Thirteen Moons (11 page)

The newly dead are noted for their absolute lack of pity. Wild Hemp had a powerful desire for him to join her and did everything she could to hasten him toward her. For a while he felt ready to do it, to give up and follow Wild Hemp into the Nightland.

But he went ahead and did all he was supposed to do to fight back against her pull. He paid out large amounts to herb doctors and spirit healers, including the best of the bunch, an old woman named Granny Squirrel who lived half a day’s ride west. Primarily, though, Bear did himself good by going to water and immersing himself in the river every morning at sunrise throughout the year. He went even when big wet snowflakes fell all around him and disappeared into the black water without making even a brief dimple in its smooth face. And he went to water on spring mornings, when the river steamed and carried the fallen peach-colored blossoms of tulip trees and was skinned over with yellow pollen and the wormlike tags from oak trees, and trout held themselves still against the current and waited for food to pass by and their speckled backs merged with the color and pattern of the mossy stones on the riverbed. And also on late summer mornings, when the dawn sky was black and thunderstorm wind howled and rain was flung around sideways and maple trees turned the pale undersides of their leaves upward and lightning blazed its brief white light so bright that he felt sure he could see the insides of tree trunks, all the veins and long fibers running upward from the earth toward the sun. He went to water on autumn mornings, when red and yellow cupped leaves floated along, almost covering the river from bank to bank, and he could lie back in the chill water until his fingernails and toenails turned blue and look up into the nearly bare limbs and watch the final leaves release and fall and spin slowly down the quiet air. And sometimes for good measure he would go to water in the evening, when there was nothing left of the day but a yellow streak over Sunkota Mountain and the stars were lighting up in the indigo path of sky broken through the forest canopy by the river’s passage.

All that year he marked the flow of time by the growth and wasting of moons, and he mourned the deaths of each of Wild Hemp’s four souls in turn. And when a year had passed and her last soul, the soul of her bones, had died, she let up on her efforts to have Bear join her. He could feel her lift away from him. He decided to give up the worst of his lamentations and go on with life for the time being, but with the knowledge that a piece of him was missing and would never be recovered.

FROM THE TAIL
end of winter into spring and summer, at new moons I would go nightwalking in an effort to put Bear’s theory of fearlessness and defiance into practice. I’d strike off into the black trackless forest blinded. Offer my body to whatever harm this place might wish to do me. Try to see surviving the night not as suicide averted or botched but as proof that I could rest easy against the malignity or indifference of the universe and refuse to fear the world I occupied. A way to own it in the memory of my body. In the last weeks of winter I could look up and see stars through the net of twined tree limbs. But later, in summer, the canopy of the forest was so solid it might as well have been a pot lid, layers of thick wet leaves lapping over me. At first I would go into the night with my arms out before me and my palms forward, as sleepwalkers are said to posture themselves when they wander about on their senseless pilgrimages. I touched leaf and twig, trunk bark and rock face. Once, I touched a startled grouse that flushed up from low brush and then flared away, leaving me breathless, heart rattling away in my chest like a cowbell, with a memory of the lightest brush of wing tips against my palms.

At some point, I would put my arms down and just walk. Ducking when I supposed a limb was about to slash me at the neck, high-stepping over root and rock, wheeling away to avoid head-slamming a big hemlock trunk, skittering aside from any ground rustle that could be copperhead or rattler. Trusting that huffs and grunts and thumps were other than wolf and bear and panther. Let those sounds be the spirit forms of exiled elk or bison returned from wherever they went when they were all killed down. I would walk a thousand steps, in as straight a line as I could manage, and then turn square around and count back another thousand and see if I had returned to the store. I seldom succeeded. On many occasions I sat lost in the woods, waiting for dawn to light the way home, feeling that Bear would be proud of me for having fought the universe to a draw.

THE CHEROKEE GENERALLY
found it beneath them to come into the store chaffering over the price of goods or the trade allowance you were willing to give for hides or ginseng. You’d name a price and they’d either take it or nod ambiguously and walk out. The few white customers, mostly proud old Scots, were about the same. But you could always tell traveling Northerners, for they were not happy unless they could force you through about three rounds of bargaining and come out feeling like they had beat you. If you started out by offering them the item in question gratis, they would most likely try to convince you to throw in something to boot. It’s just the way they are, and they don’t know any better. But that hardly helps when they’re standing right in your face shouting their harsh and nearly incomprehensible brand of English like you’re hard of hearing.

Case in point: one day about noon, Bear sat by the stove looking at the flames and sipping his third whiskey. A stout little Yankee man with a florid face and yellow hair in curls over his red ears came striding into the store like he owned the place. He was touring with a driver in a private carriage, having a big adventure in the far wilderness. He wore a grey suit of clothes spotted with red mud thrown up from the high wheels. Almost without transition, he began objecting to the price of both Cuban cigars and Jamaican rum, saying he could get either of them cheaper in New York City, New York. He offered to pay what he claimed the items in question would cost there.

I mentioned the obvious fact that we were not in New York City, New York. Nowhere near it.

But that one distant little frame of reference was the only one the man would acknowledge. I told him that rather than strike such a poor bargain, it seemed a surer way to make us both happy if he’d direct his driver to wheel the carriage around and ride him straight back up north where he came from. Or at least far away from here.

Over by the stove I heard Bear snort back a laugh.

Then damned if the Yankee didn’t fail to be insulted but instead tried to offer me my original price on cigars and rum. And when I declined to sell at any price, he said, Boy, you will never succeed as a businessman, and the sooner I emerge from this benighted wilderness and cross to the upper side of the Mason-Dixon the better.

I said, Speed to your journey.

He left in a huff without spending a penny.

Bear sipped the last of his drink and said one word,
Ayastigi.
Warrior.

I said, I thought you didn’t speak English.

Bear said that speaking and understanding were separate matters.

BAPTISTS CONVEYED AN
offer to render the Bible—or at least a few of its most striking episodes—into the syllabary and supply copies of it to the people. Bear wanted me to read him some of the book before he decided whether to accept the offer or not. I more summarized than translated. He liked the story of Job, especially God’s pride in his own handiwork in creating all the animals and the varieties of landscape and weather. Those features of the world were certainly noteworthy and successful. God’s bragging about how well the nostrils of horses turned out struck Bear as some kind of truth about creation. He said that every being has at least one part that is of especial beauty, and his first wife had many such parts. As for the book of Job in general, he thought it was true enough that whatever power runs the earth sometimes beats a man down for no good reason whatsoever other than whim or black jest, but he also thought a good doctor like Granny Squirrel could work some medicine that would at least lighten the blows. Also, the story of the expulsion from Eden got his full attention, though his most persistent question was how big I thought the snake was. In the end, he said he judged the Bible to be a sound book. Nevertheless, he wondered why the white people were not better than they are, having had it for so long. He promised that just as soon as white people achieved Christianity, he would recommend it to his own folks. And that is the message I sent to the Baptists, which they chose to take as a yes.

ONE DAY ABOUT
a year or two into my residence at the store, Bear left his cow-hocked packhorse grazing in the yard and came inside. His hunting costume carried about it the air of the antique. The hem of his rifle frock fell nearly to his knees, and below that, beaded buckskin leggings. Contrary to recent style, he wore his moccasins with the flaps turned up. He was all hung about with powder horn, shot pouch, hunting pouch. His hair was tied back at the neck with a strip of rawhide. He carried a long rifle draped casually over his forearm. I told him all he lacked was white skin and a flop-brimmed felt hat to look like Daniel Boone. But as was sometimes the case, a weak joke set him off on a serious discussion.

The long hunters from Boone’s time, he said, were now old men, those who were not already dead. All they could do was spin winter stories about Kentucky and the big wilderness and the flowing blood of yesteryear. Elk and bison still numerous, and deer so thick in the woods that a single musket ball might kill two at a shot if they happened to be standing bunched together. The stories bore resemblance among them. Many featured a man closing in personal combat with a wounded bear and killing it in a manner like a tavern fight engaged in by a pair of drunks. If the man had a knife, then just as the bear’s long-clawed forepaws drew closed around him to pull him apart like a stewed chicken, he plunged the blade all the way to the handle in the bear’s chest and the animal bled out still embracing him like a lover. If the teller had a pistol, he discharged it into the bear’s howling red mouth, thrusting the barrel past the yellow teeth and pressing the muzzle into the soft palate—the whiteman’s suicide spot—before pulling the trigger. To prove the tale’s bloody truth, the old teller might display raised white toothmark scars on the back of his right hand where it dragged through the clashing teeth on the way out. But that was a lost world of men and animals and freedom and death, and it would never come again.

What I thought was that while it might have been romance to those old hunters, really it was business. Hides and furs and feathers for the markets as far away as New York and London and Paris. And now the woods were as empty as church on Monday morning.

I said those things as best I could in his language, and Bear looked straight at me, all sharp-witted and thinking hard. I was not sure whether I had butchered the grammar or not. And I wondered whether I had found a workable replacement for the concept of romance and whether he knew at all about the existence of London and Paris.