Читать книгу The Eden Hunter - Skip Horack - Страница 9

II

A land forfeit—Redsticks—Florida

DAYS OF WANDERING. He buried the slavecatcher’s scalp in a bobcat den and walked south, moving at night, following the stars to Florida. The clay that had once coated him dried into brick dust and fell away, and his skin was left stained red and itching. His breechcloth was now dyed the color of rust.

It was easy country to traverse and at times he grew angry with himself for not bolting long before. He crossed pine flatlands that in low spots dropped off into thin finger forests of virgin oak and elm—beech, sycamore and chestnut—shady hollows where clear springs flowed and he could escape the stunning heat of the day. The cut on his shoulder from the musket ball scabbed and then healed.

As a distraction from thoughts of Samuel and the boy, he collected arrowheads as he walked—chert bird-points and deer-points. This was land forfeited by the Creeks to the Americans at the end of the Creek civil war, but still the Indians lingered. He could see their scattered sign and surely they his, and yet one did not cause harm upon the other. A peace persisted. Some understanding that he was only a traveler passing through. A visitor laying no claim. A small man who would leave no lasting mark of any consequence, no evidence that he had ever even existed. This was a wilderness.

HE HAD TRADED the dead sentinel’s musket and accessories for Lawson’s longrifle and hunting pouch and powderhorn. Kau brought the longrifle to his shoulder and his finger only barely reached the trigger. Though lighter than the musket, the flintlock was as long as he was from brass buttplate to muzzle. Still, he stared down the barrel and nodded, supposed that he could continue to kill at very close range and that maybe—one day and with practice—he would be able to shoot with the skill of the innkeeper, a man who could snipe a fish crow from the top branch of a cross-river cypress, tumble a running fox.

ON HIS WALK he saw many deer, sorrel in their spring coats, and though he needed to test himself with the longrifle he thought it even more important that he move in a whisper through this strange land. He foraged for his food at dawn and at dusk, collecting ripe berries and fat white grubs, stabbing pine snakes and woodrats with a three-pronged gig sharpened from a hickory stick. He was tracking a diamondback through sugar sand one morning when he encountered an old Indian woman sitting alone near the entrance of a tortoise burrow. She was a Creek, he decided. Her lined face was the color of dark cedar, and she was wearing only moccasins and a faded British redcoat decorated with broken pieces of mirror. Though he made no effort to hide, she did not seem aware of his presence.

He spoke out to her in the faltering Creek he had learned during his years at Yellowhammer. “Grandmother,” he asked, “is this Florida?”

The woman gave a vague and toothless smile but said nothing in reply. Nearby a gopher tortoise—its scaly hind legs hobbled together by the end of a long rope—struggled across the sand, fighting to return to the burrow that it had been stolen from.

He stood watching the woman, and after a while another tortoise emerged. The woman rushed forward like a statue gone living and flipped the tortoise onto its back. She tied this second tortoise to the other end of the rope and then lifted them both up so that they hung like fish on a stringer. The rope was placed atop her balding head like a tumpline, and the kicking tortoises bounced against her small hips as she disappeared down a thin scratch path that meandered through the clumps of pale green wiregrass.

MOST NIGHTS IT was humid and hot like some darkened day and the snap of a broken stick would cut the stillness with a sound like a whipcrack. Other nights it would rain and this was in fact best because he could move through the forest trackless and without sound.

To sleep was to dream. And to dream was to see the dead boy.

Late afternoon. Upon rising for his tenth night of walking south he spotted a thickening thread of smoke in the near distance. He folded his horse blanket as he considered whether to keep on or investigate. Soon he would have the cover of darkness, and in the end he decided that perhaps in seeking out that fire he would come upon some clue as to whether finally, after so many nights of travel, he had at last crossed over into Florida.

THE NIGHT BREEZE was in his face and he could smell the wood smoke as he walked. Before long he came to a clearing in the pines where pioneers had cut a shallow potato field in the poor soil. Across the way stood a small barn, and beside it a cabin was burning down to its gray-rock chimney. In the glow of the orange fire an enormous Indian was pushing himself against a bent white woman. A smaller figure leaned against a toppled middlebreaker, watching, and a man lay dead and mutilated in the nearby dust with killed daughter and killed son and killed plow mule. The shock-struck wife made no real sound as the giant forced his way inside of her.

Kau hid himself and decided that these two Indians were Red Stick Creeks—the villains of all those Yellowhammer stories, the terrors of the federal road. The smaller Indian moved away from the middlebreaker, and Kau saw that she was a young woman. She called out to the giant and he quit with his raping long enough to slide the pioneer’s long dress free from her milky body. He threw the dress high into the air, and as it came ballooning down the redstick girl caught it. She laughed and then danced as she pulled the dress on over her head.

He remained hidden until they took out their knives, then was turning to leave them when he saw an Indian crouched and watching him from a few feet away. Kau lifted his longrifle but this third redstick charged forward and knocked it from his hands.

Kau was wrestled out of the forest and into the potato field. He lay sprawled in the dirt and in the firelight he saw that the full tip of the redstick’s nose was missing. The Indian was bare-chested and wore a breechcloth, beaded leggings and moccasins. A crimson war-club hung from his side and ashes swirled around him. The deformed redstick put a foot on Kau’s stomach, then called to his companions with a single whooping holler. Kau turned his head and saw the other two redsticks come running. Behind them the pioneer woman kept at her writhing. Her heels seemed to have been cut. Twice she tried to run but both times she fell.

The redstick girl had wild brown hair that fell down past her waist, and was maybe half the age of the two men. She laughed and tugged at Kau’s breechcloth, then he heard her wonder in Creek if this tiny clay-tinged man could be the son of the master of breath himself. The cut-nosed Indian smiled and the redsticks all moved closer. Both the cutnose and the girl now held what looked to be big-bored Jaeger rifles. The giant wore only a breechcloth and moccasins, carried a red club of his own but no rifle or musket. His long face and broad chest were painted in a division of black and bright red. Like the cutnose his head was shaved. He stared at Kau and seemed never to blink.

THAT HE WAS a negro and knew much of their language perhaps saved his life. And of course his size intrigued them. When he saw that they would not harm him he asked carefully for his longrifle, and the cutnose fired the flintlock into the air before returning it to him empty. Kau was told to wait, and so he sat alone in the potato field while the pioneer woman was at last scalped and then killed by a blow from a war-club that split her skinned head.

LATER, ALL THREE redsticks stood facing him in the potato field but he would not look at them. He stared at the burning cabin instead until finally the girl spoke to him in Creek. “Do not be afraid,” she said. “Our war is not with you.”

The cutnose nodded. “You are running to Florida?”

Kau answered in Creek. “I am,” he said.

“Then we will bring you,” said the girl. “We go there as well.”

“I do not need that.”

The cutnose shook his head. “No,” he said. “This is our land. And we will guide you through it.”

THE BODIES OF the pioneers were thrown into the fire, and after the redsticks stole some oats the barn was torched as well. Kau was then led back into the forest to where three stallions—a white, a gray and a red—stood hitched to scrub pines. The cutnose told him that his name was Little Horn. “And you?” he asked. Kau said his own name, and Little Horn copied him slowly. “Kaa-ew?”

“Yes.”

Little Horn nodded and then climbed on to the white horse. “Kau,” he said again. The redstick offered his hand, and when Kau took it he was lifted in a rush so that in an instant he was sitting straddled and felt like a child.

THE REDSTICKS RODE south, talking. The young woman was called Blood Girl. The giant, Morning Star—a prophet who spoke only to Blood Girl. When Morning Star had a thing to say to the others he would point to Blood Girl. She would ride to him and he would whisper into her ear, stare off at the stars as she shared his message.

“You are one of the caught ones?” asked Little Horn. “An African?”

“Yes.” He could hear whistles of air passing through Little Horn’s clipped nose. What Kau knew of redsticks he had learned from the soldiers who came to Yellowhammer to play cards and drink whisky. He turned and touched his own nose. “Horseshoe Bend?” he asked.

Little Horn poked him in the side. “What do you know of that place?”

“I heard that the Americans took noses to count the dead.” In fact he had seen a glimpse of them once, a sack of some six hundred shriveled scraps of flesh. The soldiers had gambled with them as faro checks.

“So they did.” Little Horn wiped away the snot that had collected above his lip. “I have seen the whole of the war between my people.”

They rode on and Little Horn began to speak of his life and his battles. The redstick had been in Tukabatchee five years earlier when Tecumseh came down from the icy lands in the north, splitting the Creek nation with his calls for war and a return to the ways of the ancestors. The Shawnee chief showed them a comet and then promised an earthquake—and when the village shook that same autumn Little Horn took up the war-club of the redsticks, fought for the prophets at Burnt Corn and Fort Mims, Tallushatchee and Talladega. The war ended at Horseshoe Bend. Little Horn was left shot and unconscious in a tangled carnage field when they came for their cut count. He awoke with a young soldier sitting on his chest, and after the boy had finished with his sawing Little Horn took hold of the knife and killed him. Blood of Indian mixed with the blood of the boy, and as the stabbed American screamed all eyes witnessed the quickening of the dead redstick in the slippery gore. General Jackson himself ordered the dirty goddamn heathen devil killed at once, but Little Horn survived the hacking gauntlet of soldier and militiaman and Lower Creek and mercenary Cherokee. He threw himself into the river like a diving mink, and when he surfaced on the other side of the Tallapoosa this time all shots missed.

BLOOD GIRL MANEUVERED her chestnut stallion alongside Little Horn and held out a canteen. “Water for the child of the master of breath?” she asked. Kau’s own canteen was empty and so he accepted. He drank and stared back at her, listening as she started up a chant that told of the creation. How at one time the entirety of the world lay underwater, the only land a hill. On this hill lived the master of breath, and from the clay of the hill the master of breath molded the first people. A man and a woman.

Kau grunted and Blood Girl sat sideways on the bare back of her red horse. “Is that what your people believe as well?” she asked. The pioneer woman’s blue dress was gathered around her young hips and he saw that it was trimmed with lace. She pulled it over her head and let it fall from her fingers. Beneath that dress she wore another. This one made from the finely woven fibers of some plant or tree. She was pretty and seemed strong and able—perhaps the closest thing he had seen in this second world to the wife he had lost in the first.

“No,” he said finally. “But what we believed was not so different.”

She dropped the reins and began gathering her chocolate hair into a topknot. She was sideways and facing him still, but her horse stayed the trail, following that of Morning Star. “They are gone?” she asked. “Your people?”

He nodded and then the path made a sharp turn. The redsticks banked their stallions quickly—so quickly that, for a moment, they all seemed to be spinning in place.

THEY TRAVELED THROUGH the night and then until late the next day. Along a wide spot in the trail he saw where the trunk of a big live oak had been notched twice with an axe. Here they at last halted. Little Horn dismounted and patted him on his leg. “Florida,” he said, stomping down hard on the earth.

AT DARK THEY left the trail and made their camp at the far end of an oak grove. He spread his horse blanket out beside the fire and sat down. Morning Star and Blood Girl were across from him; Little Horn was already on his back and sleeping.

Kau watched through the smoke as Blood Girl began scrubbing the war paint from Morning Star’s skin with the torn corner of a charred quilt. The redstick prophet whispered to her, and she looked over at Kau and spoke: “He tells me that we have many more to kill.”

“White men, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Kau folded his blanket over so that he was cocooned within it. He was through with killing. “I have heard that there are places here in Florida where there are still no white men,” he said. “Is that true?”

She balled the quilt in her hands and handed it to Morning Star. “I think so,” she said. “But at one time you could have said that about the whole of this land.”

“I only need a piece of it.”

He saw Morning Star shake his head. The prophet rose up holding the quilt, then walked with Blood Girl away from the fire and into the darkness. Soon there came sounds like those made by small animals tussling, and Kau stared at a far southern star as he lay listening to the snarls and squeals of their lovemaking.

IN THE MORNING he watched as Little Horn took a knife to Lawson’s longrifle. The redstick unscrewed the buttplate and shaved down the stock. When he was finished Kau lifted it to his shoulder, and though the balance was off it did fit him perfectly. He lowered the flintlock and motioned toward Morning Star. The prophet was wandering among the hobbled stallions.

“Yes?” asked Little Horn. “What is it you want to know?”

“Why does he not carry a flintlock?”

Little Horn brushed the curled chips of wood from his lap and shook his head. “He follows the old ways in everything.”

“So only the club?”

“Yes.”

“And you?”

Little Horn laughed, then he bent the brass buttplate over onto itself and threw it into the fire. The full sun had appeared in the sky, but the air was still cool within the shade of the oaks that surrounded them. “I am no prophet,” he said.

LITTLE HORN AND Blood Girl both gave him lessons with the longrifle—teaching him the proper powder load and how to shoot with some accuracy. On occasion he made to leave but always the redsticks delayed him, convincing him that he needed more rest and more food, more training with the longrifle before he should continue on his journey. At night they built great roaring fires without concern, but when he asked if here at last was a place where men need not fear discovery the redsticks only shrugged and said no but let them come. We fear no one.

HE SPENT ALL of the day with the longrifle, concealed within briers near the fork of a deer trail. Late in the afternoon a doe appeared, and when she paused to glance back the way she had come he pressed his cheek against the longrifle and peered down the barrel, closing his left eye same as the redsticks had taught him. The front sight was a thin blade of silver, and he lined it up with the groove of the rear sight, fixing on a spot just behind the doe’s shoulder. At present the doe continued on, and when she was about twenty paces from him he released a level breath and squeezed the trigger. The doe collapsed onto her side, then began to paw at the air with slow and rhythmic kicks. He pushed his way through the briers and ran toward her. His ball had flown wide but she was shot through the neck.

AT DUSK HE sat by the fire with the others. Little Horn had cut himself a long green stick, and the redstick was roasting the deer heart when he made a clucking sound with his tongue and pointed. “Look there,” he said.

Kau followed his gaze and in the fading light he saw a spotted fawn walking alone in the oak grove, cold-trailing its dead mother through the leaves. The fawn trotted into the camp like a pet goat, then began to nuzzle the wet doe hide that lay crumpled nearby.

“Sad,” said Little Horn.

Morning Star threw a coiled length of rope to Blood Girl, and she tied the confused fawn’s leg to a sapling. She walked back to Morning Star, and the fawn folded itself atop the comforting deerskin.

Kau looked across the fire at Little Horn. “If there had been a child with me, would you have killed him?”

Little Horn bounced the deer heart over the flames. “What kind of child?”

“A white child. A boy.”

“A baby white child?”

“No.”

“How big?”

Kau placed the flat of his hand two widths higher than his own head.

Little Horn laughed and the fawn’s head lifted at the sound. “That is no child,” he said.

HE SAT UP that night watching the caught fawn sleep, wondering whether the creature knew that its mother was dead, whether the little deer realized that it was only waiting for the moment of its own slaughter. Morning Star was tossing through a nightmare, and Kau saw him shiver and then kick at the ground. The fawn awoke with big blinking eyes and though Kau considered slipping its noose he knew that there was no point, that tether or no tether it would never leave this place that smelled of its mother.

MORNING. THE REDSTICKS woke late and lazed in the camp eating venison and passing pipefuls of tobacco cut with sumac. The deer meat had begun to ripen in the sun, so a rack was fashioned from green limbs. The hungry fawn went to bleating as they smoked the remains of the doe, and its cries brought a horned owl swooping like some gigantic bat. The owl settled into an oak, watching the fawn until the owl itself was spotted by a crow, and then these ancient enemies fought in the treetops like courting dragonflies until more crows came calling and at last the day-roving owl was chased off.

The redsticks watched all of this and after a while even they could no longer bear the cries of the starving fawn. Morning Star whispered to Blood Girl and then handed her his ball-headed club. The fawn cowered as she walked toward it.

THAT NIGHT THE three redsticks planned their next raid while the skewered fawn cooked on a crooked length of dogwood that had been stripped of its bark. He listened to them plot. A company of thieves was living in a cave back across the border, not far from the federal road. The redsticks would kill these highwaymen and ride to Pensacola, buy weapons and supplies from the Spanish and then fall in with the other redsticks—those who had already fled deeper into Florida. Little Horn bit at his fingernail. “We will find them and together we will fight a running war. I have learned from our mistake at Horseshoe Bend.”

Kau watched the eyeball of the skinned fawn begin to bulge and then split from the heat of the embers. He sat up on his horse blanket and the redsticks looked at him. He was thinking that maybe there was another lesson to be learned that day at Horseshoe Bend. “What if the Americans cannot be defeated?” he asked.

Little Horn leaned closer to the red coals, and his flat skull-face gleamed in the firelight. After a long while he spoke. “Your tribe must have been a very peaceful one,” he said.

Kau nodded. “We had no enemies,” he said quietly. “Not until the end.”