Here, in the south, we had cold rain all day yesterday, but Monson got four inches of snow, so my afternoon drive will be glittering. In the meantime the furnace grumbles and chants. It's 34 degrees in Portland--not quite a frost but close. Happy Halloween, happy winter. I won't be home to distribute the candy, but I've got T set up with a bowl of Junior Mints and peanut-butter cups, and he can do with them what he will.

I wrote yesterday that I wanted to tell you about the book I've recently finished: Scott Zesch's The Captured, a history of a series of kidnappings that took place in the Texas hill country during the 1860s and 1870s. The kidnapped were mostly the children of German immigrants who had settled into this area, roughly edged by San Antonio to the south, Austin to the east, and the Colorado River to the north--a wild scrubby region smack in the middle of Comanche and Apache hunting grounds. Many of these settlers did not speak English: they identified as Germans rather than Texans, and for a while they prided themselves on having worked out their own treaty with the Comanches . . . that is to say, the farmers were under the delusion that the tribe was willing to negate not only its own long history with the landscape but also its own long history of raiding and warfare, which was key to how it had survived for millennia. Be what you're not: it seems that white people are always suggesting this as a solution.

In any case, the treaty didn't stick, and the Comanche and Apache raids intensified. Horses were a primary target, but children were targeted too. It's not entirely clear why, but it seems to have been a longstanding practice between warring factions: likely to replace their own killed children, sometimes also as pawns for ransom. The children they took were generally between the ages of 7 and 12--beyond toddlerhood but not too old to assimilate into the tribe. Sometimes a raiding party would sweep up a child who was out tending sheep; he would just vanish. Sometimes they would launch a full-scale attack on a lonely cabin or settlement, killing the men; raping, scalping, and killing the women; murdering the smallest children; and then absconding with the older ones. In any case, the moment of capture was intensely traumatic.

But what happened next? The children became members of the tribe. They were adopted into families. They learned to ride and hunt and raid, if they were boys. The girls were absorbed into a protective community of women. Within a few months, many of the captives had completely forgotten how to speak German or English. Some had even forgotten where they used to live. They had become Comanches.

How did this happen so quickly? And so completely? For the most part, these children did not want to return to their white families. When they were "rescued," they resisted. Some wasted away and died. All were "odd" for the rest of their lives, unable to fully reenter the white world. They had seen horrors during their capture, but they did not hold that against the Comanches. For the rest of their lives they defended the Natives and Native ways.

Scott Zesch is both a good historian and a good storyteller, and I found this book almost impossible to put down. He probes the question of why but is willing to live in ambiguity, and I appreciate that. The pain of losing a child, for both the settlers and the Comanches, is visceral. The tale is a tragedy. But it is also a story of freedom for these children, these scions of nose-to-the-grindstone 19th-century Lutherans . . .  a sudden new world in which play and adventure and tangled hair in the wind replaced building fences and chopping wood and grubbing up stumps. There were things about their first lives that they were happy to forget. Why even hold on to its language?