The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn (14 page)

“I’m a white man like I told you—far as I know. Cade’s my foster father. He’s half Delaware.
Lenni Lenape
, they call themselves.”

“What do you mean, far as you know? How could you not know?” The question was barely out of Tamsen’s mouth before she wished it back. Her glance strayed to her mother’s box, tucked under the shelter.

Mr. Bird followed her gaze. “You don’t need the key, you know. I can get it open for you any time you want.” His hand stretched toward the box, just within reach.

Tamsen half rose to intercept him. “No, please.”

Mr. Bird looked at her questioningly. Though she’d taken time to scour the trail through the draw again, and Mr. Bird had crossed the creek and looked on the other side, they hadn’t found the key. She’d hidden her disappointment. Told herself the key was not her mother. Only a keepsake. But it felt like losing her mother all over again.

“Not now, I mean,” she said, unable to explain.

In the storm’s wake, the sky was clearing, the air taking on a chill. She wore her summer cloak over Mr. Bird’s shirt, which drooped low on her
shoulders. Still he rose, took his sleeping fur from under the shelter, draped it around her, and settled across from her again.

“When you’re ready, I can get into it without much damage done. Nothing that can’t be mended.”

The gesture, and his words, brought her to the edge of tears again. From barely being able to acknowledge the man, she’d swung to wanting to thank him with every other breath. She ran a fold of the fur through her fingers, fixing her attention on it instead. It was old, worn in spots, black … and familiar. “This is a bear’s fur, isn’t it?”

“Sure is. My first bear.”

She looked up, meeting his gaze across the fluttering flames. “You shot the bear? How old were you?”

“ ’Bout thirteen.”

Tamsen thought of what she’d been doing at that age. Embroidering sleeve cuffs. Learning to bone a set of stays. Nothing that could help in her present circumstances.

Down in the draw, the creek rushed over rocks, its noise magnified in the darkness. A breeze caressed the trees in the black above the firelight’s reach, ruffled the flames below, whistled now and then through some stony fissure out in the dark.

In scant grass nearby, the horse grazed. With the bearskin around her, a roof of pine boughs to shelter her, a fire to warm her, Tamsen felt remarkably snug.

Once they’d given up the key for lost, Mr. Bird had gone to work on the shelter. She’d returned to the creek to rinse her filthy petticoat and came up the draw again in time to see the clouds part and the sun setting behind dusk-purpled mountains, peak piled on peak like jumbled ribbon, strewn westward as far as she could see, vast, brooding and ancient. She’d stood staring, caught small and helpless between the terror and the grandness of it, until Mr. Bird, soft footed as usual, came up beside her.

Looking out over that howling wilderness, he’d said, “The Cherokees
tell a story of a great vulture creating these mountains, back when the earth was new and wet as clay on a wheel. Ever hear tell of that?”

“No,” she’d said, wondering if he’d heard of Genesis.

“It was the bird’s wings dipping as it flew that scooped out the coves and swept the mountains high.”

As he spoke, she drew a shuddering breath, unable to look away from the dreadful beauty stretching before them.

“Are ye afraid?” he’d asked her. Then, upon her admission that she was, “Of what? All those mountains?”

“And what they hide.” Bears. Wild Indians. Her future.

“I’ve long acquaintance with what those mountains hide,” he’d said. “You needn’t go in fear of it with me.”

They’d stood, side by side, until the light went. Now the sky loomed black, with stars strewn in a glittering net that showed in patches between the rustling trees. She was still reaching for the courage he’d promised to lend her.

“Whither shall I flee from thy presence?” she whispered, gazing at the stars, breathing in the tang of pine and rain-soaked leaves and something strange and subtle beyond that—maybe the smell of the mountains themselves, like the distant exhalation of a cavernous sigh. “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there.”

Above the flame’s crackle Mr. Bird’s voice rose. “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.”

Surprised he’d recognized the psalm, much less could quote it, Tamsen dropped her gaze to him. Mr. Bird sat cross-legged, rifle at his knee, looking back at her. She swallowed and said, “Do you mean to answer my question?”

“What question was that?” There was a smile in his voice.

“Why aren’t you sure about being white?”

“Truth to tell, I’m as much Indian as Cade is, never mind my skin’s not brown.”

It was such an outright contradiction of his earlier profession that Tamsen frowned. Mr. Bird held a hand toward the flames, staring at the back of it. Then his mouth crooked, like he knew he was confusing her, enjoying it, even. But he didn’t leave her puzzling for long.

“I had maybe three years on me when Shawnee hunters found me somewhere in these mountains. Wasn’t a war party. Hunters. They heard screaming and cut over a ridge to have a look. Found a white man dragging the bodies of another man and a woman into a cabin, which he set fire to. The Shawnees—there were three of ’em—hid in the trees while the man got on his horse and rode off like the hounds of hell pursued him. He took nothing, far as they could tell. Didn’t touch the stock in the barn. That’s where they found me, hiding in the hay while all this was going on.”

Mr. Bird kept his eyes on his hand while he spoke, turning it over and back in the firelight, as if it held some mystery he longed to fathom. Just as she’d looked at her hand, she realized. He had large hands, well-shaped, though callused and scarred. Tamsen glanced at his face. He showed no sign of grief as he related the horrific tale, but the ache of her own loss twisted tighter. “They were your parents?”

“Reckon so.” Mr. Bird took up the stick and poked the fire, sending sparks high in a bright swirl, before reaching for more deadfall laid by. “Truth is I don’t recall any of what I’ve told you. First memory I’m sure of is crossing the
Spay-lay-wi-theepi
—the Ohio—heading north by canoe into Shawnee lands.” He sat back, watching the wood take flame. “Once they got me to their town—Cornstalk’s Town, it was—I was adopted by a couple whose children had died, and I became Shawnee. They called me Wildcat.”

“I’d have thought Hawk,” Tamsen said before she could stop herself.

“Would you?” Mr. Bird rubbed a fingertip along the bridge of his
narrow nose, looking as if she’d paid him a high compliment. “Maybe now. Back then I was still a snub-nosed baby. Cat-That-Scratches is another way of saying my name. When they found me, I was curled up with a batch of half-wild kittens and fought like one when they took me up. They fed me, and soon enough I settled down to purring—or that’s the tale they liked to tell.”

Tamsen fingered a lock of drying hair. She’d spotted a sizable gap in the story, between the tiny child he’d been, adopted by Shawnees, and the man sitting before her now. “Shawnee warriors found you? But you said your father—Cade—is Delaware. Where does he come in? Why is your name Jesse Bird now? And how—”

“Hold on,” he said, stemming her flood of questions with a laugh. “This is where it gets twisty. Cade’s pa was a white man, his ma full-blood Lenape, but he’d got himself adopted by the Shawnees too, a grown man. Wolf-Alone, they called him. Cade’s a good hunter, even better in a fight. He was thought highly of for one adopted after running the gauntlet.” He paused, then with a cautious look asked, “You know what that is?”

She’d heard of it. “They—the Indians—line up and make a man run past while they hit him with sticks?” The night breeze gusted, tickling the back of her neck. She suppressed a shiver at the thought of such cruelty.

“Sticks, whips, other things,” he said. “Sometimes war clubs.”

A horror dawned in Tamsen’s mind. “Not you? They don’t make children do that, surely?”

“Not small children, no. But I’ve seen older boys, women …” Mr. Bird searched her face, then redirected the conversation. “Anyway, by the time I was four, maybe five years old, Wolf-Alone took to spending time with me, teaching me to track and set snares, even made me a little bow so I could practice. My Shawnee parents were older, so he stepped in and taught me like an uncle would’ve done. But he also spoke English to me on the sly, when it was just the two of us. Didn’t want to forget it himself,
he’s told me. So I grew up knowing how to speak it, more or less, though for years I was more conversant in Shawnee.”

That answered a question Tamsen hadn’t even thought to ask yet, why he had no trace of an accent, save the drawl of an Overmountain man. “Why did the two of you ever leave the Shawnees?”

She wondered if he minded her questions, but he didn’t appear displeased. She was glad, for she wanted him to go on talking. The sound of his voice was a comfort, a shield. Like the firelight, it was helping hold back that vast unknown looming dark around her. Besides, he had a remarkable story, and he told it well.

She knew now she’d misjudged him, based on their first meetings in the stable. Not only was he brave and kind, but watching his face now, she glimpsed an intelligence and wit that his rustic manners and speech at first had obscured. Or perhaps it was his eyes that masked the depth of thought behind them. Such an unnerving shade …

“I suppose the blame lies with Virginia’s governor at the time, Lord Dunmore,” he said in answer to her question. “I’d been seven years with the Shawnees when the Virginians made war on the people. This was a year or so before the colonies rebelled, the autumn of ’74. Dunmore’s War, they call it now. My adopted pa, Split Moon, was too old for battle but not too old to hunt, and at ten I was finally big enough to go along and not be in the way. We’d thought it safe, since the fighting had stopped back in October and our chief, Cornstalk, was talking peace with the Virginians. We hadn’t crossed the Ohio—it was too dangerous, with our old Kan-tuck-ee hunting grounds filling up with settlers. The Ohio was meant to be the new boundary between the red man and the white. But that didn’t stop hunters, even settlers, from crossing over onto our side. Three days out, a party of white hunters stumbled onto our camp. There were four of us—Split Moon, a warrior called Falling Hawk, Wolf-Alone, and me. It was early morning. I’d just woken up and gone off a ways to a creek to
wash. Wolf-Alone had gone with me. We heard the shots, could see through the trees, Split Moon and Falling Hawk were down, hit before they could reach their muskets. Dead.”

Instead of fighting on after Split Moon and Falling Hawk were shot, Jesse told her, Wolf-Alone had snatched him up as if he were a flour sack and fled, getting shot at for a mile over trackless ground before outrunning the hunters, with Wildcat struggling all the while, wanting to go back and avenge his fallen father.

“Wolf-Alone was a sight bigger’n me then, and about five times stronger.” Mr. Bird gazed past the fire, as if beyond its light, he could see that boy he described for her, furious with grief and bloodlust. “He told me plain weren’t no hope in going back, and he wasn’t minded to let me throw my life away afore I’d lived it. He told me God—the white man’s God, the Christian God—had a plan for me and betwixt him and whatever angels were lent to guard us, Wolf-Alone meant to see it unfold.”

Wildcat hadn’t much cared for those words, and soon, Mr. Bird went on, it was clear that Wolf-Alone had no intention of returning him to the Shawnees at all. He was taking the angry, grieving boy south, to the hated whites. Wildcat, feeling himself and their people betrayed, escaped him twice before injuring himself in a fall from a ridge.

Mr. Bird stroked his right shin, as if feeling the echo of an old wound. “I’d broken my leg and was out of my head with the pain of it when Wolf-Alone caught me the second time. He picked me up, and eventually we came stumbling, me dangling in his arms, into a clearing in the wilds of Kan-tuck-ee, found a cabin with folk not inclined to shoot every Indian they saw on sight—a miracle, Cade likes to say. They gave us shelter in their barn while my leg healed. Their name was Bird.”

It wasn’t until they’d left that place that Wolf-Alone started calling him Jesse Bird, after the youngest boy in that family. “ ‘They were good people,” he told me when I asked why he was calling me so. “They won’t mind you borrowing the name.’ ”

“And Cade?” Tamsen asked. “Where did he get that name for himself?”

Mr. Bird shrugged. “Picked it out of the air, I reckon. He’s never said. Anyway, by then I’d grown used to the idea of being with him. He’d been like an uncle to me for years, after all. Cade took me on south, hunting along the way, working the hides to trade for things we needed. One of those things was a Bible. After that it was reading lessons along with the hunting. We moved around the back country, Virginia, Carolina, sometimes farther west. After a time we came down the Watauga to Sycamore Shoals. Reckon that’s as much home now as any place.”

Mr. Bird fell quiet, elbow propped on a knee, chin braced in his hand. Tamsen was holding on to the end of a braid she didn’t remember plaiting. He bestirred himself, drawing one of his bags close to take out a coil of rawhide. With his knife he cut a piece and held it out. She tied off her braid, still caught up in his story. “Have you tried to learn who your parents were?”

“Split Moon and Red-Quill-Woman were my parents.”

“I meant your white parents.”

He smiled faintly. “I know who you meant. Mind you, I was only ten when we left the Shawnees. Too young—or too Shawnee—to care about white parents I couldn’t recall.”

“Don’t you wonder now?”

“ ’Course I do. But Cade reckons anyone—anyone Shawnee—who knew where I came from is likely dead.”

Leaving him with a borrowed name and no ties to his blood kin, whoever they had been. Tamsen couldn’t help thinking it might be best he never knew the truth. Though she understood the burning need to
know
—raw and new as that need was in her own soul—she was tempted to ask if he’d ever thought he might not like what he found.