Charley looked at Lowan and George and Jake, and they seemed to have no opinion on this matter or any other. Their eyes were dead and hopeless as polished river stones. Wasseton began to object that he was not a child and should go with the men. Without getting up from where she sat, Nancy turned and slapped him hard across the face where he sat beside her, striking him twice, first backhand and then with her hard palm. Wasseton blinked back tears and shut up.
Way down the cove they could hear a long cackling laugh. It sounded like a puppy barking. Charley nodded to Nancy. He and the younger men began climbing away.
—Not together, Nancy said.
Charley turned and nodded again. He and the three younger men flared off from one another, Charley taking the path straight up.
AT NIGHT, sheltered deep in a thicket, Charley built a small fire and slept warm. The next day he did not even get up off the ground where he had slept. He lay all day by the ashes of the fire with his mind blank, wishing he would die here and never be found. White bones gnawed by porcupines. He did not know what would happen to his family. He liked to think that Nancy was right, that neither the trackers nor the soldiers would kill women and children, but who could know? He might go on to the highest ridges and follow them northeast until he was far away from the hunters. But then what? It was said to be nothing but white people up there now.
Everything had fallen away from him. First his house and animals and crops and neighbors, then his family. Now white voices and Indian voices both hunted him. His own people running him through the woods like an old boar.
IF YOU ARE in the mountains alone for some time—many days at minimum, and it helps if you are fasting—the forest grows tired of its wariness toward you. It resumes its inner life and allows you to see it. Near dusk, the faces in tree bark cease hiding and stare out at you, the welcoming ones and also the malevolent, open in their curiosity. In your camp at night, you are able to pick out a distinct word now and then from the muddled voices in creek water, sometimes an entire sentence of deep import. The ghosts of animals reveal themselves to you without prejudice toward your humanity. You see them receding before you as you walk the trail, their shapes beautiful and sad.
Charley had reached such a point when he went to sleep under his blanket up on a bald. He woke up under three quarters of the Hunting Moon with frost silvering the grass and the cuts of the creek drainages through the mountains etched out below him in blue light. The bald was thick with feral hogs. Dozens of them. They rooted with their flanged snouts and long tusks for something in the ground that they savored, some grub or minuscule rodent. The tusks of the boars were like pairs of long dirks that would lay you wide open. The ground they passed over looked like it had been turned by plows. The hogs went about their work all hunched forward. Most of their bulk was in the thick muscles of their necks and shoulders, and this was further emphasized by the ruff of red bristles that roached up like porcupine quills from the base of their skulls and tapered away along their backbones. Their hams thinned off as lean and long as the hind legs of a Plott hound.
Charley was too weary to hold any hope of killing a hog with just a hatchet. But he was in a sort of strange mood, and so he walked out slowly among them, and the stout blue shadows they cast across the bald merged with his own. He passed his hands across the red bristles on their backs and talked to them and said he required nothing from them and only wished them well in their endeavors. They paid him little attention as he stroked their backs, only arching slightly against his palm like house cats. When he had touched each of them, he bade them good night and went back and lay down under his blanket to sleep.
But just at the first point of slumber, he had a dream of falling and gave out a little yell. And when he did, the hogs broke to run, and the direction they went was right over the top of him. What he found himself under was a grunting squealing eruption of hogs, a resurgence of the wild. Their sharp hooves left him looking like he’d taken a beating with a war club. When the stampede was over, he was bleeding and bruised, but nothing was broken.
IT WAS A bad time of year to be a fugitive living off the land. Charley overturned creek rocks to find crawfish, and one by one as he found them, he pinched their whiskered heads and snapping foreclaws off between thumb and forefinger and ate the tails and whatever hind legs remained while they still pulsed in a last attempt at flight. He made no effort to separate meat from shell, but crunched them together between his back teeth and swallowed them down. He dug roots and brushed the dirt off and ate them raw as apples. There were still a few wormy chestnuts and hickory nuts on the ground under leafless trees. One day he caught a trout by spearing it with a sharp hickory stick and ventured to light a fire no bigger than he could have cupped in his hand to sear it over. When he was done with the body, he held the head in his mouth and sucked until it held no more flavor than his own spit. His bowels suffered greatly from such diet. He squatted under the canopy of rhododendron and felt that his insides were being twisted like a dirty dishrag.
He wished he had a great double-barreled gun as long as he was tall with which to kill whoever he could until they overwhelmed him.
ICED STREAM BANKS, frost-burnt pigeon moss, a cold sun setting down a metal-colored sky. Heavy-timbered steep land. No scrap of it horizontal enough for a short man to sleep on except where a damp gravel bed rose a handbreadth above a creek shoal. The sky was overcast with such thick low clouds that the sun did not even make a bright spot through them, and there was no way to gauge the progress of the day.
Charley put his back to a big chestnut tree and slept sitting up, forehead to knees, cowled in his blanket. The next morning after he awoke, he sat motionless a long while trueing up his mind. Then, suddenly, the sound of runners coming close. He had no time to hide and just squatted with his back against the trunk of the tree and became utterly still. He fixed his eyes on the ground between his feet, for it is the meeting of eyes that most identifies prey to predator. Hunters bloomed out of the fog and ran past him without letup. He could have reached out and hit them with a stick. Then they were gone, and he rose and fled upward.
The white sky was entirely free of birds. Charley looked down the long view south, grey mountains lapped and stacked to the end of the world. He stood at the edge of the vast laurel hell, feeling the hard cold that spilled down the slopes so gently it did not even stir the leathery leaves that overlay one another dense as a wall in front of him. But the cold seeped through the weave of his clothing and chilled him deep in his joints. The laurel could feel the cold too, for they were beginning to curl their leaves into themselves in long rolls that looked no more alive than strips of deer jerky. Under the canopy, as dense as a canvas tent, there would be nothing to eat whatsoever other than two lumpy pocketfuls of chestnuts and hickory nuts he had picked up the day before. Charley pinched the last little bit of fat at his belly and judged he could live only a short while longer on water and nuts. He shook his big stoppered gourd to check if it was still full from the most recent creek. He parted laurel boughs and they rattled against him as he passed through their gates at a stoop.
It was as if he had entered a cave mouth. The day immediately dimmed to twilight, but stained green, and he moved through it as if crawling across the bottom of a slow deep river. Dry dead laurel leaves under his hands and knees and feet were thick as nutshells. They clattered against one another like potsherds when he moved.
He went on and on, walking stooped when he could, but mostly crawling where the tangled trunks and limbs left no choice. After dark, he ventured to strike a little fire no bigger around than the mouth to a bucket. The runners would have to be on top of him to see it through the brush. He wondered where Nancy was tonight, and all the children. At best, they were captives beyond his power to redeem. He leaned over the fire as close as smoking meat, trying to get warmth.
When he woke up in the night, the fire was dead. He waved his hand in front of his face and could not see a thing.
He hear
d them coming, following his trail, which must have lain behind him in the dead leaves plain as if he were dragging a plowpoint.
It was a chase suited for an old man, very slow and mostly on hands and knees. Charley moved jittery as a crawfish. He crawled over dirt like powdered ashes, trunks and branches spreading all around bare as old bones, broken-down skeletons.
When he paused, he could hear them coming. And he guessed they could hear him too.
So he tried just sitting, looking with unfocused eyes at the various parts of the laurel in its dim green light.
There was a long silence, and then the hunters spread out and moved forward and began circling around him. Many of them. They made no effort now to move silently, and the sounds of the men crawling in the ground litter and of the laurel boughs brushing and sometimes breaking against their bodies came from all sides. It sounded as if the thicket itself were closing around him, the limbs tightening and reforming from wild tangle into something much simpler, a harsh-spoked wheel with him at the hub.
The first man to reach him was only a few years older than Wasseton, and he came crawling forward out of the half-light with a knife between his teeth and an awkward long musket on a strap over his shoulder banging against every limb and trunk.
Charley still sat, breathing deep. He looked at the boy and said, Hey. And then he looked more closely and said, You favor a man I once knew. He went by the name of Dull Hoe and sometimes John.
The boy sat up and took the knife out of his mouth and wiped the spit against his britches. He said, My grandfather.
The boy took two strips of deer jerky from a pouch and reached them to Charley.
—They’ll be wanting your blades.
Charley handed him his hatchet.
The boy said, We caught the others some time ago.
Then he made a sort of bow to Charley, at least to the extent possible given that they were both sitting. An acknowledgment of Charley’s will to live.
LIGHT SNOW CAPPED the highest balsam ridges, a bright band between the grey slopes and the dark sky, and it did not melt away until nearly midday. In the bend of the river, there was a grassy piece of flat ground with just a scattering of old grey birches and a few big rocks. The river was high and thick and red with the clay it was carrying. I stood on a hill above the bank and saw it all from some distance, so that all the men were remote and small, actors on a distant stage beyond earshot. I had not slept in more than a day.
Across the river I could see the fire circle where Charley and I had sat up talking all night.
Guards stood over the prisoners, who sat under a birch tree with their bound hands between their thighs and did not talk, even to one another. The younger men—Lowan and George, Jake, and the boy Wasseton—wore brown felt hats, and old Charley had on a white headcloth tied in a band around his forehead. They all wore moccasins and britches and shirts of linen and faded red calico. The women and little children stood together, off to the side, guarded by a pair of young soldiers.
Lieutenant Smith and another officer huddled together and there was a long period of talk between them, and then they seemed to argue. Smith made broad encompassing motions using the whole of both arms, as if to implicate the wide landscape in the coming actions. The other made little jerky emphatic gestures with just his fisted right hand and kept his left in his coat pocket. Among the hunters from Lichen’s bunch, disagreements appeared to run in many different directions. Voices were raised and lowered and raised again, though I could not make out a word of what passed down below me. Two Indians shouted at each other and then locked up and fought on the ground until soldiers waded in and grabbed them by their arms and snatched them apart. Two other Indians went and propped their muskets against a rock and walked into the forest and did not return. No one tried to stop them.
Several of Lichen’s hunters began working at the loads to their muskets, fooling with shot pouches and powder horns, checking the pans and priming. Smith watched them and then took a rundlet from his saddlebag and drank a long pull and stoppered it back and put it away in the bag. Then he took it out and pulled again at it and just kept it in his hand.
Soldiers stood Charley and the boys up and walked them out near the riverbank and left them standing there in some confusion. The Indian hunters, including Lichen, went and stood near Charley and the boys. I could see them talking. Then just Charley talked and tried to make gestures with his bound hands. The hunters backed away and raised their muskets. There were two shooters for each of the tied men, and it was arranged so that one would aim for the head and the other for the heart. Smith walked over and pulled Wasseton from the group and led him away toward the women.
I saw the flash of powder in the pans, the leap of grey smoke against the background of dark trees. A great bloom of red blossomed on the white forehead band of Charley’s turban. Then—only after the four men began falling, knee joints gone limp—the reports of gunfire arrived across the river where I stood watching. The sound had crossed the water and climbed up the ridge like a rushing wind, but still in arrears of what sight had already told. When the brittle crackle of shots reached me, not appreciably louder than eight dry sticks breaking, it seemed allied with the brevity of life, with time, the sound we make as we fall through its abyss into darkness.
1
AFTER THE NATION HAD BEEN WIPED AWAY, THE EMPTY LAND WAS not even left for a moment to draw breath. State surveyors had plotted and platted it in preparation for a mighty land auction in the spring. Down at the capital, someone had drawn the street plan for a county seat to erupt near where the empty fort stood, the ground still beaten smooth where the people were collected and held before transportation to the West. Squatters and claim jumpers began streaming into the white space on the map even before the auction. And of course there I was, my string of trading stations already in place, ready to sell them everything they needed and a lot they didn’t at elevated prices justified by the distance goods had to be transported and by the lack of competition. I expanded all the posts and began calling them mercantiles and brought in a wider range of stock, for I knew the trade would not just be hides and ginseng for gingham and axeheads. And too, I was already buying land like God wasn’t making any more of it—which He wasn’t, for otherwise we wouldn’t have had to shove someone else off to make a place for ourselves.
THE WINTER AFTER the Removal was a hard one with a great deal of snow. It often piled halfway up the door of the winterhouse and the wind howling blue out of the north. Bear and I would be inside warm as loaves baking in a clay oven. Nearly all we talked about that winter was loss and land and love. Maybe if we’d known there wouldn’t be many more Cold Moons together by the fire, we’d have talked about something else. The meaning of life or the nature of God. Maybe not. We were in pain, and that has a way of focusing one’s attention. We still could hardly talk about what had happened to Charley and the boys, and the part we had played. I was all broken by Claire’s absence, and Bear yearned desperately for Sara, who was holed up not a quarter mile away in the cabin with the other women. I argued that her proximity made me the winner in degree of anguish, but Bear declared physical distance irrelevant. The obstacles of time and space were as nothing compared to a heart hardened against you. Also to be tallied in his column of despair was the fact that Sara had recently produced a baby, which was clearly not Bear’s, for it had reddish hair and pale skin. Very quickly it grew four sharp front teeth from its pink gums and would bite like a snapping turtle onto any extremity that presented itself, though unlike the implacable turtle it would let go if you just popped it lightly on the top of its head rather than having to wait for a clap of thunder.
We dreamed powerful and vivid dreams during that blizzard and we told them to each other in great detail. In my dreams, Claire never made an actual appearance. She was a force akin to gravity or magnetism drawing me toward her through various landscapes and through the corridors of buildings that were somewhat like the Indian Queen Hotel and the Capito
l in Washington City. I searched and never found. Bear’s dreams, though, all ended in full consummation. He bragged shamelessly of night emissions as profound as those of a fourteen-year-old boy.
It was Bear’s contention that if you want to know who is dreaming of you, just look at who peoples your own night world, for there’s a confluence to the flow of dreams. I could only hope that Bear was right and that out in the unimaginable West, Claire woke up every few mornings with her pillow in a wad and her bedclothes damp and twisted, and that she went about with a haunted empty feeling that bruised the day blue until well past the dinner hour.
When we became exhausted with the subject of hopeless love, we turned to land. Bear had begun studying on the matter as soon as the great auction of the Nation was announced. In the winterhouse, I tried to show him my paper map of the territory printed by the state. The rivers were drawn crooked as life, but everything else was cut up into perfect squares and rectangles that bore no resemblance to the ragged and often vertical terrain. Bear looked at my map a minute but then rolled it back up into its cylinder and began to draw his own in the dirt of the floor. He squatted on his heels and swept his palms in broad strokes to smooth the dirt, and then he sharpened a stick with his knife and sat a long session scribing interlocking rivers and creeks and ridges, working from physical memory of walking them over a lifetime. He progressed from the large to the small. Rivers to creeks to branches to streams, going uphill all the way back to their sources. Thin lines and thick, continuous and truncated. Real places and speculative places. The Great Leech Place, the Great Lizard Bald. When he was done he had covered most of the floor with topography. He studied his work for a long time and then eased carefully to the fire so as not to step on anything important. He made tea and built the fire brighter and studied his map some more. And then he began talking, cataloging all the land he wanted to acquire.