Slowly, clumsily Duncan repeated the sounds.
Conawago nodded, then continued, speaking a few syllables at a time. Duncan echoed each phrase without comprehension, recognizing only one word of the many spoken. Ohskenonton. Deer.
“What does it mean?” Duncan asked when they finished.
“A prayer to the forest spirits. Difficult to translate. First, you asked for forgiveness for being so ignorant as to enter the forest without trying to know it, without respecting it. You said you knew you will die soon, but you just want another day or two to be able to show homage to the spirits, to try to find your true skin. You said you were no better than a pile of moldy deer droppings, but sometimes you will remember to put a hand on a tree and give thanks. It is a prayer taught to children in case they get lost in the forest.” There was no amusement, no mocking on Conawago’s face. “Now take something you need and give it to the forest.”
A sharp retort leapt to Duncan’s tongue, but he kept silent, breaking Conawago’s harsh, penetrating stare to kneel and open his bag. He extracted the small, hard loaf Crispin had packed for him, then cast the bread toward the current that flowed along the far side of the pool and watched as it gradually floated down the stream, slowly sinking.
When he looked back, Conawago was holding a large river pebble under the waterfall, whispering to it. After a moment the old Indian turned, shouted out several words in his native tongue, and threw the stone high, so that it disappeared into the chestnut towering above.
Duncan bent to pick up his bag, realizing the sturdy old Indian truly did not need his help. “I thank you for your kindness, and I shall trouble you no-” The words fell away as Conawago turned to squarely face him, for the first time allowing Duncan a view of his naked chest. The bag slipped from his hands and Duncan found himself in the water, an arm’s length from the Indian, staring at the intricate tattoo on Conawago’s chest. “The wolf clan of the Mohawk,” he declared in a cracking voice, then pointed to the pattern of rays that radiated from the Indian’s left shoulder. “The sign of the dawn chasers.”
Conawago’s hand went to the club that still hung from his belt. “Where did you steal such secrets?” he demanded, his voice suddenly sharp.
“The last time I saw that wolf, it was on a man’s chest. He wore his sign of the sun over his ear.”
The Indian surveyed Duncan, head to foot, as if he had never seen him before. “You are a friend of Jacob the Fish?”
Duncan shook his head uneasily. “I helped to clean his body with some who were his friends.”
Conawago leaned forward, intensely studying Duncan’s face as if looking for the truth in his words, then he seemed to sag. The old Indian released the club, stepped to a flat boulder at the side of the pool, and collapsed onto it. “When the black snake wind blows, it must be obeyed,” he said in a sorrowful tone.
“He was attacked near the Dutch inn after the Ramsey Company crossed the Hudson. They tried to scalp him.”
“As it happened to you,” Conawago said in a tight voice.
It was Duncan’s turn to settle onto the bank. Conawago was right. What had happened to Jacob had also happened to him. A drop of blood fell from his bent head onto his hand. He stared at it for a moment, then began explaining what he knew about Jacob’s death.
When he finished, the old Indian was silent a long time, withdrawn into himself.
“The wolf,” Duncan ventured. “You were of the same clan?”
“Not exactly,” Conawago said absently and looked up at Duncan. “He was Mahican. I am Nipmuc. He knew no one else left alive from his tribe. I know no one else of mine. But we always believed we would find them. He thought if he just stayed on his ancestral lands, someday they would come back. My tribe’s land, in what you call Massachusetts, was taken so long ago, I look elsewhere. The last time I saw Jacob, he said he had had a dream in which we discovered that our peoples had been living together on an island in a lake that I had overlooked. He thought it was very funny. But,” the old Indian sighed, “like all of his dreams, he thought there was truth in it. He made me promise to find the island, then come for him so we could go live there together.”
Conawago fell silent again, looked at the old tree. “You should go back,” he declared. “You, too, will die from your wounds if you push too hard.”
Duncan looked over his shoulder toward the east. “There is no back for me. I am a fugitive, an escapee from the Ramsey prison company. I can only go forward. I am looking for a place called Stony Run, somewhere in the north.”
Conawago winced, then tossed a pebble into the water and watched its ripples until they had disappeared. “If you knew what lay north, you would beg me to finish the job those fools started.” The old Indian rose and put on his shirt. “You will not make it there. Return to the settlements. Stay here. Go north and die if that is your wish. You will snap like a twig in the hands of a Huron raider.”
“You saved me. I thought Indians believed that when they saved someone they are responsible for them thereafter.”
“I know not what you mean when you say Indians,” Conawago replied in a weary tone as he lifted the shoulder strap of his pouch around his neck. “There are Lenni Lenape, Mohawk, Seneca, Susquehannocks, Nanticokes, Oneidas, Onandagos, Tuscaroras, Cayugas, Huron, Abenaki, a handful of Wappingers left, and fifty other tribes I have known personally, the nations living here before the Europeans. Just as across the ocean there are tribes called English, Scottish, Irish, French, Dutch, Hessian, Catalan, Danish, Welsh, Italian, and, if you credit the tales in taverns, Hungarian.” The old man glanced at Duncan and seemed to relent. “I was schooled by Jesuits at an early age,” he declared with a shrug. “They cured me of many of my early notions.”
“I don’t recollect many Jesuits making offerings to streams.”
“Jesuits,” Conawago said with a sigh, “don’t know everything.”
Duncan gazed at the darkening forest. He could not recall ever feeling so weary, so lost. He needed Conawago, just for the night. “An innocent man is being held for murder at Edentown. I can find answers at Stony Run that will save him.”
Conawago frowned again, then picked up another pebble, little more than a grain of sand, and tossed it into the pool. It barely made a ripple as it sank. “That is how much I care about the guilt or innocence of Europeans out in the broken land.”
“Jacob the Fish was an innocent man.”
“Lightning reaches down and takes you. If the spirits intend it, you will step around a tree into a swarm of hornets. It has nothing to do with innocence.”
“Some of us fight the spirits when we have to. Jacob did. He didn’t die because they wanted his scalp. He died because he had to deliver a message.”
When Conawago reached for the paper Duncan extended, Jacob’s blood-inked message, the old man’s hand trembled. After a moment his eyes took on a distant expression as if looking through the paper at something far away. “I will light a fire and make tea for you,” the old Indian said. “Then you will tell me everything.”
Conawago spoke no more for nearly an hour, except to say they would need shelter from the storm, though Duncan saw not a cloud in the sky. Quickly, with an economy of motion that astounded Duncan, Conawago assembled a lean-to of limbs against a large, flat-faced boulder, covering it with pine boughs and a piece of tattered sailcloth from his bag. Then he tossed Duncan a flint and steel to begin a fire as he collected moss for a bed, laying Duncan’s pack on it, and enough firewood to last for hours.
“I was in the Ramsey Company,” Duncan began as the last rays of the sun hit them and the wood began to crackle in the flames.
“That is nothing, just what some other men did to you,” Conawago said. “I am asking about you. Where was your mother on the day you were born, near water or mountain? What animals did you play with as a child? Were you scared of the ocean at first, or did your parents perhaps set you in it before you could walk?”
“How did you know I lived by the
ocean?” Duncan asked.
“You can take no truth from a man without knowing the truth of his life,” was Conawago’s only reply. From the forest floor he picked up a flat stone, twice the size of his palm, set it at Duncan’s side, then with two twigs lifted an ember from the fire and dropped it on the center of the stone. From his bag he produced a brown leaf and laid it on the ember. As the tobacco smoke rose in a small, slow spiral, he dispersed it with his hand around Duncan’s head. He dug further into his bag and produced a folded piece of deerskin, which he reverently opened, exposing an inch-wide belt of white wampum. “Now the spirits are listening,” the Indian declared somberly, as he laid the belt on Duncan’s wrist, nodding, “now we shall see about you.”
Thus began the most extraordinary conversation of Duncan’s life. The old Indian would not have him speak of Jacob or Ramsey or any event of the past year, but spent an hour asking about the Highlands, asking the Gaelic words for rainbow and oak tree, trying to understand how Duncan had been raised. He became quite excited to hear that Highland cattle resembled bears and that they roamed freely around the hills like the guardians of the ancient clans.
“What do these creatures do at first snow?” Conawago inquired as he composed a soup of roots and leaf buds in a small copper pot. He seemed skeptical that such animals could truly be called cattle, and asked whether Duncan had ever caught any listening at doors and windows, as American bears were known to do.
“If as a boy you cupped a butterfly in your hand, did you notice the wind change direction? In living by the ocean, did you ever see giant fish circle about and make one of the great whirlpools that draw stars into the ocean?”
“I knew an old woman who said she had seen children change into seals,” Duncan offered. The news brought an appreciative nod from his companion.
It seemed hours before Duncan reached the voyage of the Anna Rose and its prisoners, long after he had consumed Conawago’s fragrant concoction and let the old man help settle him onto the moss bed against the face of the rock, which had absorbed the heat of their fire.
Did the great leviathans follow their ship, the Indian asked, and after a man had been lashed at sea did Duncan see the water around the ship glow the following night, as Conawago had himself witnessed? Thunder rose in the north, and lightning from over the horizon reflected on clouds above.
When Duncan came to the deaths on board, the questions came obliquely, about aspects he had not previously considered, as though Conawago’s process of comprehending how men died was different than Duncan’s. When they spoke of Evering, the Indian passed quickly by the circumstances of his murder and wanted to know if there were specks of color in the professor’s dead eyes, whether he sang songs on his last day, and how he behaved at night on deck when the stars shined. He was intensely interested when Duncan related how Evering had predicted the coming of a comet.
“He died helping a woman named Sarah Ramsey,” Duncan offered, having explained how the ship’s most important passenger had attempted suicide, “and celebrating his love for his dead daughter.” He could not understand why he felt so comfortable speaking of such things with a stranger.
“A fine way to die,” Conawago affirmed with a slow nod.
Duncan paused, realizing he had never considered the point.
“And on that very day, this woman and you were summoned by the same spirits,” Conawago summarized, as if Duncan had been called into the ocean to confer with some deity.
“I just jumped into the ocean to save her,” Duncan countered.
The old Nipmuc gave a patient smile. “Do you remember anything at all about what happened in the water?”
“No,” Duncan admitted
Conawago nodded, still smiling, as if Duncan had proven his point.
Duncan spoke on, of landing in New York, of the trip across the Hudson, of the duck Sarah had released, of the Stag’s Head Inn and life in Edentown. He became aware of rain softly falling, though he could not say when it had started.
After one of the silences that punctuated their conversation, Conawago looked up, cocked his head, and spoke quite somberly. “Tell me, Duncan McCallum, how many are left of your tribe?”
It somehow seemed the wisest and most terrible question the Indian could ask, and it took a moment for Duncan to fight through the ache in his heart to answer. “My tribe, like yours, is almost gone. There is one other with my blood.”
Conawago did not seem surprised, and he spoke on, softly, asking about the color of lightning in Scotland and the books in Lord Ramsey’s library.
Finally words seemed to fail the old Indian, and he stared into the embers of the dying fire.
“Am I permitted some questions myself?” Duncan asked as he reverently lifted the wampum from his arm. Conawago looked up with wary eyes but did not object when Duncan laid the belt on his own arm. He lifted a stick in the dirt and traced the shape of a round creature with round, flat tail and wings. He had not forgotten the signs Adam had left on the mast.
Conawago stared at the drawing, then a slow, reverent sweep of his hand obliterated it. “We do not speak of sacred totems with human words. It is between a man and his totem, his protector spirit.”
“Why would it have wings?”
“A greeting, from one who is about to become entirely a spirit being.” Conawago dropped another leaf of tobacco on the embers and fanned the smoke toward Duncan, as if he needed particular attention from the deities.
“Do you know a man named Hawkins?” Duncan asked suddenly.
Conowago studied Duncan’s wound again, cupping smoke over it, before he replied. “I know many like him in the forest north of here. I wouldn’t necessarily call them men. More like wolves on two legs.”
“Okewa,” Duncan tried. “What is the meaning of the word?”
The old Indian stared into the embers before answering. “A dance,” he said in a voice suddenly gone hoarse. “A ritual. It starts at dusk and goes until morning. Women sing all night long.”
“A ritual for what?”
“The dance of the dead, performed with the family a year after the death. It allows souls to make the final crossing to the other world.” Conawago fixed Duncan with an inquiring glance. “Where did you hear this word?”
“It was written on a secret map in the home of Lord Ramsey.”
Conawago’s face went still as death. The old Indian stared into the fire again, added more tobacco to the flat rock. Duncan watched as his companion silently brewed one more cup of tea for him, then held his hand over Duncan’s injured head and offered a whispered prayer. Duncan fell back, able to comprehend neither the reactions of the old Indian to much of what he had said, nor the unexpected calm that had settled over him when speaking with Conawago.
In the morning he awoke slowly, groggily, a strange dream about swimming with otters flickering at the edge of his consciousness. He tried to rub his eyes but could not feel his hands. He shook his head several times but still had difficulty understanding his surroundings. Conawago’s last mug of medicine had done more than relax him.
He lay in the stream. His legs, nearly covered in water, were pinned by a heavy log that he could not budge no matter how hard he flexed and pushed his legs. His hands were behind him, arms straddling a tree, bound at the wrists behind the trunk. Their campsite, fifty feet away, was abandoned, with no sign of Conawago. Duncan’s pack, neatly tied at the top, sat on a rock two feet away, a piece of white bark pinned to the side with a sliver of wood, bearing words inscribed in a neat, decorous hand.
The storm in the north last night means the stream will rise by noon and lift the log that imprisons you. When it does, push up against the tree. Your ax is embedded at the height of your waist and will cut the strap around your hands. Then run south and thank Ramsey for preserving your life by allowing you to be his servant. If you survive to wisdom, you will see there is no mystery about Jacob, Adam, or myself, only one simple truth. There is no better death, at any age, than standing up to an
overwhelming enemy to defend the bones of your fathers and the refuge of your gods. There will be another Okewa, twelve months from now. Stay alive, and sing then for the red men and the plaid men.
Duncan stared at the note, reading it again and again, leaning back against the tree, listening to the forest, sensing the warm, subtle pulse from inside the tree, reading the note once more, trying to grasp the war within a war of which Conawago seemed to be speaking. His anger soon burned away, replaced by an unbidden ache in his heart and a question that tugged at the edge of his mind.
The final realization came slowly, only after countless readings, only after recalling everything that had happened between himself and the old Indian, every word they had spoken the night before. He might not have recognized him from Lister’s description of a dark, educated gentleman who traveled with Sarah, or from the careful way the old man’s questions had sidestepped Sarah. But the handwriting, the unique looping of the double O’s, left no doubt. Duncan had discovered Socrates Moon. He had found, and lost, the one man at the intersection of the mysterious paths of Sarah, Jacob, and Adam, and the only way to find him again was to reach Stony Run, where, Moon seemed to warn, everyone was going to die in seven days.
Chapter Twelve
Okewa. The full significance of the death rite did not dawn upon Duncan until the pool was an hour behind him. Conawago’s instructions had proven perfect, and once the water had risen he had quickly freed himself, stuffed the Indian’s note in his pack, and headed north. Now, as Duncan read the note again while he rested, he understood Conawago’s alarm when he had heard that the word appeared on the map in Ramsey’s safe room. Ramsey might not have known about the council of old chiefs called at Stony Run, but he had been advised, probably months earlier, that the Indians who had enslaved his daughter-and who controlled much of the land to the west-would all be back at Stony Run on the anniversary of the massacre.
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