Tyoga gently lifted Sunlei from the rock upon which she was perched and nestled her down to the forest floor. He put his finger to his lips. “Stay here. Don’t move.”
“No, Ty. Don’t go.” She begged while holding onto his forearm with her trembling, cold hands. “You don’t know how many are out there, or where they are, or if they are setting a trap. Ty, what i
f?
Don’t leave me. Promise you won’t leave me here.”
He took her face into his mighty hands, gently brushed the wisps of soaking hair from her eyes, and calmly said, “Sunlei, look into my eyes.”
As she did, she saw the gentle hazel green dissolve away. The amber glow began to build from deep within the recesses of his eyes. The gentleness was replaced with focus, and resolve and glassy-eyed sting.
The pitch of his voice had deepened ever so slightly when he said, “I’ll be back for you. Don’t move.”
She managed a smile and a nod. He would be back.
Tyoga had placed her beside and behind the rock upon which she had been sitting. Her back was pressed uncomfortably against the trunk of a downed oak tree, and her neck was bent awkwardly so that her chin was close to her chest. She was soaked from the rain, cut and bruised from their run down the mountainside, and shivering uncontrollably from the cold—and from the terror of their ordeal.
Tyoga had left her alone.
She did not know what awaited him back up the trial, but he would return for her—if he could.
She thought it peculiar that at that moment she would think about the sounds of her family as they gathered around the warmth of the fire pit in their cozy, comfortable lodge. She longed to hear her mother’s voice. True Moon’s voice was soft, reassuring, and filled with love and patience. Sunlei was a lot like her mother.
They didn’t look like mother and daughter. Sunlei’s height and shape set her apart from nearly every other girl in the tribe. But her smile was the same.
So were their eyes. Her mother’s eyes were expressive and candid. They revealed her emotions without pretense or apology. Sunlei’s eyes were more subtle in what they revealed. They spoke to those whom she permitted to hear. They told Tyoga all that he needed to know when he left her on the forest floor.
Slowly, Tyoga started to make his way back up the mountainside. The slope was incredibly steep and he had to pull himself up by grabbing on to trees and branches while he moved upward. He had to crawl on hands and knees in some places.
He came to a junction where the trail intersected the slope. He hid behind an outcropping where he could see both ways along the trail. The sound of whatever it was that was staggering through the woods grew louder. It was close. He hunkered down and waited.
When the rain picked up again, Tyoga wiped his face to get a better look at the ghostly figure stumbling towards him about twenty yards away to the east.
Through the summit mist and driving rain, it appeared to be one of the Shawnee braves who had been chasing them down the mountain. He was staggering back and forth across the trail, struggling to stay on his feet. His arm outstretched in front of him, he looked like a blind man trying to find his way. His other arm was hanging at his side. His hand appeared to be clutching a war club.
Tyoga guessed him to be in his late teens or early twenties. He would wait until the warrior was closer, and then spring out from his hiding place to take him down. He waited.
Before the warrior could advance to where Tyoga was waiting, he stopped, collapsed to his knees, and crumpled face first to the ground. Tyoga remained concealed behind the outcropping to see if the Shawnee’s companions would come to his aide. After several minutes, and hearing no sound of a chase in the woods around him, he was confident that the others were not nearby.
Tyoga cautiously stepped from his hiding place and onto the trail. He slowly moved towards the warrior who was lying face down in the muddy trail. He got to within two feet of the warrior before he saw the growing pool of blood oozing from the Indian’s head, turning themuddy loam into a sticky purple soup. He nudged the young man’s shoulder with his foot.
The warrior did not move.
Tyoga squatted down next to the bleeding man, and saw that he wasn’t breathing. Standing back up, he rolled the dead man over with his foot. Gasping, he took two quick steps back at the sight of the butchered man at his feet. He had never seen anything like this before.
The Indian’s face was hardly recognizable as human. The vicious attack had ripped his cheek and lips from his face. His left eye was hanging from the socket. All that was left of where his nose used to be was a gaping hole. His right ear was completely gone. The arm that was holding the war club was severed above the elbow. His artery hung like a bloody straw from his upper arm. His rib cage was torn open and his small bowel bulged from the hideous tear.
Whatever had attacked him had torn him apart. It wasn’t even a fair fight.
Tyoga sat on his haunches next to the dead Shawnee.
Only the gentle sound of the rain and the muffled caw of a solitary crow filled the hollow.
He stood and turned to walk back down the slope to Sunlei. He walked slowly—deliberately. He knew that there was no need to hurry or to hide.
When he reached her, she was crying. She jumped up and threw herself into his arms and held him close.
The piercing howl descended from the summit of old Mount Rag to fill the valleys and hollows below with an icy declaration that was viscerally understood.
This battle was over.
Tyoga and Sunlie looked into each others’ eyes before glancing up towards Summit Rock.
The rising sun peaked through the clouds of the passing storm to outline the silhouette of the wolf standing tall on the alter of old Mount Rag.
Putting his arm around her, Tyoga led Sunlei along the trail to the valley below.
He glanced over his shoulder to look up at the summit one more time before rounding a bend in the trail.
The wolf was gone.
The three of them began their journey home.
Chapter 14
Frontier Intrigue
T
he early 1700s were tumultuous years in the Appalachian Mountains. The divisive pressures from the British, French, and Spaniards took an ever increasing toll upon the natural resources, and the lives of the Native Americans living in the territory from the southern Ohio Valley, western Tennessee, and on eastward to the Carolinas. Relationships between tribes were tenuous and fragile as political intrigue and deals with the Europeans for goods, especially for whiskey and firearms, fractured long-standing alliances, and established new ones that would ultimately be the demise of a proud and prosperous people. As the tribes vied for the weapons of war that would forever alter the balance of power, oaths of allegiance see-sawed wildly to gain the favor of—and firearms from—the French, or the British, or Spain. Weapons of flint and stone, obsidian and quartz, were no match for firearms and gun powder, iron and steel.
Members of the same tribe independently brokered deals with warring factions so that braves from the same tribe, sometimes even brothers, would unwittingly end up facing each other on the battlefield—some fighting with French against the British, or with British against the Spanish.
Unaccustomed to the deceitful ways of the foreign invaders, and imbued with a natural trust in the integrity of even their adversaries, the Native Americans were easy pawns in a deadly game in which the stakes could not have been more consequential.
The treachery foisted upon the Native Americans by foreign countries competing ruthlessly for the bounties of the New World were less egregious, and in a sense more manageable, than the day-to-day injustices the Indians tolerated at the hands of the settlers who they had come to call neighbors. Not only did the white trespassers cheat them out of the fair market value of the land, but in establishing their homesteads, they chased away the game upon which the Indians depended for food, clothing, shelter, and sustenance. Even these transgressions the Indians bore without making war.
What tipped the balance in the early 1700s was the growing practice of stealing Indian women and children, and selling them into slavery, mostly to the northern colonies. The practice became so extensive that in 1705 the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law against the further importation of Indian slaves from the Carolinas. Unfortunately, the price to be had for such an easy venture was too hard for the southern colonists to resist. The practice would continue until the morning of September 22, 1711, when the Tuscarora Indians indiscriminately slaughtered virtually all of the white settlers homesteading along the banks of the Neuse and Trent rivers in eastern North Carolina.
The pressures of encroachment were pervasive and not confined to any particular region or territory of the frontier. The white tide had risen until it had breached the Appalachian Mountains, and flooded the pristine valleys and forested basins. The Ani-Unwiya Cherokee and the South Fork Shawnee were not insulated from the scourge of slavery. Both tribes had their women and children stolen and sold by the white man.
The Shawnee raid upon the unprotected village of Tessuntee in 1692 to steal Cherokee women and children while the men were away on the winter hunt, placed them squarely in the same category as the slave traders. The Native American code of civility decreed that when the men of any village were away on the winter hunt, the women and children of the tribe were to be left in peace. A breach of this code was an atrocity few were willing to own.
The Cherokee had never forgiven the callous treachery of the heinous deed. War between the tribes had been averted only through the tenuous bonds of arranged unions that had been orchestrated in times of peace. Even though no formal declaration of war had been issued from either of the feuding tribes, their braves kept a sharp eye out for one another and took every opportunity to skirmish and harass each other at virtually every encounter.
The deaths of the four young Shawnee braves on the summit of Mount Rag were not the first deaths to have occurred between the tribes since the raid in 1692, however, this attack was more than simply another assault on members of the Shawnee tribe. In the eyes of the Appalachian tribes, these deaths came at the hands of a single white settler who was accompanying the most beautiful and sought after Indian maiden in the land. To have killed Tyoga and captured Sunlei would have been an enormous coup for the Shawnee nation, even though it would have meant all out war with the Cherokee nation.
That one white man, or the magic over which he had control, could defeat four Shawnee warriors was an affront that the tribe could not reconcile nor abide.
The fact that there were no witnesses to the mauling deaths added a dimension of intrigue upon which legends grow and flourish. It was an occasion of historical significance that solidified the iconic stature of Tyoga Weathersby.
In protecting his spiritual brother, and the woman he loved, the wolf had set into motion a series of events that would tear two lovers apart, and break alliances that had kept a tenuous peace for decades.
Chapter 15
Camp at the Confluence
A
t eighteen years old, Tyoga and Tes Qua had grown into their magnificent prime.
Tyoga Weathersby was a mountain of a man. Powerfully built with broad muscular shoulders tested by the oppressive struggle that was life in the Shenandoah Valley in the 1700s, his rugged upper body reflected the agonizing work of clearing the land. His hard, rippled abdomen and finely sculpted torso recalled every swing of the ax. His massive upper arms and broad muscular chest were
testament to the miles marched while wrestling teams of draft horses and plowing mules. The years of galloping the mountain trails and
leaping cat-like along the bouldered spines of the Appalachian’s outcroppings had sublimely chiseled his buttocks into smooth muscular orbs of granite perfection.
His soft weathered buckskins—second-skin tight—softly sighed in protest at the flex of his thighs when he haunted the obscure back hollows and lush hidden valleys known only to him.
His face was set in the determined mold of generations of Weathersbys before him. Resolute. Single-minded. Hard, some would say. Friends and family would more kindly describe the look as intense and focused. The telltale etchings of his grandfather’s facial creases were forming on his bronzed weathered skin. His nose belied his English roots. While regally structured, his face carried the gauntness familiar to those living on the frontier where time between full-meals was measured in days, not hours. He brandished several days growth of dense, coarse stubble, bear-like in its fullness and magnificent when spared the assault of the blade.
In a week’s time, he looked more animal than man.
As the years had passed since the legend was born, Tyoga’s eyes became his most distinguishing feature.
Like generations of Weathersbys before him, they sparkled with the courage of an adventurous heart. They echoed the restlessness that compelled Weathersby men to blaze trails through the wilderness, cross the Appalachians more than a century before the discovery of the Cumberland Gap, and settle in an unnamed glade in the Shenandoah Valley.
Rich in texture with a hint of caprice and unpredictability, Tyoga’s hazel eyes were translucent portals that revealed the content of his character, and reflected an unvarnished appraisal of others. When content and satisfied, his tranquil green eyes calmed with an unexpected gentleness; when threatened or provoked, they glowed with the blinding amber brilliance of white-hot coal. Like a cup of black coffee turned cappuccino brown with the first drop of lily-white cream, the transformation was complete.
What was there was gone.
The gentleness replaced with an animal deliberateness and lethal intent. His brilliant amber eyes hardened into balls of cold unforgiving malevolence. Inhuman. Indifferent to death. Frightening.