Force of Blood by Joseph Heywood

purposely releasing prisoners to take the word back to their home nations? The Jesuit said some Iroquois managed to escape. Presumably on their own, through luck.
    Do the Iroquois have a version of this story in their oral histories?
He made a note.
    He wished he knew more about Indian logistics and such. A hundred warriors: Did that mean fifty canoes? Or were they in the larger Montreal canoes? With five per Montreal they would need only twenty craft, though either fifty or twenty would be damn near impossible to conceal along the coasts. No wonder the Saulteurs found them.
    He wished he could read French, but guessed any French he’d recall now would not make reading the seventeenth-century version any easier. Every language tended to shift and vary greatly through the centuries. In college he’d once looked at Old English and could hardly make it out, much less understand it without a lot of sweat, thought, and a lexicon.
    Returning to the reference room, he read a subsequent account of eight hundred warriors from the other three confederation tribes going against the Susquahannocks, only to be once again ignominiously banished. After an initial armed skirmish, the Susquahannocks in April 1661 withdrew into their impregnable village. The Iroquois sent twenty-five armed ambassadors into the village to negotiate terms, only the Susquahannocks immediately took them prisoner, put them on stakes on platforms, and burned them to death in front of the other seven hundred–plus warriors waiting for the signal to attack. These warriors reportedly withdrew to their own country with the Susquahannocks screaming they were coming there to burn all of them the way they had burned the first twenty-five.
    Had this story and Iroquois Point somehow gotten mixed up? If three hundred is unrealistic, isn’t eight hundred even further off the damn charts?
    Further on, Father Lalemant indicated that smallpox began to ravage Iroquois “towns,” which effectively curtailed any significant future forays on the war road.
    Service guessed it wasn’t the threat of a road of skulls that kept the Iroquois from coming back: It had been smallpox.
    Damn interesting reading by a writer who pulls you right back into his century, but not much there for a police case. Except for the tactical note of the Iroquois being surrounded.
As a recon marine in Vietnam he had seen his share of ambushes on both sides of the equation, and to make one happen with totality you needed the best possible terrain, steady nerve, and a helluva lot of luck.
    He was sitting there tapping a pencil on his chin when Etta Trevillyan sat down across from him and said, “You look perplexed. Something you read?”
    “What if the ambush didn’t happen at all, or it happened south of the Soo, not to the west?”
    “I think that’s exactly the kind of doubt I was trying to convey when we talked. There’s just no way to know for certain unless someone stumbles upon the actual site. Artifacts and remains would reveal most of the truth.” She smiled. “I wouldn’t mind helping you with this. Native American history has always fascinated me, and anything an old historian can do to to bring clarity to disputed events is a good thing.”
    “I could use some help,” he admitted. “Do you know Dr. Wingel of Whitewater State?”
    “By reputation.”
    She’s holding back
. “Which is?”
    “Professionally or personally?”
    “Both.”
    “Professionally she’s said to be very ambitious and somewhat competent. Personally she’s described as paranoid, cowardly, self-serving, and petty.”
    “But her cats probably like her,” he said.
    “Based on what I’ve heard I’d find it difficult to believe anyone or anything could do more than tolerate her.”
    “I get the sense you don’t appreciate directness.”
    The retired professor smiled. “Sometimes, with some people, there just ain’t no way around the honest-to-God, knock-you-twixt-the-eyes truth. What do you want me to