Bone Rattler amoca-1

by Eliot Pattison

  Images swirled in his mind again, the strange dreams that sometimes boiled out of despair. He would go to Carolina and send for Sarah. He saw her laughing and dancing with Crispin over the news that Duncan was in the southern mountains. Jamie and he were building a cabin as Lister plowed fields with a big grey mare. At a Highlands festival, Lister told old tales to freckled, kilted children. But then, like a frigid wave, reality broke over him and he found the words that had been squeezing against his heart. Sarah was a slave again, probably lying beaten and bloody that very moment in some squalid camp. He could only save her by breaking the solemn vow he had given her. And Lister could only be saved if Duncan preserved Hawkins, the man who was going to kill his brother.

  He glanced at the map she had given him, and the name of the farmer who would act as go-between. William Wells. No one had told Sarah that the settler had been hacked to death the week before. The savages were close. The savages were everywhere. But slowly the realization had been building that there was another way to save Lister, as impossible as using Hawkins. There had been a witness to Frasier’s murder, lingering in the shadows by the alder bushes, laying another message on the riverbank. Somewhere in the vast wilderness was a savage who had seen Frasier’s killing.

  When he finally rose, he lifted the stone cover of the lichen-covered cairn and draped the wampum belt over his forearm, the belt over which one could only speak the truth. He extracted his list of clan chiefs and held it before him, reciting the names without looking at the paper. He added a new name this time, in a firm, level voice aimed at the shadows before him. Duncan McCallum. Finished, he cupped in his hand the dried thistle he had carried since the day Lister had brought it to his cell and raised it toward the trees. He returned the belt, neatly folded, draped his list of clan chiefs around the thistle and set it on the belt before replacing the stone cover. As he did so men began shouting alarms from the town, and he saw figures running desperately toward the barn and great house. With a trembling hand he tore up the map to Carolina, then stepped toward the river and the black western forest. He wasn’t going to throw his life away as Ramsey’s puppet. But he was ready to die as the last chief of the McCallum clan.

  Chapter Eleven

  Never in his life had Duncan felt so alone, so helpless. He ran at a crouch as he climbed out of the river, ran until his lungs ached, until he stumbled on a root and fell, gasping for air. Without conscious thought he crawled into a gap between two boulders, leaning against one, his heart thundering.

  Through the trees he glimpsed a low ridge, with a rock ledge jutting from its spine. Moments later he was in a small clearing at the highest point, surveying the top of the endless forest, where he laid out his few possessions on a flat rock. His pipes, his spare shirt, a blanket, a tomahawk, flints and a striker, the food left by Crispin. The papers he had grabbed from his schoolroom table. Finally, unexpectedly, a muslin pouch containing nearly a quarter pound of black pepper, a small treasure that must have been purloined by Crispin from Ramsey’s kitchen, though Duncan could not fathom why.

  A twig snapped nearby. Duncan recoiled in alarm, then he looked up into two moist black eyes. Twenty feet away a large stag stared at him. As he returned its gaze the majestic creature inched forward, tilting its head, and he realized he had seen its expression before, in the eyes of the Indians at the army headquarters, an intense, guileless curiosity, a countenance that seemed incapable of expressing fear. Duncan stayed motionless as the stag approached him, sniffing the articles he had strewn on the rock before him, cocking its head again as if expecting an explanation for Duncan’s intrusion. He slowly uncurled his fingers, opening his palm for the animal to see what it held, the last object in his pack. The deer stared at the stone bear as if it recognized something in the stone, then stepped backward, pausing to investigate a blood-red mushroom before slipping back into the mottled shadows, following the rock ledge toward the north and west.

  Duncan stared for a long time in the direction the stag had disappeared, then at the stone bear in his hand. Once, a lifetime ago, Adam Munroe had written that the bear would take Duncan where she needed to go. He gathered his meager belongings into his pack, took a step in the direction of the stag, and froze. There was a new sound in the distance, though approaching fast. The baying of large hounds. Against all odds, he had already been missed. The bear dogs were kept hungry, in case there was work to do.

  He would never outrun them. With sudden realization he lowered the pack and retrieved the pepper. Crispin had foreseen the danger. He quickly spread some of the pepper on the rock, ran ten feet from the rock in three different directions, sprinkling more pepper behind him, then took off at a sprint down the bare rock of the ledge, leaving no prints and the barest of scents, which, Crispin had reckoned, would be of little interest to dogs whose senses were numbed by the pepper.

  By the time he paused again, an hour later, the barking of the dogs had faded, then stopped, and he had begun to recognize the patterns of the forest. Though it held no roads, it had its own unique thoroughfares. Narrow trails of animals, some heavily worn, led to small watering holes along the streams, which themselves flowed down from the ridges to the northwest. Birds he could not recognize sang over his head, and he saw flashes of red and yellow and chestnut as they fluttered among the trees. Here and there golden leaves, harbingers of autumn, floated in the air. Squirrels and chipmunks stood on their haunches, some scolding him, others gazing at him before racing away as if to report his presence.

  Suddenly in front of him was a small, ragged piece of green cloth, on the trail between two fallen trees. He halted, looking quickly about. The birds had stopped singing. The cloth was reminiscent of one of Sarah’s green dresses. As he dropped to one knee to retrieve it, something slammed into the crown of his head. He collapsed, rolling, reaching for his hand ax, hearing a grunt of amusement, smelling an odor of rancid fat. As the ax cleared his belt, he lashed out at the quick, shadowy shapes that accosted him, landing a blow that caused a moan of pain, groping with his free hand to wipe the blood that was dripping into his eyes. A wrenching howl, like those he had heard in the Edentown raid, rent the air. As Duncan spun about to face its source, he saw only a blur of movement. Someone hit him in the back, slamming him to the ground; his tongue tasted the forest loam. He twisted futilely, saw the flash of a blade as someone straddled his back. Another man uttered a sound like a curse, and something hard hit him again. His last memory was the ring of a tiny bell.

  Duncan floated in a terrible, dark place that echoed with the shouts of the Indians and remnants of Crispin’s stories of Indian torture. Never before had he experienced such deep, piercing pain as that which now gripped his skull. As he gained consciousness, he stretched his hands to search the black night around him. Nothing but twigs and dried leaves. But he heard the music of morning birds, felt the soft, warm wind that came after dawn. A long, mournful groan escaped his throat. He was blind.

  His heart rattling against his ribs, his breath coming hard and fast, he groped about and finally raised a trembling hand and discovered a cloth bandage tightly tied around his skull, covering his eyes.

  “I’d rather we leave it for another hour,” a deep, slow voice intoned from a few feet away. “Let the herbs draw out the filth. Those gentlemen seldom clean their blades.”

  Duncan lowered his hand and turned his head in the direction of the voice. He smelled smoke, sensed the dull heat of a fire.

  “It took a stitch or two,” the stranger observed. His voice was quiet and soothing, like that of the old priests Duncan had known as a boy. “The last of my good silk thread.”

  Duncan grew very still as the words sank in. “Are you saying they wanted to lift my hair?”

  “I’m saying they did lift it. Or made genuine progress at it. I knew a man who survived the completed act,” the stranger said in a whimsical tone. “Nothing but bone on top. He had seven wool caps of different colors, one for each day of the week.”

  There was
movement, a hand reached around his neck, pulling him upward, and a hot tin mug was pressed to his lips. Its contents were bitter yet sweet. It smelled faintly of anise and roseberries. He sat up, fighting the stabs of pain in his skull, and eagerly drank.

  “How did a gentleman such as yourself come to the deep forest?” Duncan asked when he had drained the mug, wondering who his savior could be, but quickly settled on an image of a well-schooled Englishman in a greatcoat, probably with an expensive fowling piece and a game bag. He remembered there were men of science who compiled descriptions of New World flora and fauna, who would know how to concoct a healing tea of local herbs. “Do you pursue natural philosophy then?”

  He thought he heard a low sound that might have marked amusement, then sensed movement behind him. The man seemed to move without disturbing the debris on the forest floor. “Lean back,” his companion advised. “I have made you a pillow of moss.”

  The tea, Duncan discovered, was quickly making him drowsy. “I have studied the sciences, too,” he began, the awkward words blurring together as he eased back into the cool, soft cushion.

  When he awoke, the pain in his head had subsided to a dull ache. The forest seemed alive with sounds he had never heard before. Where he had heard only a random whistling before, he now discerned half a dozen melodies from the trees, over the rustle of leaves and the chirping of squirrels. He slowly eased the bandage from his eyes for a glimpse of his benefactor.

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the late afternoon sun. Shielding his eyes with his open hand, he slowly focused on the back of a figure rummaging through a sack, a man attired in deerskin leggings and a ragged muslin shirt, his long black hair gathered together in the back with a strip of leather into which had been inserted a long mottled feather that hung downward.

  With painful effort, Duncan seized a nearby limb from the forest floor and launched himself on the thief. “Murderer! What have you done to him?” he demanded as he slammed the limb into the heathen’s spine, knocking him to the ground. The kind Englishman who had saved him had been killed by this Indian. All the anger and frustration of recent weeks erupted within him, filling him with a wild, dark energy. At last he had found an enemy he could deal with.

  The savage groaned as Duncan hit him again and again, repeating his furious demand, then rolled away as Duncan faltered, swaying as his head began spinning. The Indian leaned against a moss-covered boulder, his eyes filled with pain, as Duncan dropped to his knees, a hand to his temple. The throbbing returned, now a low, steady roll of thunder in his head.

  “If you insist on this frantic activity,” the Indian declared, gasping, speaking in the deep voice Duncan had heard earlier, “I fear your wound will open again.”

  Duncan stared at the man, his jaw agape, looking about the small clearing, then into the forest and back to the stranger again. The man’s face was as worn as a river stone, and his bright, intelligent eyes fixed Duncan with a steady, if sad, gaze. Around his neck hung a necklace of glass beads from which hung a small fur-bound amulet. At the end of a second necklace, a leather braid that had had been freed from inside his shirt during Duncan’s attack, were two small silver cones that made a tinkling sound when he moved. Like tiny bells.

  “I didn’t. . I don’t. . ” Words failed Duncan. Still on his knees, propping himself with his makeshift weapon, he silently gawked at the man.

  When the stranger lifted his hand, Duncan thought it was to make a gesture of warning. But instead he slowly extended one finger, first to his lips, then to a shrub at the edge of the clearing. Duncan followed the finger to a bird, with scarlet body and black wings, that burst into a light melody as it studied the two men. They listened without moving for over a minute, until the bird flitted away.

  “In the tongue of my boyhood we called him Firecatcher. I have never heard an English name for it. You English have so few names for the important things.”

  Duncan looked back at the man with the same curious gaze the bird had used. “I am called Duncan McCallum. In the tongue of my boyhood I would be called ungrateful.”

  A small grin stirred on the man’s face. “If you wish you may call me Conawago.”

  “Scottish. I am Scottish, not English.” Duncan nervously surveyed the forest again.

  Conawago offered a nod toward the base of a big tree near the circle of their camp. “They are gone.” At the bottom of the tree were splinters of wood and three long barrels, the remains of three muskets. “Without their guns those kind are like frightened children.”

  “Who else?” Duncan asked, watching the forest again. “Are your companions nearby?”

  “As I grow older, I find the company better when I travel alone.” Conawago returned Duncan’s stare with the same inquisitive, slightly amused gaze he had fixed on the scarlet bird, then with a wince of pain he rose and resumed loading his bag.

  As he did so Duncan noticed streaks of red on the back of the man’s shirt. “I injured you,” he said, stricken with guilt. Conawago was probably three times Duncan’s age. He had not only viciously attacked an old man, he had attacked the man who had saved his life.

  “It is nothing,” the Indian muttered without looking up.

  “I studied to be a doctor. Let me help.”

  Conawago continued his packing. “I’d as soon turn myself over to one of the old witches in the Iroquois towns than to a European doctor. Bleed this, they always say, bleed that. Take some opium. Try some Peruvian bark. Swallow some cathartic. Treat a wound by making a bigger cut.”

  “I know enough to wash your wounds.”

  Conawago tightened the drawstring of his bag and straightened, ignoring Duncan, looking toward heaven and making an upward spiraling motion with his hand.

  “I struck you. It was. . ” Duncan searched for words. “I wronged you. Allow me to render a kindness. You saved my life.”

  Conawago’s face betrayed no emotion. “It remains to be seen whether that should be considered a favor.”

  “Then you at least saved me from wearing a hat for the little time I have left to live.”

  A flicker of a grin crossed the old Indian’s face. “There is a stream with a pool two miles north where I can clean my wounds. I was going there in any event. Farewell. If you truly know something of doctoring, you will know you will lose consciousness long before you could get there, so do not try to follow.” He swung the bag onto his shoulder, lifted his staff, and began walking down the narrow trail that led toward the high ridges. For the first time Duncan noticed on his belt a long, curving club, its ball-shaped top carved like the head of a bird, whose bill was a lethal iron spike.

  Duncan rose, staggered a few steps, and collapsed. By the time his head cleared, Conawago was out of sight. As he sat there, summoning his strength, he realized for the first time that his medallion, Adam’s medallion, was gone.

  He knelt, swaying on his knees, fighting not dizziness now but shooting pain from his head and ribs, and then forced himself to his feet. With his hand ax he cut a staff, then sliced a four-inch section from a small limb, inserted it between his teeth, and began walking. He stopped every two or three hundred paces, wiping away blood that dripped down his forehead and into his eyes, clutching his head, cutting a new plug of wood when he bit through the first. The trail branched with no sign of the old Indian’s path, and he halted, trying to understand the signs he knew the people of the woods could instinctively read. There was a pool, Conawago had said. It would be the kind of place where animals would congregate. He chose the wider, more heavily used fork and kept walking.

  When he finally reached the shaded, forty-foot-wide circle of water, Conawago was stripped to the waist, his back to Duncan, standing under a narrow flow of water that spilled into the pool from a ledge a few feet above his head. With a pang of shame Duncan saw the bruises and broken skin his attack had caused.

  Conawago was muttering something unintelligible, catching the water that missed his head in a cupped hand and pouring it over
his chest, looking up when he spoke, as if addressing the huge chestnut tree whose roots hung over the ledge above. Duncan collapsed at the bank, dropping his bag and lowering his head to the cool water, drinking it from his hand, then sluicing it over his own head.

  “I have a spare shirt,” Duncan said to the Indian’s back. “I can make bandages.”

  Conawago’s only response was to raise a palm toward him, to silence him. The old Indian continued speaking, sometimes to the water itself, but mostly facing upward, toward the ledge above. The old Indian had said he was coming to the pool in any event. He had come, Duncan realized, to pray to the massive tree.

  He felt strangely embarrassed, wanted to turn away, but Duncan could not take his eyes from the old man. His grandfather had sometimes prayed like that, standing in an ebb tide under a full moon, refusing to come out when his mother had begged him to, laughing when their priest cursed him for a pagan.

  After several minutes Conawago stopped speaking and backed a few inches away from the small waterfall. He caught more water in his hand and stared at the glistening drops. “I did not expect you,” he said in a voice like that used in a church. “Now that you are here, there are words you, too, must say.”

  “I do not know your language,” Duncan said awkwardly. “I cannot remember the words you said.”

  “I was apologizing for the spilled blood, and the foolishness of men. No good thing ever comes out of violence. You must always cleanse it away.” He looked for the first time at Duncan, and stepped toward him, stopping eight feet away, knee deep in the water. “The words you must use are different. Say this,” Conawago instructed, and began reciting words in the tongue Sarah had used.