Of more concern were the endless threats of the Iroquois to the North and West, and the Susquehannock to the South. Both of these tempered their respect for the Wingohocking (and the entire Lenape nation) with seething envy of their status as "grandfathers," the royalty of the northeastern natives. They, the Iroquois and the Susquehannock, were but peasants, "children tribes," as the Lenape referred to them and as such, they indeed shamefacedly referred to themselves. And as grandfathers must ultimately suffer humiliation at the hands of death, so did the Lenape, ravaged by the diseases of white men and pressed by their incipient encroachments, suffer eventual humiliation at the hands first of the Susquehannock and later of the Iroquois - humiliation matched in intensity only by the unremitting and ultimately disastrous denial with which they were endured. The "children" Iroquois not only subjugated the haughty grandfathers, but also refused them the equal status in council - the right to vote - which they had heretofore always granted to their vanquished, while still maintaining the right to extract from the tribe young men for purposes of war, and occasional, reluctant virgins for whatever purposes they desired. Even worse, they required of the men of the Lenape to wear the longrobes of women so that their final humiliation would be unmistakable and unforgotten - and unregenerate. As part of the terms of subjugation, the grandfathers were allowed to remain on their ancestral lands, but were explicitly denied the right to sell those lands to others, their tacit defiance of this latter provision eventually proving fatal.

The gods of the Wingohocking did abuse their charges sorely, having the grandfathers wear the clothes of women, sending traders disguised as gods and slavers disguised as traders, so that even though the Wingohocking came to know the whites of the family of Rolfe Peters - sometime aid to Governor James Logan, who in turn was William Penn's representative to the nascent colony of Pennsylvania - as traders, not slavers, they were never fully confident of the distinction. Indeed, it was a distinction that history greedily blurred. For the fate of the Wingohocking was wedded to ironic tragedy: The Wingohocking suffered the bad fortune of finding the culmination of their thousands of years quest for the Dawn Waters to have become the confluence of trade, expansion and exploitation by white settlers who emanated from those waters. The meager several miles of fertile ground, with access to rivers north and south, their last refuge, was but one more stretch of rich land accessible to the immigrant German Irish and the corrupt Pennsylvania authorities who sought to profit from them. The Wingohocking suffered an endless trial of cruel ironies far worse than the wearing of women's' clothes. These primitive natives, huddled naked in rude, fragile shelters and furtively scampering about the wilderness like hasty rodents, so adored their children that they scarcely could find the heart to discipline them, causing them to guide them with words, not blows, with love not punishment. For thousands of years they had enjoyed a system of direct representation vastly more humane and egalitarian than any possessed by the inheritors of Greek philosophy and Roman law. All in the tribe had a voice. Each looked after the other. And in consequence, each was endowed with an indomitable sense of independence and self worth that even centuries of enlightenment would fail to kindle in the hearts and child rearing practices of their European conquerors. The model of a confederation, promulgated by the Iroquois, their sometime masters, would later devolve to and bolster a fledgling American democracy, which, in appreciation, would enslave and dispossess their race entire, snickeringly commemorating them in obscene, cigar store statuary and musty, romantic myths: old buffalo hides gathering dust in the attic; cobwebs in the back room of civilization. Finally, the vagaries of Western guilt, which ensued two centuries too late, would hesitatingly and sporadically restore to the Wingohocking the riches from which they had been dispossessed, in the form of the legalized right to prey on the white man's folly of gambling (a folly they shared with him, to their everlasting detriment), only to have this act of beneficence further enslave and destroy them, as had every white indulgence to them in the history of their interaction. A sane man would wonder how any god who professed love for mankind could have allowed this.

It was this last observation which afforded the Wingohocking, eventually, the final ironic, sobbing laughter. For the pagan god Kieselemukenku, the father spirit, whom they knew as a trickster in league with Badger and Matekanis, the game herder, proved, in the end, the most apt and accurate descriptor of their fate - far more so than the greater gods of the Europeans, who dispossessed them and enslaved them and brought them punishing illnesses and who, in search of gratitude for this beneficence, sought their conversion and fealty. The gods of the Wingohocking were vengeful and cruel. They were mocking gods, steeped in trickery and deceit. The gods of the Wingohocking were not gods of peace and love and harmony: they were not nearly so great as the gods of the Europeans - just more honest.