After a few games, with me whispering, Top left, bottom middle, Perry saw what he’d been missing. Goddamn, he said. There’s nothing to it at all.
The Charleston boy looked at me and wiped the last grid away with a sweep of his palm and said, Hell, I could have won tobacco money off him from now on out, but you’ve boogered that all up.
SMITH, OF COURSE,
wanted to assign watches through the night. But I told him that he had not the least worry that any of Charley’s people would make trouble, and besides, I’d about rather have Lowan or George cut my throat in mid-dream than sit awake in the long hours between midnight and dawn. So Smith assigned me the first watch, from just after sundown to bedtime, as if that had been his plan all along and my objecting to the watches had nothing to do with it. And Smith would take the last watch, from around four to sunup, which left those three boys to stand the worst of it. Smith reckoned to keep them awake two at a time, letting one always sleep, spelling one another every couple of hours.
Supper that night was beans and bacon and cornmeal mush fried crisp in lard. Charley’s bunch mostly took their food to the brush arbors to eat, and maybe it was just the food but they seemed unaccountably happy. They talked and laughed and seemed able to let their larger circumstances not weigh on their thoughts for now. Content to let worrying wait for later.
The soldier boys ate their supper and then tried to get in an hour or two of sleep, but they just rolled around in their blankets and muttered to one another. Smith and I sat studying the fire and Smith had almost nothing to say. I left him and gathered a fist of cigars and the bottle of whiskey from my packs and went to Charley’s fire.
They were telling tales, and I nodded at them to keep on with what they were doing. Sometime when no one was looking, George had slipped back into camp to share the fate of his wife and children. I passed out cigars to the men, and we lit them with a twig caught alight in the fire and passed the bottle around. Charley was doing most of the talking, telling a hunting story from the days of elk and bison, neither of which anyone in attendance but Charley had ever seen. He made them epic animals in his story, inhabitants of an old better world not to come round again. He then told about his lost farmstead at the old mound village of Cowee, before one of many disastrous treaties had driven him and his family west to Nantayale. At Cowee, he had been noted for his success with apple trees, which over the years he had planted at the spots where his outhouses had stood. Apples grew on his trees huge as dreams of apples. That Cowee house was old, from the time when they still buried dead loved ones in the dirt floor, but Charley could not remember exactly whose bones had rested near as a lover beneath his low sleeping platform. Then, without transition, Charley told how Nancy tailored his pants. She would have him lie down on his back on a smooth patch of bare dirt outside their door. She would take a stick and trace the outline of his lower body as children trace their hands. When she was done marking, Charley got up carefully, and Nancy would scribe lines to show his waist and the bottoms of his pantlegs. Then she’d lay out pieces of rough wool or linen she had loomed herself and scissor two pieces to match the pattern on the ground and stitch them together. In Charley’s telling, it was a miraculous process, at the end of which he suddenly had new pants.
And then Charley told a new story from the past month, another hunting tale. He had been out alone under a low sky, moving up a narrow cove north of here into a deep closed landscape, a cut in earth so sharp he sometimes had to walk the creek like it was a trail because the cove walls narrowed and rose straight from the lapping water of the creek edge. He had a sort of lidded forage basket or creel woven from oak splits on a strap across his shoulder, and when he came to a place where the cove widened and there was a flat woods floor for a stretch, he looked about at the dry stalks and frost-burnt leaves of low-growing plants. He stopped and got down on his knees and dug in the black ground with a stick and then with the tines of his stubby and spatulate fingers, the knuckles swollen like galls in a blackberry cane. He didn’t use the broad-bladed knife or the hatchet that hung in leather scabbards from his pantwaist, though they would have made the job easier. They were each sharpened keen enough to shave his forearm bare, but he would rather damage his hands than his tools.
He dug elbow-deep in the dirt and then came out with a root, pulling it from the ground as if he were a fisherman with his hands plunged in muddy water grabbling out a heavy and reluctant catfish. His catch went into the creel with its fellow roots, and Charley closed the lid as if they might otherwise escape. Some would be for eating. Some for making tea. Some for medicine.
He stopped at midday and struck up a small fire from pine shavings and oak sticks. He boiled creek water in a kettle and set it off the fire and steeped rounds cut from a piece of ginseng root. When it had made tea, he drank it out of a tin cup he kept tied to his rope belt with a smaller loop of rope. That was his dinner.
Charley sat by the fire a long time thinking about food. The trees were nearly empty. The thorny chestnut husks had fallen and the nuts had been eaten every way there was to eat them. Raw and roasted in the fire and made into bread. The leaves of the poplars and maples and chestnuts lay on the ground, and at night the bare limbs cast jagged moon shadows across the rocks of the river. Just the oaks held out against the cold with a few yellow-brown leaves left rattling in the wind. Wasseton had darted all the squirrels within a mile of the camp with his blowgun. Their slim charred bones and tiny skulls were mixed with the white ashes of the fire pit. Also the long column of spine and the many curved keen ribs of a big rattler that Wasseton had hit right in the soft underside of its head as it rose up in striking posture and then finished off with thrown rocks until it lay twisting, head crushed, in the leaves. There seemed to be few turkey or quail or even songbirds left in the woods. No hares or coons. The horses were long gone—traded to Axe, first one and then the other—during late summer and early fall. All they had brought in the trade was a puzzlingly small quantity of beans and cornmeal and a few pumpkins and cabbages. At this precise moment of the fall, since the beginning of known time, passenger pigeons had arrived in great clouds, their masses like a dark river flowing southward down the sky, settling into the bright-colored woods for a few days like a dense grey fog of bird meat. And in the past, Wasseton would dart them out of the trees with his long blowgun until the muscles of his diaphragm and stomach became weak from the effort of deep and sharp exhalations, and his six hickory darts became heavy and dark with blood all the way to the thistledown fletching. He could reliably drive a dart through a pigeon’s head at nearly the distance he could throw a rock. But this year the pigeons came only in ones and twos, and then after a few days they were suddenly gone altogether. All Wasseton could provide for the group was one feast of birds roasted over coals. For the children, one little leg apiece like upside-down water drops of meat. Small split breasts and bony backs for everyone else. Then, only a day later, nothing but watery grey soup of feet and necks and gizzards. The woods refused sustenance. One day, all anyone had to eat was a clear broth made from a single goldfinch, so dilute you could have gotten as much flavor from dropping a stone into the water.
Though Lowan and Jake and George hunted daily, they had failed to kill a deer for the better part of a month. All the meat left now was a little venison jerky, just tag ends and scraps that served no purpose beyond flavoring a pot of cornmeal soup. Charley remembered that last deer, a fat buck. Half of him they’d eaten fresh, and half of him had been shaved into thin strips and hung from drying frames to jerk near the fire. Charley had gone out of camp to piss one night, and as he came back the hanging meat with the firelight coming through looked like bloody curtains. Before sunrise three mornings earlier, Lowan had killed a possum with a pouchful of babies. They stewed her and roasted the little ones on sharpened sticks over the fire, and the little ones were hardly a mouthful apiece. And that to feed a dozen people. The women and children had no energy and they hardly spoke. They spent most of the days sleeping under the brush arbors or sitting wordless by the fire. Winter was falling soon, and they would need more shelter. If they were this hungry now, just after the fall of leaves, what would it be when the Bone Moon came? Beyond looking for a cave, Charley had no plan for winter. The days of the year were too evasive for planning. They fled shapeless before him. The future held no hope. And he had already abandoned fearfulness. All he could do was exercise an attitude of still acceptance.
Charley’s fire would have fit in his pair of hands, and when it began dying he covered it with dirt, for it is a bad and unbalancing thing to put out fires with water. He walked away from the creek and began climbing a dry ridge to cross over to another cove whose creek he figured to descend toward the river and the camp. As he walked, he scuffed his feet in the deep leaves just for the companionship of the rustling sound. The poplars, simplified by having shed their broad palmate leaves, stood as bright vertical slashes against the brown hillsides. Charley curved around a cropping of rock and climbed steep to the crest of the ridge and then pitched down the sharp slope toward the next creek. There was a joy in descent, in suddenly finding the pull of the earth acting consonant with your needs. He barely took note that the sky was closing down over him, becoming a grey press of moisture.
It began raining hard, straight down, as if the air had turned to water. All he could do was squat under a stand of rhododendron with his blanket over his head and wait. For a while the long glossy leaves turned water away from him, and then suddenly they did not. Water fell in runnels from the leaves onto the chalky ground litter under the shelter of the rhododendron and pooled at his feet. Charley’s blanket and clothes became heavy and sodden. Then, at the point when he became wet to the skin, the rain tapered away to nothing but dense fog.
Charley rose from under the rhododendron and twisted the water out of his blanket and set out again downhill through the foggy dripping woods. He walked at a smart pace, and before long came to the creek and turned downstream. This was not his home country, and he did not yet know it well, but he reckoned he could reach camp and the heat of the fire long before dark.
Deep woods are haunted places in the fog. Light comes from everywhere at once, shapes shift, and sounds are muffled and magnified unpredictably. As Charley walked, he began to feel a presence in the woods, a sense of being watched from out of the fog. He spun and looked behind him and saw the blurred black shape of what might be bear at the edge of vision. If so, it stood square to the ground looking his way, motionless. It was probably a tree stump or a wet rock.
Charley started walking downhill again, and the fog thickened as he descended into it. He was partly blinded. The big trees were visible only halfway up their wet trunks, and the creek was a muffled rush off to his left. He could not even see the far bank, just a ribbon of dark water and the mossy rocks rising from it. All color was damped down to shades of grey. The passway lay narrow and slick underfoot, and his best idea for navigation was to keep the creek within hearing to his left and not climb any ridges to the right. By doing so, even a blind man would strike the river eventually.
He walked on down the winding creek, passing a white cascade and a deep black pool. But the thought kept weighing on him that a bear would be awfully good eating about now. A bear with yellow fat lying three fingers deep over the red muscles from a long autumn of gorging on chestnuts, hickory nuts, acorns, and huckleberries. Tasting sweet and dark like a rendering of the forest. Meat to last into the next moon. Cooking grease for the entire winter. A heavy fur for the children to sleep beneath when snow comes. Long curved claws the color of charcoal for his grandchildren to auger holes through and string into necklaces and keep as relics to remember Charley, evidence of his existence long after he was gone. He could see them showing the claws to their own grandchildren and telling the story of the day he came walking into camp bloody to the elbows, bent from the weight he packed over his shoulder, a great bear haunch in a black bundle made from its skin. And then how the women started cooking the meat and the men all followed Charley back up the mountain to finish butchering the bear, and then how they all sat about the cook fire for days, eating until their bellies hurt.
Charley stopped and turned back around and saw a motionless square shape, a dark interruption in the luminous fog. He took out his hand axe and knife and felt their heft and looked at their edges, honed bright with spit and a flat river rock. Charley reckoned his tools might suffice to kill this bear. Men had done such things before, or at least people told stories of killing bear in close combat. He had never actually seen it done. But in the stories, the men had always first wounded the animal with bow or gun and then let it bleed awhile to weaken.
The famous Bear Drowning Him, now mostly just called Bear, was said to have gotten his name when he was still a boy by killing the master bear of all this territory, wounding it first with an arrow to the lungs and then fighting it with a knife in his fist until they both streamed blood. They brawled down a hillside and then to the river’s edge and then onward until they were waist-deep in the water. They closed awkwardly together, neither finding much purchase against the round slick stones of the riverbed. But the boy drove a blade deep in the bear’s vitals. And then the bear lurched forward and pressed the boy down under the water with his full weight. All that remained visible was the muscled hump of the bear’s back breaking the dark surface of the river. But at the last moment of Bear Drowning Him’s strength, the bear died. It went still and lay with the water flowing around the bulk of it in a pair of smooth curves. The boy came up and slung the water out of his hair, and he still had the knife in his fist, the blade shining and clean from the water.