Thirteen Moons

  The famous Bear Drowning Him, now mostly just called Bear, was said to have gotten his name when he was still a boy by killing the master bear of all this territory, wounding it first with an arrow to the lungs and then fighting it with a knife in his fist until they both streamed blood. They brawled down a hillside and then to the river’s edge and then onward until they were waist-deep in the water. They closed awkwardly together, neither finding much purchase against the round slick stones of the riverbed. But the boy drove a blade deep in the bear’s vitals. And then the bear lurched forward and pressed the boy down under the water with his full weight. All that remained visible was the muscled hump of the bear’s back breaking the dark surface of the river. But at the last moment of Bear Drowning Him’s strength, the bear died. It went still and lay with the water flowing around the bulk of it in a pair of smooth curves. The boy came up and slung the water out of his hair, and he still had the knife in his fist, the blade shining and clean from the water.

  The bear was claimed to have measured a full arms’ span across at the ass. Even deducting for decades of exaggeration, that was still a big bear. Even now, when Bear wanted to cut a dash for children, he sometimes exhibited the parallel welted scars across his back and ribs where the claws had scored him to the bone in their last embrace. Bear had narrated the story to Charley’s children several years ago when, on a hunting trip, he had spent a rainy night in their cabin. Bear loomed over them at his lean excessive height and told the story, and the children looked up and listened in amazement. And then at the climactic moment, Bear turned to a quartering position and pulled up the tail of his long hunting shirt, and the skin was becoming creped and hanging loose over the bones, but the scars were bright as ropes of rubbed silver, relics of an accomplishment that could be taken to the grave and perhaps beyond.

  There was a slight shift of wind from up the creek, and it carried an odor like wet dog. Charley began walking back toward the dark shape. He talked to it in a low voice.

  He said, Come to me. Come to me. And then he sang the bear hunter’s song: I want to lay them low on the ground. Low on the ground.

  He reckoned that taking nothing but a cup of bitter tea without honey for the entire day was about the same as the hunter’s fast of the old times. He had the hatchet in his right hand and the knife in his left hand with the edge up for good ripping after a deep belly stab. He said again, Come to me. And then he said the last prayer before the kill: Let the leaves be covered with clotted blood, and may it never cease to be so.

  Through the fog, Charley could see the bear’s ears and tan muzzle. It made a bouncing motion with its front end. Charley took it that the bear was willing to fight. Without thinking much about it, he took two running steps forward and let fly the hatchet. It was a deep throw, all the strength in his old stout body expressed in a flow of movements calibrated so that the hatchet would make two revolutions in air before burying its blade in the bear with great force.

  There was the sound of a solid blow struck, but he could not see what he had hit. The bear did not charge but made a single plosive utterance, a huff. It wheeled and ran uphill at amazing speed, crashing through a stand of laurel and disappearing into the fog. Charley stood and listened to the cracking of limbs and imagined the working of the massive hams and buttocks. Big muscles that would make good eating. He sheathed the knife and went and retrieved the bloody hatchet where it lay on the ground and took off running hard.

  Charley was like the bear in his squat build, his power all settled in his ass and thighs, and he ran lumbering but strong, and his short legs were good for climbing. For a while he could take his direction by stopping for a second and listening to the bear moving ahead of him through the leaves. But when Charley grew short of breath and slowed to a walk, the bear soon outdistanced him. He stopped to listen, and there was silence, even when he opened his mouth wide to aid his hearing. But he could follow the trail of disturbed leaves and broken branches and blood, and when there was no sign, he chose his forward path only by guessing how the bear would react to the flow of terrain and the way the forest plants might serve as obstacle or cover. At intervals he found gouts of blood on the forest floor and broad smears against tree bark to confirm the correct working of his imagination.

  He moved in the bear’s wake all afternoon, climbing without letup. The blood led on, but thinned down. Bleeding out or healing up.

  Gouts became drops. Drops became rare as garnets cupped in fallen leaves. Step by step, footprints lay lighter on the earth, fainter and fainter as if the bear were slowly elevating into the sky.

  Charley went at a near trot, bent double to look for fading sign. He climbed out of the coves where colored leaves still hung on the trees, through a region where ferns and vines had grown fountainous through the summer and were now melancholy and dying as far as the eye could see, and then along the dry ridges, and by dusk he was rising through a forest of bare trees grey as winter toward the ominous balsam forests draped black across the highest ridges, a world of shadow and hush, where every step fell muffled by the soft foot-bed of old brown needles. He hoped he would not have to cross that boundary, for the only time he had done so a giant owl had glided silent and big-headed right past him in the half dark that was day under the balsams. The owl’s face as big as his own and pale as the moon. A bad sign. Not the word you wanted spoken to you out alone in the high mountains.

  Charley went on upward, one red drop at a time until the sign died entirely before him. He went casting forward until that direction became hopeless, and then he backtracked to the last drop of blood and began circling, making wider and wider rounds without success. He looked up into the trees and the sky beyond, for it seemed as if at some point the bear had spread wings and taken flight. He followed a rill of water no wider than his hand back to its source, for it is widely known that certain springs offer entrance into the world underneath the world, a refuge. But there was no sign of bear along the rill. Charley kept searching until it was so dark he could not tell one kind of fallen leaf from another. He sat with his back against a tree and looked up through the bare winter woods toward the highest peaks and sent out a prayer to the bear and all his animal brethren, speaking aloud without hope or despair. Saying that since the beginning of time, animals have willingly sacrificed themselves to the needs of people, have given us their pain and blood as a gift along with their fat and meat. Don’t stop now.

  He waited by the tree until dawn for the outcome to his prayer. Ready with knife and hand axe in case a dark shape separated itself from the night and came to him, offering him its life.

  When Charley returned to camp the next day, it was with neither a bloody haunch over his shoulder nor a heroic story to tell. He had only his creel of withered roots. He set about peeling and slicing them and brewing a pot of bitter tea the color of strong urine.

  Charley concluded his hunting story by saying that until this night by the campfire with the tobacco smoke and brown whiskey, he had not spoken a word about his lost bear to any of his descendants but only whispered about it to Nancy the night of his return as they lay on their bed of hemlock boughs, and she held him and brushed his face with the big knuckles of her fingers and told him that he had tried but failed and sometimes that is all the victory we are allotted.

  4

  THE EVENTS OF THE FOLLOWING DAY HAVE BEEN THE SUBJECT OF a certain amount of speculation over the years, both in print and as mere gossip. Some say I did not join the soldiers and Indians when they headed out down the trail because the Indians had warned me something might happen. Others have said that maybe I felt crushing guilt and stayed there at the forks of the river under the big hemlock to reflect in solitude on my recent actions. I’ll set the record straight, though it is not in the least to my credit. My recollection is that after a long stretch of camping in the woods with soldiers, I had enjoyed about all the male companionship I could stand and began wishing for the company of women. I calculated that it was but a half day’s rid
e to Welch’s Tavern, at least for me, knowing the shortcuts and going at a good clip on a fine horse. With Smith’s party moving at foot pace, I had time to drop in for a night with Welch’s accommodating female employees before catching back up the next day. That, to the best of my remembrance, is why the mounted soldiers and their pedestrian prisoners left after daybreak, Smith navigating nervously by the little scrap of map I had drawn for him. And that is also why I did not arrive at the killing ground until the morning after and had to piece together what happened from the sign on the ground.

  THE CLEARING IN the woods where I came upon the boys hewn to death was hardly bigger than the stage of a theater, a brief and roughly circular interruption in the dense forest. I commended them to what god they claimed and then walked about the perimeter, observing the order of the scene.

  The boys lay spaced apart, and the ground was marked everywhere with sign of what had taken place. Of the several interpretations that were possible to make, this is how I shaped a narrative from the attitudes of the dead boys and their scattered effects and the scripture on the ground that the skirmish had left.

  Skirmish is such an airy-sounding word. It could very well be near kin to words like cotillion or promenade. But the men who die in these little inconsequential fights are just as stone dead as if they fought at Hastings or Culloden or Sharpsburg. A quarter century after this bloody moment memorialized on the ground, I, as a middle-aged man, engaged personally in more than a few skirmishes, and I found them to be desperate and ugly encounters, gunfire spluttering in pulses, men yelling curses, brief confused silences between outbursts. And when they’re done fighting, men lie dead and dying, stunned and bleeding and pale. Other men go on calmly about their business. Those are the winners. The losers leave their dead and wounded where they fall and flee in vomitous panic.

  In this ugly little encounter smeared on the ground before me, it looked like one of the men, let’s say Lowan, struck high, a hard and solid hatchet stroke opening Perry’s head from the hairline to the teeth. Perry fell face down. The phrase that might be used by someone who has never seen a man die is that Perry was dead before he hit the ground. But that’s not always the way it happens, even with your head opened up, and I’ll leave it at that without further detail. At nearly the same moment that Lowan made his move, another man, George maybe, must have taken a two-handed swipe at the Philadelphia boy and buried the hatchet head deep at the junction of his neck and shoulder. The blade had caught hard in the bones, buried as in a dry log butt. George would have yanked at the handle but could not make it come loose. Philadelphia wanted to fall and went as far as his knees, but George kept yanking him upright, trying to get his hatchet out. Philadelphia grabbed the handle just behind the head and they disputed over it, and even then George could not retrieve his hatchet. Philadelphia fell forward and lay dying, half propped up by the handle and grabbing desperately at the ground. Simultaneously, Jake had struck at Charleston’s head, hoping to lay him out quickly, but it was a glancing blow and only staggered him and raised a peel of scalp over his ear. Jake closed with him and struck again and hit more with the flat than the sharp part of the blade. The joints of Charleston’s knees let go and he collapsed like pleated cloth straight to the ground and did not move further.

  I was just assigning theoretical parts for the killers. The dead and their wounds, though, were certain. As was the fact that the killings took place outside the Nation and on our territory. I’ve never been much of a one for prayer, but I looked at the dead boys and prayed that in the future it would be the likes of Jackson sprawled on the ground and not poor boys with hardly two pennies to rub together dying for the foolish ideas of greedy old men. I heard horses in the woods and went and collected the three and tailed them one to the other for travel.

  WHEN I REACHED the fort a hard day’s ride later, I found Smith alone in his pale pyramidal tent. He sat drafting his report atop a little folding table, and the ground at his feet was littered with balled sheets of paper. A half-full bottle of whiskey and a half-full glass stood side by side on his desk. The luminous brown contents of both vessels rocked with the effort of his writing. He looked up, and he did not seem happy to see me. I sat in a camp chair and waited for what he had to say.

  Smith became suddenly occupied with the tedium of writing. He trimmed a fresh quill with a penknife, dipped into the inkpot and scratched down enough words to make a few sentences, and then immediately balled up the sheet and tossed it on the ground as if paper grew on trees.

  Smith rose and went to a trunk and took out another glass and poured me a drink from his bottle. He turned his chair my way and sat leaned forward, holding his whiskey glass two-handed between his knees. When he looked up at me, tears were brimming at his lids. He said, These goddamn fucking mountains. I wish I’d never laid eyes on them.

  I asked the obvious. What happened?

  Smith said it all exploded so fast he still wasn’t sure what happened, exactly who did what. It began when Charley’s wife, Nancy, had grown tired. She fell back to the end of the group and then stopped. One of the soldier boys dismounted and went to see what was the matter. There was some kind of altercation, and the other boys dismounted as well. From that point, the bloody little moment unfolded in less time than drawing five breaths. Hatchets appeared from under blanket cloaks. Honed edges flashed in the sun. Smith, still mounted, tried to loose the flap of his holster to get at the pistol, but his fingers just twitched at the simple device of button and eyelet. He saw the three boys cut down while he was still fumbling. His spit turned to mucilage, tongue stuck to the roof of his drying mouth. He couldn’t piece together who committed what act of violence.

  The women and children stood watching, emotionless and completely still, grouped in near symmetry so that the memory of them would stay with Smith all his life, coming to rest in his mind like a family portrait. Perry and Charleston lay still, and Philadelphia, bleeding heavily, made motions with his hands like trying to get a grip on the earth. There was an awful lot of blood in the brown leaves, and the men with the hatchets turned in Smith’s direction.

  It was not as if he thought about it. Thinking was not what the moment called for. His heels jerked back into a kick and his hands loosed the reins and the rowels of his spurs cut and drew blood. The horse gathered himself low on his hindquarters and then galloped off downhill with Smith riding loose and his elbows sticking out and flapping like he wished to take flight.

  —At least sometimes that’s the way I think it was, he said.

  —Might have been that your horse wheeled and bolted as you were trying to unholster your pistol. By that point, it was too late to save anybody but yourself anyway.

  —Might have been. I can’t say.

  —And might have been that if I’d come along with you I could have said something that would have mattered.

  —There wasn’t time to say anything. Everything happened all at once.

  We poured another drink and sipped without further comment, neither of us truly believing the generous interpretation of the other.

  Without even a courtesy clearing of throat, the colonel’s little scraggle-haired scrivener came into Smith’s tent and said, Both of you, right now.

  As we neared the door of the colonel’s office, Smith slowed and entered behind me. The colonel sat at his table behind the leavings of a boiled-beef dinner, the plate rim-full of grey juice afloat with fat pearls of congealed suet. Two spermaceti candles burned in pewter holders. The whites of the colonel’s eyes were the color of the suet, and he looked at me a long time before saying, How did it ever occur to me to send you two out together?

  —They were farmers, I said. You’ve rousted out thousands of them without incident. How were we to know these few would put up a fight?

  —You worthless little shitheel, he said.

  —You took all they had. People get pushed too far, they lose their heads.

  The colonel touched a forefinger into the cold grey juice in his
plate and then put the first joint of the finger into his mouth. When he was done tasting, he scrubbed at his greasy finger with the thumb of the same fist. He looked at the working of his hand as if it were fascinating.

  He said, Speaking of loss, you’re about to lose something too. Land and people and everything. If I need to do it to catch the killers, I’ll send in all the Army necessary to clean every Indian out of here, no matter whose land they claim to live on. Your land included.

  I looked around at Smith. He still stood behind me, and he was looking off to the side. No help at all.

  I said to the colonel, What about our previous agreement?

  —Things change.

  I could feel everything falling apart. Bear and everyone who had taken me in as a boy, walking away to the West. Claire gone. I guess my face looked like a map in process of erasure.

  The colonel waited and watched. Then he said, If there were an easier way, I’d be willing to entertain offers.

  —What do you need? I said.

  —The killers. Every one of them delivered to justice.

  —For what purpose?

  —I recollect that you’re an attorney. The language of the law is not a mystery to you. They’ve committed a capital crime. What end does that suggest?

  —And our people?

  —Not an issue if I get the killers.

  —And what about any other fugitives hiding up in the mountains?

  —They can stay or go. All I’m interested in is the killers.