One Who Listens

By Mark Foss

One Who Listens
In the winter of 1690, long before walls and borders hardened the land, two young people stand at the edge of a changing world.
Set in the borderlands of late seventeenth-century New York, One Who Listens follows Tahonaw ta, a Mohawk youth taught to read the land before speaking into it, and Margriet, the daughter of a Dutch settler who listens more closely than those around her. As trade routes shift, alliances fracture, and northern war parties move south under cover of winter, their quiet meetings by a lake called Shanantaha unfold against the gathering tension that will culminate in the Schenectady massacre.
This is not a story of spectacle, but of attention.
Through burned hills, longhouses, palisades, and frozen rivers, the novel explores: The Haudenosaunee Confederacy and matrilineal leadershipThe ecological and political consequences of the Beaver WarsFrench-Indigenous alliances and winter war partiesThe fragile illusion of safety inside colonial wallsWhen violence finally comes, it reveals not only what fails, but what endures.
Grounded in historical record yet shaped by lived experience on the same land it portrays, One Who Listens asks a quiet question:
What survives - walls, or those who learn when to move?
For readers of literary historical fiction, early American frontier narratives, and stories rooted in land, memory, and cultural collision.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GMGR8KST
• ISBN13: 9798247494119
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 236 Pages
• Weight: 0.61 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"