I discover a place I already knew

It was my first time enjoying the book with my youngest child, but I’d done so more than once with each of my older two. I knew the novel well: its slow build; its complex, painful evocation of the 18th-century encounter between struggling European pioneers and indigenous Americans resisting their communal destruction with dignity, rage, despair. This fresh reading promised much, but I expected no surprises. 

Then, halfway through the book, I came to this passage: 

Just as the last light