There were bones everywhere. There were villages along the lower river inhabited only by bones. And the white people too, who had lived their lives away from the crowded cities of the east, had no resistance to the disease and died with the Indians.
Sad, indeed, but a great opportunity. The land lay open and empty. Surely the last Indian would be gone in five years. French and his brother Elihu were building a mill on a tributary of the big river. One tree they felled had a death canoe hanging in its branches. French's wife Anna sat by the canoe all day, her fingers caressing the sea shells that so gracefully decorated its edges. Still she sat when the rain started and did not move until Elihu called ``Anna! Dinner!'' Then she rose quickly and tended to the fire.
A rock sat in the middle of the mill site. It wasn't a large rock, but it would have to be moved. Elihu and French started digging around it in the soft cold rain.
That night they sat close to the fire as they ate their roasted deer liver washed down with river water. They smelled the Indians before they saw them. Silent they stood around the fire and they were old.
``The stone must not be moved,'' one said.
``The stone?''
``The stone you are trying to dig up. The stone must not be moved. It was once a man.''
``It is man's nature to move,'' said French, ``so why should a stone that was once a man not wish to move?''
``The stone is a river watcher. The stone keeps the river within its banks. Without the river watchers the river does not know its place.''
Anna pulled her Hudson's Bay blanket closer around her. The cold sunk deep into her bones. Elihu gave each of the Indians a hunk of liver and they went away into the dark.
Next day they wrapped rawhide round the stone and the mule pulled it away from their building site.
``You can watch the river just as well from here,'' said Elihu to the stone.
Once in a generation a warm wind sweeps the mountains long before spring. Then the snow melts before its time and the waters fill the rivers and the rivers swell and flood and the river banks are inundated.
French was last seen swept into the river, clinging to a death canoe, his mill destroyed, his body never found.
Elihu and Anna built another mill at a different place.
When they cleared the site they moved no stones.