The Wood's Edge

by Lori Benton

  Good Voice was touched. “The wolf? You give that to me?”

  Bear Tooth licked his fingers and held out the empty bowl. She came around the fire to take it, but Bear Tooth didn’t release his hold when she grasped it. With a quick look toward the lodge where his uncle had gone, he pulled her closer by the bowl they held. “You are the best cook of all. Do not tell my uncle I said so.”

  Their faces were close. Close enough that she could lean forward a little more and plant a kiss on his brow without toppling over. This she did. “You are good to us, Brother.”

  With the bowl released into her hands, she straightened and looked across the clearing. Stone Thrower stood at the forest’s edge, his handsome features contorted in disbelief.

  He’d done some trapping on his way back from fighting but had left those furs curing in their lodge in Kanowalohale. “Did you think I would stay away all winter, neglect you and our son? Is that why you have taken up with these men?”

  Good Voice looked to see that Bear Tooth and his uncle had gone into the forest and hadn’t heard those words. The hemlock boughs no longer swayed in the wake of their going.

  Two Hawks sat by the fire, staring at his long-absent father, come abruptly into their midst with his face suffused with anger.

  Heart pounding, Good Voice put down the bowls, walked to her husband, and put her arms around him. “I am relieved to see you. I feared you might be dead—”

  As her voice caught, she felt the tenseness of his body ease. He put her from him, shrugged out of his pack, and sat at the fire to unlace his snowshoes. With shaking hands, Good Voice bent to pick up the bowls. Stone Thrower glanced at them. “Is there food?”

  For him, his tone implied. Was she still willing to feed him, or only those other men? It cut her, but she smiled and ducked inside the hut. When she returned with the last of the corn soup, Stone Thrower was telling their son about a battle he’d fought.

  “It happened at a place the redcoats call Devil’s Hole. There is a wooded ravine there. Near it we waited to ambush some wagons going to the fort at Niagara.”

  “Did the wagons make it through?” Two Hawks scooted across the log to sit nearer his father. His eyes were big.

  Stone Thrower laughed, low in his throat. “Three hundred Senecas—and I with them—made sure they did not. We surprised them with muskets and made their animals stampede and drag the wagons into that ravine, then we moved in to kill the British with hatchets. If any got away I did not see. I was busy taking scalps.”

  British scalps. Blood on the Covenant Chain.

  Two Hawks looked wide-eyed at the hatchet thrust through his father’s belt sash. “Do you have them now? Those scalps?”

  “I brought one to show you.” He took from his pack a scalp with hair shiny blond, like Good Voice’s after a washing, before she darkened it with grease. It gave her a queer feeling in her belly.

  “Redcoats came running from a camp not far away,” Stone Thrower said, continuing his story. “Too late to do anything about those wagon men, but not too late to join them in death. We cut them off from their retreat to the fort. We killed most of them and lost none but one man wounded, and he lived when I last saw him.”

  Good Voice had been looking her husband over. Silently she thanked the Master of Life that he was whole, then set the bowl of corn soup into his hands. He glanced up to acknowledge her, not pausing in his boasting of battle exploits. Two Hawks listened with ears for nothing else. Stone Thrower had charmed their son but seemed to have no charm left for her. She went inside the bark hut to start on the wolf fur.

  Her husband lounged around the fire that day, talking to Two Hawks while she worked inside, but Good Voice didn’t speak to him of anything that mattered until Bear Tooth and his uncle returned, ate the food she’d made without their usual talk, and everyone went to their beds for the cold night. Then it was their bodies that spoke, coming together for the first time since the summer.

  Good Voice had had time to think. She knew Stone Thrower was shamed to find another man taking care of his family while he’d been to war. His anger and suspicion were only covering that shame. Now in the darkness, Stone Thrower spoke sweeter words into her hair, against the skin of her neck. Lying with her warm beneath a buffalo robe, he said, “I did not see my things put out of your lodge. Does this mean I am still your husband?”

  His voice held no teasing, but she forced it into hers. “After what we just did you must ask such a thing?”

  It was too dark even with the glow of embers to see his face. “A man should hunt for his family and for furs to trade for things they need. But sometimes a man must go to war.”

  “Sometimes.” But not always was it needful. She heard that implication in her voice and hurried to say, “These words were spoken before you left. Now you are back. Let us not speak them again.”

  Stone Thrower pulled his arm away and rolled over, putting his back to her.

  Outside the lodge next morning, Good Voice sensed no overt hostility between her husband and Bear Tooth. Stands-To-The-Side seemed uneasy. He wolfed down his food and left to check one line of traps. Bear Tooth lingered, talking little though he listened with interest when Two Hawks begged his father to tell the story of Devil’s Hole again. Still, Good Voice was surprised when Stone Thrower asked if he might go with Bear Tooth and set a few snares of his own. Bear Tooth, hesitating only a moment, agreed.

  Though this was his uncle’s camp, Bear Tooth had made every effort to give place to Stone Thrower. He knew Stone Thrower had seen that tender moment between them. His eyes had asked her at first glance that morning if all was well. She had tried with her eyes to reassure him.

  She was inside the bark lodge with Two Hawks when the sound of men’s voices reached her. It was early for them to be back. She’d barely started the venison stew she’d planned to feed them. And they didn’t sound like men coming in tired from a day of fur harvesting. Their voices were sharp, urgent. She shot a look at Two Hawks, then pushed past the buffalo hide in time to see Stands-To-The-Side and Stone Thrower, supporting Bear Tooth between them, stagger along the beaten path into camp, leaving a trail like bright red petals dropped in the snow.

  They lowered Bear Tooth to sit by the fire. Good Voice, hurrying to him, saw his heavy winter moccasin had been removed, his left leg and foot wrapped in torn linen, soaked in red. She unwound the bloody strips, and gasped.

  The flesh above Bear Tooth’s ankle was mangled, punctured as though an animal had tried to bite off his foot. Bones were clearly broken. What had done this? A bear? Had he tried to take a bear out of its den, for her son to see?

  Cold swept down her face and limbs, for with her next breath she knew what teeth had done this damage. Not the teeth of a bear. “You stepped into one of your traps?”

  Bear Tooth’s face was gray and clenched. “Yes,” he said through gritted teeth but wouldn’t meet her gaze.

  “No!” It was a startling sound, that word bursting out of Bear Tooth’s quiet uncle. Stands-To-The-Side glared at Stone Thrower, clouds of furious breath shooting from his nostrils. “My nephew did not step into his trap. He was pushed. With my own eyes I saw this as I came upon them quarreling. This man, your husband, pushed him, and you see the result!”

  Stone Thrower took a step back, staring at them each in turn. Then his eyes dropped to her hands, stained with blood. His face went as gray as Bear Tooth’s.

  He didn’t deny the accusation. He didn’t say he never meant to do such a thing, that it had been an accident. He lunged toward their bark hut, thrusting aside the hide. Seconds later he was out again with his pack and snowshoes.

  Good Voice stared, stunned, as Stone Thrower shrugged into his pack and, without looking at her, headed off across the clearing toward the setting sun, snowshoes in hand.

  Stands-To-The-Side moved to follow, but Good Voice caught his wrist. With a terrible effort she said, “Let him go. I need you here. Please…let him go.”

  11

 
Snow Moon 1764

  Stone Thrower didn’t return to Kanowalohale during the Long Night Moon. Had he done so, Good Voice knew he wouldn’t have been pleased that she’d taken Bear Tooth into her lodge to care for him. The bones of Bear Tooth’s ankle hadn’t knit straight. A few places where the trap’s teeth had punctured were still prone to fester.

  Clear Day came to her lodge on a snowy morning with a man Good Voice didn’t know—a Mohawk sachem from Canajoharie, a town in the east surrounded by white settlements. Hanging Kettle, he was called. “This man knows the white man’s medicine,” Clear Day explained. “He goes into their place of trade for such medicine and is known there by a healer called McClaren. Maybe he will know something that will help.”

  Hanging Kettle was a younger man than Clear Day, but there was wisdom in his gaze, and kindness. Good Voice, desperate enough to let a white man help Bear Tooth had one offered, had no qualms about a Mohawk with white medicine trying. Maybe his blended medicine would be strong enough to make her clan brother’s leg heal so he could walk again and hunt.

  She welcomed them into her home, fed them, then took her son out into the falling snow to Bright Leaf’s lodge, one in a straggle of Turtle Clan homes on a bend in the frozen creek. Snow sifted down, big as feathers. When she returned through the flurry, Clear Day, wrapped in a buffalo hide, occupied the bench beneath a pole arbor built against her lodge. She could hear Hanging Kettle chanting on the other side of the door hide.

  “Uncle, did you go all the way to Canajoharie for that healer?”

  Clear Day nodded, seeming preoccupied with other thoughts. Good Voice sat beside him with her blanket-shawl held close. The snow slanted down. Their breath rose in white clouds beneath the arbor’s shelter.

  “Has my nephew gone to look for that redcoat?” he asked.

  Clear Day had asked that question when she returned to Kanowalohale without Stone Thrower. Why did he ask it again? The answer hadn’t changed. She didn’t know.

  Good Voice looked out through the snow that obscured the nearby lodges. Many of the people were still at their hunting camps, but the elders and mothers with sickly children had stayed. “Better he do that than running up to the Carrying Place.”

  Some men made provision for their families by helping white traders portage their bateaux from the Mohawk River to Wood Creek, to continue their journey west to the lake country. No one traveled so now, with the streams and rivers frozen, but many still gathered to trade—or drink their earnings away with corn liquor and rum. When Stone Thrower went to the Carry, he rarely brought anything back but a bruised and reeling head.

  “Maybe,” Clear Day said. “But listen, my daughter. I have a thing to say to you.”

  Good Voice’s heart sank. Did even Clear Day think it was time to put his nephew’s belongings out of her lodge? “What is it, Uncle?”

  He glanced at her, frowning at her tone of resignation. “You remember how I said I learned nothing from Warraghiyagey about that redcoat or the son he stole from you?”

  Good Voice’s thoughts flew back to spring nearly two years ago, to the crushing disappointment she’d felt at the news. She’d tried not to think about it since. “I remember. Why do you speak of it now?”

  “Because I did not tell you that the reason I learned nothing is because I never spoke to Warraghiyagey. I never saw him.” Clear Day didn’t look at her. He watched the snow fall, the breath flowing from his mouth as if his words were ghosts, each one a haunting to Good Voice’s heart. “I had gone as far as Canajoharie, on my way to see him. There I met the man who is inside your lodge now. That man was preparing to go to the place where they build the boats they carry between the waters—Schenectady. He meant to visit a place inside their stockade called apothecary.”

  Good Voice understood much English, but apothecary was a new word. “What sort of place is that?”

  “A place where medicine is made, where that one called McClaren does his trade. They call it a shop. There are many shops in that town, each making and trading its own things. It is a noisy, stinking place. Still I went with Hanging Kettle to this apothecary because I was curious to see it, but I still meant to go across the river to Warraghiyagey.”

  Good Voice nodded, trying to be patient, waiting for him to get to the important part—why he hadn’t sought the help of Sir William Johnson in finding He-Is-Taken.

  “It was there I heard a girl with black hair speak to a man who came in after us, ringing the little bell McClaren keeps above the door to let him know when someone has come through it. He was a tall man—not McClaren, this other who came in—thin like a stalk of corn. One of the Irish, like Warraghiyagey, except he wore the clothes of a farmer and he had a farmer’s smell—like what comes out of the backsides of horses.”

  Good Voice restrained herself from saying hanyo, hanyo—get to the part about her son.

  “Black-Hair-Girl spoke to that man. She said a name to him. One that made my ears stretch to hear their talk. It was the name you once told me. Aubrey.”

  Good Voice drew in a searing breath. The cold leached from her lungs into her heart. Aw-bree. She sat with frozen lips, felt one crack in a tiny split of pain when finally she said, “Was it that man who came into the shop? The man who stole my son from my side?”

  Clear Day shook his head. “That was not the man. But as I listened I thought he knew this Aubrey the girl had named. It seemed by their talk this Aubrey was sick or wounded. That was why the farmer came to that shop. For the healer, McClaren.”

  Clear Day paused, gathering his thoughts, while Good Voice screamed in silence for him to say it all quickly else she couldn’t bear it.

  “I spoke to Black-Hair-Girl. I got her to say that this Aubrey was once a British officer. Major Aubrey. That is his name. And that is all I learned then. But when the tall farmer left the shop, I also went. Out of that town I followed him, though he rode a horse and I was on my feet. He did not cross the river, so I did not cross either. I knew I could do so later, go to Johnson, if following the farmer came to nothing.”

  It was a dangerous thing to do, following a strange white man through settled country. Good Voice was glad she hadn’t known about it at the time, but now her whole being was with Clear Day, flitting between whatever cover he could find along a wagon track, dodging the farms and the dogs and the watching eyes—the muskets—trying to keep the farmer in sight to see where he went.

  “All the way to his farm I followed him. It is some ways west of the town, with thick woods nearby. I hid in those woods and watched that place, a big stone house, a small stone house, a barn, much fields. And the people there. A woman who worked in the yard. Another woman who never left the doorway of the big house. And two children.”

  Good Voice had let the blanket fall open. She pressed a hand to her mouth. Clear Day looked into her eyes, where she saw the truth before the words left his lips. “One of those children was male. From a distance he might have been Two Hawks. Two Hawks in a’sluni clothing, though his hair and face were not so dark. He was too distant for me to tell how much he resembled your son.”

  Chills prickled up Good Voice’s arms, over her scalp and face, chills that had nothing to do with the cold. “He was very white, that first son born to me. He might look nothing like his brother.”

  “One twin brown, one twin white. I thought of that as I watched that boy.” Clear Day gripped her hand, his gaze earnest. “If you wish it, I will go back to that farm and find out more, if I can.”

  Good Voice put her hand over her mouth again. Tears ran warm over her fingers. She wiped them away, leaving her skin chilled in the gusting snow-breeze. “He looked strong and happy? He was allowed to go where he wished?”

  “He had a girl and a dog with him. They ran free over the fields and down to the river like a son and daughter together. That is how they were as I watched.”

  For a time all Good Voice could do was sit there, fist pressed to her heart, seeing in her mind this boy who looked like Two Hawks
, but white, see him running free. Gradually those good thoughts ebbed, letting others in. Thoughts as sharp as blades.

  “Do you know what words I spoke when I put Two Hawks into his father’s hands, there at the French fort on the lake? I said, ‘This is half of the son I bore you. A redcoat stole the other half. But you will get him back for me and take the scalp off that redcoat for what he did.’ I have had many nights lying awake to regret those words.”

  “It was your right to ask him to do that thing,” Clear Day told her.

  Somewhere, beyond the veil of snow, children shouted. The voice of a grandmother cracked as she called to them. Good Voice swallowed and said, “That may be, Uncle. But I think sometimes to claim a right is the wrong thing to do.”

  Clear Day’s mouth curved sadly. “That is a wise thing for someone to have learned.”

  If it was wisdom, then it was learned in a way that made a young woman feel old in her bones. “Why did you never tell me what truly happened? And why tell me now?”

  Looking pained, Clear Day went back to the beginning, how Stone Thrower was away to the Carry when he returned from seeing the boy who was probably He-Is-Taken. Already he’d had doubts about telling his nephew what he’d seen. “But when I saw Stone Thrower again, it was clear there was something still broken in him, something that taking revenge on the redcoat might not make whole. Still I nearly had the words out, more than once. Each time it seemed a hand covered my mouth. I could not speak. As for why I did not tell you…it was not because I thought you would send my nephew to kill those people on that farm, stirring up a nest of white hornets to follow him back and kill some of us. I did not want you to live with knowing where your son might be, and not know how to get to him in a way that would not bring more grief than you already bear. If I was wrong to keep this from you, I will do what I can to make amends.”

  Good Voice let go of Clear Day’s hand. Inside the lodge, Hanging Kettle had stopped chanting. She hoped he was helping Bear Tooth with his medicine.