The adolescent male with spina bifida was someone who woke up every morning in a community that was, in some essential way, organized around making it possible for him to continue living.

He was carried.

He was fed.

He was kept warm.

And when he died at fifteen, he was placed in the pond with the same care and attention as everyone else — as people who had walked and hunted and woven and fished, as people whose bodies bore the marks of full physical engagement with their world.

The older individuals — the ones with arthritis in their joints and the signs of age in their bones — had lived lives long enough to accumulate those marks.

They had been young once, and probably strong, and they had grown old in a community that continued to support them.