The Hinterlands (33 page)

If I had had a gun and could have turned loose of Sue I would have gone back and put that cat out of its misery. Nothing is as dangerous as a hurt animal, though. They was nothing to do but go on and let the painter die as it was, choking in its fever.

I heard the barks again, but they seemed a good way off. They was short yipes like a little dog makes, not a hunting hound and not a cur dog like so many mountain people had back then. It sounded like a squirrel dog, or some kind of terrier. If Sue heard the dog she didn't show no sign. She kept trotting.

Sue run straight in the direction of the barking. We had got into much deeper woods while running away from the painter. We had entered a forest so thick it was dark as twilight.

Sue trotted on for several hundred yards in that near darkness. I blazed a tree here and there, and listened for the barks. Had I imagined the dog in the first place? Maybe I wanted to hear a dog so bad I just made it up, hoping the painter would hear the barks too. I was so tired I might imagine anything. Or the dog could be running away in the direction we was going. Or maybe it had been a fox barking. Things had gone so strange that day I didn't trust my senses no longer.

The trees was bigger than any I had ever seen. It seemed like their trunks was wide as houses. And they was so many trees Sue had to weave back and forth through them. That was why they
blocked out all the light. The trees was like pillars in a palace. They seemed to be supporting a dark roof up there. I couldn't tell what kind of trees they was. They didn't look like any oaks or hickories I had ever seen. But even in the gloom I could see the bark was all covered with moss and sooty mold. They wasn't no undergrowth, just the big trees standing like masonry columns. If the painter had chased us into these woods he would have caught us.

They was another yip ahead, and then another. Sue and me was winding back and forth between the trees. It seemed like the barks was off to my left, and then they seemed to come from my right. I hoped we wasn't going in circles.

It got lighter up ahead. In the woods it didn't seem the sun could be shining nowhere. It was like we'd been inside all day, in a cellar or attic, and thought it was overcast. And then we walked out to find the sky clear and sun pouring out its warmth.

Sue busted into a little opening, and I blinked with the sudden brightness. The sun was out in spots on the ground, and blinding where it shined from wet leaves and little puddles in cupped leaves. They was a yipe from the bushes nearby. I jerked around to find the dog but seen instead a man in buckskin standing in the laurels watching us. He looked like he was growing right out of the laurel bushes. A little dog growled in the brush beside him, its hackles raised.

The man appeared never to have shaved in his life or had his hair cut. His hair might have been blond at one time, but flowed gray and white down his shoulders. Never had I seen a wilder-looking human. Hair growed out of his ears and out of his nose. He wore an old black hat that appeared to be three-cornered, the kind my Grandpappy wore in the Revolution. But it was so wrecked you couldn't really tell. It was frayed on all the edges, but had a gold badge pinned to the side. He had leather strings over his shoulders and around his neck, and he leaned on a long
musket, the kind you didn't see much anymore even then. His eyes glittered under the wrinkles and bushy brows.

“Is this the way to Cedar Mountain?” I blurted out. I couldn't think of nothing else to say. And it seemed like years since I had talked to a human. My voice surprised me.

“Some say it is,” the man said, and never took his eyes off me.

His dog run out in front of Sue and cut her off. Instead of wheeling to go around the little terrier, or just running right over her, Sue paused. She must have wanted a rest, to be so easy stopped. It was just a little clearing in the laurel bushes. She could have plunged into the brush. But she stood her ground. The hackles was raised on the little dog's back.

“Will she bite?” I said. The dog was too little to do more than nip the hog, but I had to say something to break the old man's stare.

“She might,” he said. “She might if she didn't know a body.” The man looked steady at me, like he was asking me to explain. They was spots on his skin, a sign of real old age. But he stood so straight and alert he didn't seem that old. I realized how I must look with the dried blood on my chin and beard and shirt, and my clothes all wet and tore. I must have looked like an escaped prisoner, or somebody who run from his sick bed or grave.

“I'm surveying a road to Cedar Mountain,” I said.

The little dog kept yiping and Sue backed up against my leg.

“Friend, you look like you been to war,” the old man said.

“I'm just trying to make a road,” I said. “And it seems nobody wants me to.”

“A road just leads faster to the grave,” the stranger said. “I want to go where no roads go.” He had a quaint but cultivated speech, like they had in the last century, like they had brought from Virginny. It seemed odd to hear a buckskin talk that way.

“I want to take the way that winds around some through the woods,” he said. “They's roads aplenty if people can see them.”

Was the old man Tracker Thomas? They was stories he was still alive somewhere in the mountains, that he still hunted in the Indian country to the west. Tracker was supposed to have come into the mountains at the time of Daniel Boone. But instead of going north to Kentucky, he stayed in the high mountains of Carolina and Tennessee.

They was all kinds of tales about Thomas and another trapper named Muskrat Maybin. They was stories about how they was rivals over an Indian girl, and about how they seen who could trap the most furs, and who got the most would win the girl. Muskrat caught five hundred muskrats and thought he had won for sure, but Tracker showed up with fifty mink pelts worth more than all the rat hides put together.

People like to make things up, if they can find a hero, a name to pin their stories on. Some names just seem to stir the imagination and attract liars. We want to believe they done extraordinary things. It's like we need people to act out our lies. Ginseng hunters and trappers in the mountains beyond Brevard said for years they seen Tracker Thomas there. Others claimed to have spotted him in the Long Holler and near the Sal Raeburn Gap. But I never had believed such tales. If Tracker Thomas was still alive, he'd be eighty-five years old. What eighty-five-year-old could live on his own in the mountains? Nobody could live in the wilderness like they done in the old days anyway.

“Did you notice the orchard around you?” the stranger said.

“This is wilderness,” I said. “I don't see no orchard.”

The old man pointed to his left, and then to the right, and for the first time I seen the apple trees. They was little trees, spread
out like wild apples will. Their bark was blacker than other trees. Whoever had planted the orchard had left it, and the other trees had grown between the fruit trees, above them. The orchard was buried in shadows, but each tree had apples on it. Some was gold and some was streaked and some was turning bright red.

“Who could have planted these trees?” I said. “Never heard of Indians growing apples.”

“They's more things we don't know than we do,” the man said.

“These trees look old as the Garden of Eden,” I said.

The old man's eyes glittered with the pleasure of showing me the apple trees. It was like when he pointed them out, they just appeared, for I hadn't seen them before. Of course I hadn't been looking there either, what with trying to foller Sue and see where the barking dog was.

The little dog kept jumping sideways in front of Sue as she turned to face it. But she didn't go on. She would swing her head at the dog and it would step out of the way and then hop closer again. I think she needed a rest as bad as I did.

Seemed like it had turned to autumn around the stranger. It was the oddest thing, but I had the impression of yellow leaves on some trees, and red leaves on the shumake bush. Maybe it was just the colors of the apples and the dapple of spotlights from the sun. But it seemed the woods was full of fall colors and the air was thinner and cooler.

“How come these apple trees are here?” I said. “Ain't nobody been here to set them out?”

“How do you know who has been here and who ain't?” the old man said.

“Wasn't nobody in the mountains but the Cherokee,” I said.

“But who was here before the Cherokee?” he said, smiling and leaning on his rifle.

“Don't rightly know,” I said. “But I've heard of the lost tribe of Israel, and I seen some Melungeons back down the trail.”

“Friend, we are all the lost tribe of Israel,” the old man said. “And we don't know what all has been here since creation.”

He took pleasure in telling me, and in surprising me. We old fellers always like to tell the young things they couldn't have dreamed of. It's one of the pleasures of being old.

“For all we know, this was the Garden of Eden,” he said. “It looks kindly like paradise, don't it?” He looked both young and old at the same time. And he seemed to think he might be in paradise. A yellow leaf floated to rest on his hat and another rested on his shoulder. He smiled at me out of the shadows.

“How do you live in the woods and not get lonesome?” I said. “This is far back in the mountains.”

“The trees are my company,” he said. “And the change of seasons. I have the fellowship of time.”

I wanted to ask if he was Tracker Thomas. But I couldn't bring myself to out and say it. He seemed so peaceful and happy, and I didn't want to offend him. If he didn't want to tell me he was Tracker Thomas, I couldn't ask him.

“I've never been lonely but once,” he said. “That was when I took a load of furs to Charleston. In the town and taverns I begun to feel awful lonesome. My ears felt like they was going to burst in the Low Country. Once we started back through the pine woods and got to Fort Ninety-Six, I begun to feel better. And the closer we got to the mountains, the better I felt. And when I seen the ridges again, I thought I was going to jump out of my skin with joy. These blue slopes looked like the ramparts of heaven itself.”

He ignored his little terrier that kept Sue at bay. She stood still, like she was unaware of the tormenter. But I knowed she was stiff
with fatigue like I was. We was soaking up the moments of rest like a thirsty man would cold spring water.

“Sometimes I just sing to myself and Powder,” the old man said, and pointed to the dog. “I sing the old hymns and tavern songs for the joy of it. And the mountains echo the song back to me. A rock cliff will answer you word for word.”

“Is Cedar Mountain straight head?” I said after a pause. It was past the middle of the afternoon. The shadows was bigger and reaching to join over the laurel bushes and trees.

“Some say it is,” the old man said, like he had said at first.

“I don't want to get lost,” I said. “Not this late in the day, after coming this far.”

“I want you to get lost,” the stranger said. “Can't really see where we are till we get lost.”

“I've got to get home, and I've got to build a road.”

“You don't have to do a thing,” he said. “You're free to go where you please.”

“I have promised to build a road across Douthat's Gap.”

“You don't have to build a road,” he said. “Of course, somebody will eventually. And next thing we'll have is wagons and dust, peddlers, new ground cleared and gullies washing every holler. The game will be gone, like the Indians is gone.”

“It's just a matter of time,” I said. “Somebody will build a road.”

“I hope it's more time than I have,” he said. But he didn't sound mad. He sounded peaceful and sad. It was like he was already grieving over the wilderness that would be gone.

Sue begun to lunge at the dog again. She side-stepped and suddenly darted around the terrier, like she had rested and got her spirit back. I just had time to grab her tail.

“Here, have this,” the old man said. He held out a thick gold
coin, which I took in my hatchet hand. It was the fattest, brightest gold you ever seen, thick as a biscuit.

“I found it,” the stranger called as we was leaving. “It might be some use to you.”

That gold piece felt heavy and soft as clay. I looked at it the best I could while running and dodging limbs. They was a picture of a king on one side and some foreign writing. But I couldn't look no more for I had to mark trees. The little dog was barking after us, but then dropped back. When I glanced back the stranger seemed to have gone.

“Much obliged,” I hollered back.

The heavy gold coin warmed my hand as I swung the hatchet again and again, marking pines and poplars, cucumber trees and white oaks. The sun got hot again as we left the deep woods and run out the slope. The shadows was stretching on the open places. The big coin felt like it had a fire in it.

I glanced through the trees to see the mountains ahead. I had thought I had seen Caesar's Head way up there. But now they wasn't a thing familiar. It didn't seem like we had gone down hill. We was running out the same ridge. I couldn't figure out what had happened to the mountains there.

But Sue didn't seem confused at all. It was like she had got a second wind after breaking away from the terrier called Powder. She trotted fast as she had that morning. She darted around trees and stepped aside to miss a rock or stump. She run like she had had a night's rest, or like she'd had a lot of syrup and coffee.

“Slow down, old girl,” I said.

But my voice seemed to spur her on, like I'd said “giddup,” or “hie.” I wondered if she would outrun me yet, if after all the way we'd come I'd have to give up and let go near at the end. It made me mad just to think of it, how people would laugh at me if the
pig showed up in Cedar Mountain by herself and I had to come stumbling in the next day with my hatchet and my torn clothes.