Читать книгу The Eden Hunter - Skip Horack - Страница 11

IV

A teeth cutting—A return to the Mississippi Territory—The remains of a buffalo—On black panthers

THE NEXT DAY the redsticks revealed to him what they knew of the highwaymen. They had learned of these white thieves two months earlier—from a muleskinner captured north of the port city of Mobile. Facing death, hoping to save his life, the man had told them a tale of land pirates and treasure.

The highwaymen had laid claim to a cave near the Conecuh River. Assisted by men seeking commissions—collaborators like the muleskinner himself—they targeted wealthy travelers along the federal road. In his own broken Creek the desperate muleskinner had convinced the redsticks that he knew the exact location of that hidden cave, describing a cleft in a particular broken hillside so well that he made his own survival irrelevant.

Kau sat sweating on his horse blanket beside a dying fire, watching as the redsticks prepared to depart that safe camp for another distant blood field. A company of cursed souls doomed to spend their days cutting warpaths across borderlands, a back-and-forth revenge life of ambush then pursuit. The night before, Little Horn and Blood Girl had both asked him to join them. His answer had been no, but now, studying on the redsticks, he was less certain. In a way he envied their lives of purpose, their forever war. He himself had felt nothing at all since the killing of the boy, nothing save the blank hope that if he continued pushing across Florida he would someday find a silent corner of forest that reminded him of his home, a place he could come to treasure as much as all that had been taken away from him.

The stallions were freed from their hobbles and Little Horn asked him again. Once more Kau explained that he intended to strike out on his own, and Blood Girl stepped forward. “You are not listening,” she said. “Morning Star believes you must come with us.”

Kau looked over at Morning Star. The prophet was standing beside his horse, and the old gray was refusing to eat oats from the flat of his hand. Morning Star nodded, and Kau turned to Little Horn. “I have no choice?”

“No,” said Little Horn. “In this you do not.”

Kau knelt and began to slowly place his things into his saddlebags. He could smell a coming rain. So, he realized, it seemed that he had somehow become a slave again.

IT WAS DRIZZLING when the redsticks finally broke camp and rode off west to kill the highwaymen. The light rain washed the very last of the clay dust from his thick hair, and steam rose from the ground. Little Horn offered him a place on his horse but he declined. His thighs were still sore and blistered from the bareback night ride of the previous week and so he swore off horses, preferred instead to follow on foot, tracking the unshod stallions alone through the damp and dripping forest.

Several times while trailing the redsticks he considered turning around and trying to escape them. Twice he backtracked for a near mile before again changing his mind. Were he his younger self, were this a forest he knew as well as the one he had been stolen from, he thought he might have had the courage to break away from them. As it was he did not. These redsticks were not white men. If he ran he was certain that they would find him and so he kept on.

HE WAS ANXIOUS for more real practice with the longrifle, and so when he came upon a wild cow wallowing in the muddy path he crept to within a few downwind paces of the big speckled beast and then shot it in the head. The cow sighed as it rolled over in the mud. He drew his knife and cut loose one of the backstraps, a thick length of meat that reminded him of a python.

It was dark by the time he reached the camp. The redsticks had built a fire and were waiting for him. He washed the backstrap in a creek that ran nearby, and Little Horn walked over from the fire. “It was you who shot?” he asked.

“It was,” said Kau.

“A cow?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you lost our trail.” Little Horn tapped at the creek with the toe of his moccasin. “Or that maybe you decided to leave us.”

Kau dried his hands on his breechcloth and then began cutting the wet backstrap into steaks. “You do not need to worry,” he said. “I will not run.”

A smile played across Little Horn’s scar-slick face. In the firelight Kau saw Blood Girl and Morning Star spread out on horse blankets. They were watching him as well. Kau brought the meat to the fire and saw that the girl had a bare and glistening leg draped over that of the prophet. Morning Star put a finger to his open mouth and she laughed. “He wants you to cut his teeth,” said Blood Girl. “Can you do that?”

“Why?”

“He says that we have things to learn from you.”

Morning Star pushed her leg away and sat up on his blanket. Blood Girl clapped her small hands.

“Now?” asked Kau.

“Yes,” said Blood Girl. “Now.”

He hesitated but then removed a scavenged arrowhead from a saddlebag, that and one of Benjamin’s oval sling-stones. “Hold him,” he said to the redsticks. “He will want to kill me.” He looked into Morning Star’s black eyes as he said this. Nothing. The prophet lay back and allowed Little Horn to pin his massive arms to the ground, and then Blood Girl slid a hand under his breechcloth, distracting him. Kau held a stick out sideways, and Morning Star bit down onto it with straight teeth that were stained the color of honey. The big man’s brown skin was smooth and unscarred, and Kau straddled his wide chest, holding the deer-point in one hand, the river stone in the other. Morning Star shut his eyes as the tip of the arrowhead came to rest on the edge of an incisor, and Kau began tapping at the base of the arrowhead with the stone. Blood Girl grunted behind him, and flakes of enamel fell away as the front six teeth of the prophet were sculpted.

It was slow work, work that he had not done in many years. Morning Star’s gums were cut here and there from mishits, but still he did not cry out or even open his eyes. Occasionally the prophet would turn his head to spit blood and bits of tooth and flint and stick, and before long a paste had formed in the dirt beside them. Kau finished with the final canine and rose up, then Morning Star pulled the stick from his mouth and ran his tongue across his cut teeth. Blood Girl passed him a cracked hand mirror that had been stolen from the dead pioneer woman, and the prophet knelt with it beside the fire and examined himself for a long while.

At last Morning Star dropped the mirror and rolled his head in a wide, slow circle. Kau heard a popping sound, and was not sure whether it came from the fire or from somewhere deep inside the body of the prophet. Little Horn had a beefsteak cooking on a hot rock in the coals, and Morning Star grabbed the rare meat in his big hands. He turned to Kau, then bit off a chunk of the sizzling steak and smiled. Pink blood-juice spilled from the corners of his mouth as Little Horn let out a series of war whoops. “He likes it,” said Blood Girl in a low voice. “He likes it very much.”

EVENTUALLY THEY CHANGED their direction from west to north, and though he saw no real difference in the land, the redsticks told him that they had crossed back over the border and were once again traveling through the territory of Mississippi. After several days the pinewoods fell off into an immense canebrake, a great green sleeve that choked both banks of the dark and peaceful Conecuh. They made their way through the slender cane, following a confusion of game trails. The serried stalks rose fifteen, twenty feet from the moist black soil, filtering out the sun so that Kau came to feel as if he had joined with some party of burrowing tunnel-dwellers.

The canebrake teemed with deer and bear that crashed off unseen before them, and in an ancient salt lick Little Horn found the large and gnawed bones of what Kau thought must be more wild cattle. But then Morning Star crouched beside them and traced a long finger in the dirt. The prophet drew the crude outline of some big, short-horned animal, and in Kau’s mind those bleached bones took proper shape. Morning Star whispered to Blood Girl and she began to describe a creature that seemed so much like the forest buffalo of Africa that Kau felt his heart quicken. “Tupi,” he whispered.

“Yuh-nuh-suh,” said Blood Girl.

Kau stared at her. “Are there many here?”

Blood Girl shook her head and told him that even Morning Star had seen only two in his entire life, a cow and calf in the rocky foothills far to the north. “But that was very long ago,” she said.

Kau knelt among the familiar bones. He figured this could only be a message from the forest, a sign that he was on the proper path, that perhaps he was indeed meant to try this angry killing life. He searched the scattered remains until he found a long bone half buried in the loam. He pulled the bone free of the earth and brushed it clean.

“What do you want with it?” asked Little Horn.

Kau slapped the bone against his palm and then pointed to the war-club that hung from Little Horn’s waist. The redstick smiled, and that night they helped him dye the bone in a crimson broth made from boiled pieces of oak bark and root that Blood Girl had went off to collect in the uplands. The bone was painted with thin coats of pine resin, then placed by the fire to dry and strengthen until morning. They slept and at dawn Little Horn tested the reddened bone against the thick skull of the buffalo. The skull cracked and he handed the bone to Kau. “Now take it to Morning Star,” said the redstick. This was done and after the prophet had mouthed some silent blessing or curse over the virgin weapon it was returned. Kau fixed a hard loop of rawhide to the back of his belt and then slid the bone club into place.

HE WAS LESS than a mile from the salt lick yet again he was alone, separated from the riders. Along a wet section of trail he saw where Morning Star had paused to draw another buffalo in the mud, that and a little stick man Kau realized was meant to be him.

He was studying his image when there was an eruption in the canebreak. He full-cocked his longrifle, then watched as a velvet-horned buck stumbled out into the path with a tawny and growling panther attached to its back. The cat raised its head from the buck’s neck and stared at him, then left the deer for the shelter of the cane. Buck hair filled the hot air like sparks from a kicked fire. The bloodied deer lurched forward and Kau pardoned the wobbly creature. “Go,” he said in Kesa. “You were lucky today.” The buck gathered itself and then bolted. Kau watched it bound back down the trail. There were other deer close by—keeping still in the cane—and as the wounded buck fled these others spooked as well so that soon Kau could hear deer moving all around him.

He sat down in the trail. Because his name was Leopard these New World panthers were of great interest to him. He cupped his ears and listened, thinking that maybe, if he waited long enough, he might just hear the big cat scream from somewhere in the canebrake. No scream came, but waiting for some sound from this panther soon made him think of another panther—the black African leopard that had once visited him while he slept.

THE LEOPARD HAD been a female. Small but cunning, she was introduced to the flesh of humans by the carelessness of the Kesa. Before the destruction of his people, before the rape of Janeti, before the births of Abeki and Tufu even, there had been this man-eater.

But the leopard did not become a man-eater until the arrival of a Kesa child—a blind child, the son of one of the poorest farmers in Opoku. It was the custom of the Kesa to cast out such misfits, and for that reason the condition of the infant was a secret kept close by the mother and father. The child was raised in the hut, and somehow three years passed before an aunt finally spoke out and word reached the chief. Chabo sent for the boy.

The delay of the parents only made their loss more profound, as the boy was walking and even speaking by the time Chabo’s men came for him. He had a name and a personality, a preference for bananas over plantains, for goat meat over chicken. Even Chabo was stalled, but then he consulted the witch doctors and was compelled to act in accordance with tradition. The boy was pulled from the arms of his mother, then brought deep into the forest and released to wander.

And wander he did. The child’s whole world had been a small round hut and to be taken from it terrified him. The next day he was walking through the village calling for his mother. Chabo heard his cries and again the boy was seized.

After two days in the forest the child was found by Kau, hunting. He carried the milk-eyed boy back to Opoku and was scolded by the Kesa villagers. “Do not involve yourself with our affairs,” Chabo told him.

For a third time the boy was carried off into the forest—though even farther now toward the rising sun, to a distant place separated from the village by an impossible maze of trails. But by now Kau had developed an interest in the unfortunate child. He lingered in Opoku until the Kesa warriors had returned, then backtracked to where the boy had been left to die. When he arrived the child was already gone, stolen by a leopard. He studied the abundant sign:

The leopard had arrived that same day, perhaps attracted by the cries of the boy. Kau saw that at first she was only curious and had sat in the shadows, watching. She was not hungry—he found where earlier she had killed a nesting chimpanzee—but as time passed she grew bolder. She crept closer and walked a tight circle around the blind boy—brushing against him, perhaps even teasing him with her tail—and the shock of her presence sent him dancing little nightmare steps that left random dimples in the soft earth. The boy then rolled himself into a ball and the leopard slapped at him, her hooked claws kept hidden, retracted. The cat played until finally the terror-stricken boy collapsed. He lay flat on his stomach, digging his fingers into the dirt as the leopard sniffed him. When death came it came quickly. She touched her fangs to his neck and squeezed her jaws closed.

Kau thought of the blind and banished child and wondered whether there was a moment before that killing bite when he believed he might be spared, that maybe he had met a friend in the forest, that maybe he would be adopted by that leopard and raised by her, go on to live as a wild boy.

At that time in his life Kau was still cursed with the curiosity and courage and foolishness of a young man, and so he began to track the leopard. In a sun-dappled clearing he spotted the stiff arm of the buried boy pushing up from kicked leaves. He tensed and looked around, and then he saw the cat asleep within the plank buttresses of a giant fig tree. She was an all-black, a coloration that was almost unknown among the leopards of the forest. He sat and watched the dark sleeping cat for all the afternoon, then slipped off in silence as night began to fall.

SHE WAS THE only black panther he would ever see—though in the Mississippi Territory the white pioneers and settlers would speak of them often. Black panthers killed hogs. Black panthers stalked travelers on the federal road. Black panthers screamed like dying women in the night. But not so long ago an Alibamu mystic had assured him that the white men were all wrong, that no such creature really existed in these forests. There were indeed panthers but not black panthers.

He had come upon the old Indian sitting alone on a stump in a field behind Yellowhammer and had stopped and visited with him for a while. Though Kau knew much of his language, the Alibamu spoke good English and so eventually they settled upon that tongue. Somehow their talk turned to black panthers, the Alibamu insisting that white men saw them for the same reason people sought to name the shapes of clouds and the clusterings of stars—a beast akin to that shadowy form lived in their imaginations and their fears. “But that does not make black panthers real,” said the Alibamu. “No Indian will ever claim to have seen one, at least not before the invaders came.”

Kau told the Alibamu that black panthers were in fact in Africa—that he had killed one himself, a man-eater.

The Alibamu stared at him. “Is that the truth?”

“It is.”

“Maybe you say that because you have lived a long time with the whites, are owned by them even.”

“No, that black cat done come first.”

The Alibamu rose up and began to shake a loop of clicking snake rattles. When he finished he climbed atop the stump and looked down at Kau. “You should be very careful,” he warned.

“Why you sayin that?”

“Because you must come from a place where the dreams in their heads live,” explained the Alibamu. “Be careful that in the end you do not become just another one of their wicked creations.”

THE OTA MEN were gathered around a fire, listening as Kau told of what he had seen. When they at last retired, the leopard entered the camp and looked into the leaf hut of the sleeping storyteller. She brought her face almost to rest against his own and watched him—watched him like he had watched her and then stole off, returning to the forest.

In the morning Kau saw her pugmarks in the dust and thanked that same sheltering forest for protecting him. The elders pointed at where the cat had stood over him and laughed at his luck. Only a visit, they told him, from his namesake.

AGAIN HE TRACKED the leopard, and before long he saw where she had ignored the fresh spoor of a crippled bongo to instead return and begin feeding on the remains of the child. Something had changed within her, and that night in the Ota camp Kau shared this news with the others. The leopard was headed in the direction of Opoku. A man-eater was now hunting.

EVERY FEW DAYS thereafter the leopard visited upon the Kesa, waiting all night at the edge of the burnt-back forest, in the thick borderland where their cassava fields pushed up against the beginnings of the tree line. At sunrise the farmers would leave their huts with the fatalism common among those reigned over by others, and once they had worked themselves far enough into the fields the leopard would attack, hauling off a half-dead catch as the more fortunate of the Kesa raced for the village.

At night goats were left staked throughout the forest, broken legged and bleating, their hides soaked with poisons. All these the leopard ignored.

Chabo began to station the best of his warriors in the fields with the farmers, and these men kept guard but without effect—as they could never know the exact place or moment or victim of the next attack. When the black cat appeared they were always unprepared, and the closest they came to killing the man-eater was an errant spear thrown into the chest of a mauled farmer.

Five more men were taken before Chabo asked for help from the Ota. He called upon the Ota even though he knew of their relationship with leopards. Like all people the band lived by certain codes, and among their beliefs were prohibitions against the killing of particular animals. Generations of Ota had shared the forest with leopards, and though on occasion there would be incidents between the two forest-dwellers, for the most part they existed together in peace. That leopards allowed the Ota to live in their midst was a gift from the forest, and so to kill a leopard would be an insult to that blessing. Chabo asked and the Ota refused. In their minds this problem belonged to the Kesa alone.

More villagers died. The Kesa witch doctors conferred and blame was placed on the young Ota man who called himself Leopard—the one who had first returned the blind child to Opoku. The black cat was his sister. He had somehow brought this killer, and therefore it fell upon him to destroy her. Chabo declared that the Kesa would not suffer this alone. The Ota were not welcome in the village so long as the man-eater lived.

AMONG THE OTA were some who had begun to adopt the customs and superstitions of the Kesa. These younger men spoke out in support of Chabo, arguing that the black cat was a mistake of the forest same as the blind child had been a mistake of the village—an unintended creature. The Ota were hunters; the forest was their home. It was their duty to kill this man-eater and restore the balance of things.

In the end there was a compromise between the young men and their elders. Kau alone would help the Kesa. If the leopard must be hunted then it should be done by the one she herself had chosen to visit. Perhaps in this way there might come forgiveness from both the leopard and the forest.

THOUGH HE HAD feigned reluctance for the sake of the elders, in truth Kau was eager to test his skills against the animal whose ancestor had appeared at his birth and thus given him his name. In her decision to spare him while he slept he had come to see not a kindness but a challenge, and so he took up his bow and went to Opoku.

SPRAWLED IN THE shade of a hut, he passed the time with the extraordinary patience of the Ota. After two days the leopard made another kill. Kau was dozing when she came, and he awoke to the shouts of farmers running for the village. He hurried into the fields and was brought to the place where the man had been attacked. The turned earth was splashed with blood, and a shallow rut in the dirt led into the forest. A warrior pushed him forward. “Go,” he said. “Hunt.”

Kau ignored the warrior and instead returned to Opoku. There he spent the morning coating the tips of his arrows with poisons while the impatient villagers glared at him. The leopard would feed and then she would rest. Once the forest grew hot he would seek her.

SHE CARRIED HER kill far, far away, beyond the boundaries of his own known world. Though the farmer was very heavy Kau saw that the leopard dropped him only once, placing the body beside a creek so that she could drink. When she was finished the man-eater rearranged her grip and continued on, straddling the corpse as she walked so that to Kau, tracking, her pugmarks seemed situated like little villages on either side of a wide, drag-path river.

He began to gain on the leopard, and so he strapped his bow across his back and scanned the forest for any glimpse of the black cat—a flicked ear, a twitching tail. A Kesa warrior had lent him a long spear affixed with a rusty iron point, and Kau held it low out in front of him as he tracked, swiveling his hips from side to side, moving in tiny measured steps.

A leopard has a weak nose—though it still works much better than that of a man. And what a leopard lacks in smell it gains in eyesight, hearing. Such is the way with all animals. An elephant might see only in shadows but it can also listen to the beatings of its own massive heart, wind a hunter from a mile off. Soaring eagles spot prey from soundless heights. A snake tastes the world with a tongue flick. So what then is a man? An animal with poor eyes and poor ears, a near-useless nose. Hairless. Fangless. Clawless. How is it that this pitiful creature—a creature that should not ever have been able to survive among beasts—has come to lord over so much?

IT WAS ALMOST dark when he spied the dead farmer lying high up the slanted trunk of a fallen tree. A blanket of flies covered the half-eaten corpse; moths drank from still-damp eyes. Kau looked around, processing the forest in sections. Nothing. She was still resting, he decided. She was resting, and at some point when she was once again hungry she would return to resume her feeding. By the light of the moon he would kill her.

And so he readied himself. He walked up the sloped trunk of the dead tree and stepped carefully over the mangled farmer. At a place well past the ripening corpse he stopped and bent branches for a blind, and then he set his spear and quiver down close where he could reach them. The bow was in his hand, and he selected the best from among his arrows, then went as still against the tree as a day-lazing moth.

DARKNESS FELL OVER the forest as day pulled away. He remained motionless in the tree, waiting for the man-eater to appear. A hyrax shrieked and was soon answered by another. The ebony sky was speckled with bright stars. The moon rose and he closed his eyes, listening for the sound of claws scratching bark.

THE LONG NIGHT passed without any sign of the leopard, and as dawn came he spotted the first of them—a colony of driver ants was moving through the forest, a dark brown band of butchers coming million after million. They swept closer and the base of his bent tree divided the river into halves. He saw a sprinkling of foragers ascend the tree trunk, following the stink trail of the cat-killed man. A single ant perched itself on a rib bone of the corpse. It reared back on hind legs, seemed to celebrate before retreating. Some collective intelligence clicked and both columns shifted and then doubled back. They met at the tree and soon ants covered the dead man. The leopard had lost her kill.

And Kau was trapped. He knew the colony would stay for several days now, would not leave until the farmer’s bones were all that remained of him. An ant latched onto Kau’s ankle and he flinched in pain. He broke off the body but the stubborn head remained, the jaws still clamped to his skin. He pulled the head loose, and then he threw his spear and quiver and bow down to the forest floor. More ants were on him. He jumped, touched down on the balls of his feet and crumbled into the leaves. He was on his knees when he spotted her. The black cat was crouched and staring, close enough for him to see the tip of her pink tongue. The snaking mass of ants flowed between them.

The leopard’s black coat shined almost blue in the glow of morning, and watching her Kau was certain that he would die. He waited but she stayed crouched even as her tail danced above her. The Kesa spear was impaled in the ground beside him, and when he slowly reached for it so came the man-eater over the wide scramble of ants. She leapt once and then twice as he lifted the spear. The iron point went in at her chest, and then the spear twisted free from his hands. He rolled away and watched as the screaming cat raked at the shaft with her claws. Finally blade nicked spine and the leopard went limp. She stared at him with fluttering yellow eyes, until at last her bleeding slowed to a trickle and she died.

He stood and looked down at the dead leopard. Only now could he see the splash of rosettes hidden deep within her black coat—rosettes the same as a typical and ordinary leopard. The first few driver ants had discovered this new kill, and he watched as the insect river divided itself yet again. This would not be so horrible, he thought—to be devoured by the forest. He knelt and with the wet spearhead he sawed off the man-eater’s tail, his proof for Chabo.

A beam of sun pierced through the canopy, and Kau felt his body being cut by light. He tied the soft black tail in a twist around his neck and let himself be warmed. He could sense the forest watching him, and he trembled as he began walking toward the village.