extra power and magic in visions. Often I have wondered what life would be like in the far future. With this group I conjured up a vision of it, carrying them and myself to what is now here before us."
George and Sidney glanced at each other. George's lips twitched and those of Sidney trembled. George said softly to the Indians, "Let us be friends." He explained to them what they were doing here. "We are trying to find out what you were—are—like. Especially what made you desert people leave your villages."
They looked blank. Huk said, "But we have not left—except in this vision."