Over the Misty Mountains

by Gilbert, Morris

  For thirty minutes Josh remained absolutely still. An itch developed on his lip, but he would not even reach up with his lower teeth and bite it. It was a test, and he knew that the Indians had the ability to hold such a position for hours. His legs grew cramped, and once he almost cried out with the pain of a knotty swelling in his calf, but he gritted his teeth together and thought, If an Indian can do it, I can do it!

  Finally he was rewarded for his patience. A tiny sound came, and he shifted his eyes slightly, catching a flash of movement. A buck stepped out of the thickness of the forest, his head held high, and his eyes looking constantly, searching the whiteness around him. Josh remained absolutely still. The rifle was cocked, and his finger was on the trigger. His left hand held the barrel, and though he had lost all feeling in that hand, he knew that he would have only one shot. He could not, for a moment, decide whether to slowly move the musket into position or to raise the rifle with one snap movement and get the shot off. He chose the latter, and even as the rifle rose he saw the buck whirl. Judging accurately the direction of the leap of the animal, he pulled the trigger. The shot knocked the deer down, but the animal jumped up at once and disappeared in the corridor of snow-covered trees.

  Josh ran quickly and gave a sigh of relief when he saw the bright red trail of blood in the snow. “Hit hard,” he murmured, feeling his blood pumping through his veins and his heart beating faster. Josh began to move through the snow at a steady pace, trotting, and after half a mile his breathing had hardly increased. Getting tougher, he thought. My legs are gettin’ stronger every day.

  He saw the body of the deer lying in a clump of cedars up ahead, and he smiled with satisfaction, advancing carefully. One of his friends had rushed in on a buck that had leaped to his feet in his dying throes and cut the man to pieces with his razor-sharp hooves and antlers. But this one was dead, so Josh quickly pulled out his skinning knife and began to butcher the animal. He was not as good at this part of hunting. Carefully he removed the skin, and then cut off a quarter. He kept the liver also, which was a favorite of his. He made his way back to where the horse was tied. “I’m gonna fix up a good supper, Rusty. You can’t enjoy a good steak, but I’ll feed you the rest of the oats.”

  It was a feast, for there was nothing Josh liked better than deer liver. He made a stew and also put a huge chunk of the fresh meat on a forked stick. The savory smell as it sizzled above the fire made his stomach growl. Finally when it was done, he gorged on the meal. He tore off chunks of the steak with his strong teeth, and when he could hold no more, he leaned back against a tree and said, “Now all I want to do is lie down and sleep.”

  The next morning he fried up another piece of the steak and moved ahead, glancing up at the sun. The sky overhead was blue, and there was no sign of snow. An hour later he sighted some small animals bouncing from tree to tree, and he thought, Squirrels! I could do with a little squirrel stew. He tied the horse, patted him on the rump, and said, “See if you can find some dried grass under that snow, Rusty.” Leaving the animal tethered, he moved underneath a canopy of towering evergreens. Overhead, the thick branches kept the snow from falling to the earth so that only an inch or two crunched beneath his feet. It was still bitter cold, and as he moved forward a sudden thought came to him, one that he had had before. There might be Indians in this part of the woods.

  He had not gone fifty feet before he stepped into a hole that was covered over with a layer of snow. He fell awkwardly, twisting to hold his musket clear. Even as he was falling he caught a glimpse of movement to the side. Fear ran through him, for whatever it was stood only a few feet away. He cried aloud and brought the musket to bear, but even as he did, he was struck in the face by a stream of the vilest-smelling liquid he had ever encountered.

  Skunk!

  Gagging and coughing and clawing at his eyes, Josh let his musket fall to the snow. He was blinded, for the stench of the skunk’s spray had struck him full in the face and on the front of his jacket. Some of it had even gotten on his lips, and it burned like fire. Wallowing in the snow, he took handfuls of the powdery fluff and washed as well as he could.

  Finally, he got his eyes clear, and peering through half-shut lids, he saw the skunk—white stripe down his back and his plumed tail raised high—regarding him with a pair of beady black orbs. Josh grabbed his musket, leveled it, and then could not see, for the burning scent clawed at the tender tissues almost like needles. “Go on!” he muttered, and gathering his musket, he half groped his way back through the woods toward his horse.

  “Well, this is just great!” Josh said bitterly. “I’ll probably smell like this for days!”

  The rest of the day he stopped several times at streams and tried desperately to wash off some of the stench. He had brought a bar of lye soap, and he heated water and washed as well as he could, but he knew that the stench would not come out of his hunting shirt. It was ruined forever, so he tossed it aside. Josh knew he needed to find someplace to shelter for the winter. Turning Rusty toward the mountains, he decided to head there to look for a cave.

  Just as Josh kicked Rusty’s flanks, a piercing crack shattered the eerie silence of the thick snow-covered forest. A searing pain ripped into his back, and he toppled off his horse. He vaguely remembered being astonished as he hit the ground. Why . . . I’ve been shot . . . !

  The dark pit into which he plunged engulfed him without a trace of light. When he awoke hours later, it was snowing again, and he was burning up. He tried to sit up, and a streak of fiery pain shot through him. It was as if someone had driven a white-hot iron through his chest. He looked down and saw that his woolen shirt was soaked with dried blood, and the movement had started it bleeding again.

  He struggled to a sitting position and tried to think, but the fever was already making him light-headed. He got up slowly and looked around. There was no sign of the horse.

  “Got to find some shelter,” he muttered. The afternoon sun cast long shadows across the ground as he stumbled along, falling more than once. A root caught his toe and he fell headlong. Josh was a strong man, and he was shocked to discover that he did not have the strength to stand up. He could not move. He lay there on his back, turning his head from side to side in his efforts to rise.

  He began to lose consciousness, and he thought, This is death. Even as he slipped into the darkness, he thought of his parents—and then he thought of the son whom he had turned his back on. God’s striking me down. I’ve been so wrong!

  He had no time to think more, and just before the last bit of consciousness ebbed from him, he heard a strange noise keening high in the air. Glancing up, he saw a red-tailed hawk circling in a wide gyre. Even as the hawk screamed again, Josh slipped into an utter, complete, ebony blackness.

  Chapter Five

  Sequatchie

  Sometimes the darkness was unbounded—blacker than a hundred midnights down in the swamp! At other times it seemed that he was drifting through a heaven filled with light so intense he could not open his eyes. And just as varied as the darkness and the light were the sensations of heat and cold. His body would shake so viciously that his teeth chattered, and he thought he was buried under tons of snow. Then the biting cold would fade and something warm and soft would envelop him and a voice would speak. Often he would be drenched in sweat and would cry out, for his body burned as if it were in a furnace. At times like this he tried vainly to throw the soft warm covering from his heat-parched body.

  Finally lucid moments began to come to him, and he opened his eyes to mere slits. Racked by fever, he could not distinguish between the wild dreams and what seemed to be harsh reality. He knew there were people near, for he had heard their muffled voices, and he could smell the odor of bodies—mixed with acrid smoke, old hides, and smells that were foreign to him.

  “Ho! Sit up and drink!”

  Josh was drawn roughly from a trancelike dream in which he had been pursued by a large animal that he could not identify. He opened his eyes and started violently
, for there, not a foot away from his face, was the countenance of a man he had never seen before—which at first seemed to him part of his nightmare.

  An Indian!

  Instantly, wild stories flashed through his mind, stories of captives who had been burned at the stake and pulled apart, their flesh stripped from their bones while they yet lived. He opened his mouth to speak and put out his hand to defend himself, but then he saw a smile break across the dark face, and the obsidian eyes glinted with humor. “You decided to live awhile.”

  The voice spoke in a pleasant baritone, and there was nothing threatening in it. Josh reached up and threw his arm across his forehead, which was dripping with sweat, at the same time studying the dark features so close to his own. The face was bronze with a distinct copper tint, and the long beam of sunshine that came down through an open door to Josh’s right revealed a long face with a broad forehead. The Indian had an aquiline nose, high, prominent cheekbones, and a square jaw. His head was totally bald except for a patch of hair ornamented with feathers and porcupine quills that disappeared behind the man’s shoulders. The cheeks were smooth, and the man, who wore only a breechcloth, seemed to have no body hair.

  “Where . . . where am I?”

  “Don’t talk. Drink this.”

  A cup made out of birch bark was thrust to Josh’s lips. The odor of the liquid was pleasant and aromatic, and as he drank it thirstily, he found it had a taste somewhat like English tea. He drained it to the bottom, then held it out again, whispering, “More.”

  Again a humorous light touched the dark eyes of the Indian. He turned and handed the cup to an Indian woman who suddenly appeared out of the darkness at the side of the room and filled it without a word. She looked older than the man, in her late fifties, and was rather tall but more delicately built than most of the Indians Josh had seen. His mind was clearing quickly, and he took in the oval-shaped face and the jet black hair of the woman. She wore a short leather skirt, deerskin moccasins, and a blouse made out of some sort of lightweight material.

  “I am Sequatchie,” the man said and sat back on his heels, regarding Josh.

  Josh drank the rest of the tea and nodded. “That’s good,” he whispered. He found that his voice was hoarse, as if he had not spoken for a long time. He cleared his throat and looked around the room, then back to the Indian. “My name is Jehoshaphat Spencer.”

  The Indian considered him and shook his head. “Too much name,” he said, then turned to the squaw and said something in his native language. At once the squaw moved toward the fire that was sending up a thin spiral of smoke over to one side. She removed something and brought it back to Josh. He was surprised to observe that it was on a pewter plate. The Indian, seeing that Josh was looking at the plate, grinned suddenly. “I stole that from the British when I was a young man. No steal anymore, though.”

  “You speak English very well,” Josh said. He reached for the knife that Sequatchie handed him, and pain suddenly ran through him, as if a sword had passed through his body. He grunted but gritted his teeth to keep from crying out. Looking down he saw that his bare chest was bound with cloth, and memory came flooding back to him. Holding the plate and the knife, he said, “I was shot.”

  “Yes, you almost died. Look.” Sequatchie leaned forward, reaching over Josh and touching Josh’s back. “You shot from back. Bullet go through, come out up high.” He touched Josh’s chest and shook his head. “It is a good thing you not taller. You would be dead by now, and in eternity.”

  Josh felt the Indian’s hands, and a strange sensation went through him. He had never been this close to an Indian—certainly never touched by one—but there was something in the tall, lean figure, and especially in the rather stern countenance that somehow gave him confidence. “You found me?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long have I been in this place?”

  The Indian seemed to count mentally, then held up his hand. “Five suns,” he said. “You believe God?”

  The question shocked Josh, and he blinked with surprise. “Why . . . certainly I believe in God.”

  “You thank Him then. If it had not been for my mother, Awenasa, I think you would die.” He turned to the Indian woman and smiled. “She knows how to make anyone well, even animals.”

  Josh turned to the woman whose face was impassive. She stood back in the shadows, saying nothing, and Josh hardly knew how to speak to her. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m grateful.”

  Sequatchie translated his words, and when the Indian woman said something, he turned to face Josh. “She says you thank your god, not her.”

  Something about the situation disturbed Josh. When he had ridden out of Williamsburg, he had left behind his relationship with God. When Faith had died, he had walked away from all that. Now here in a rough cabin in the middle of the wilderness, he was suddenly confronted, in the stolid face of a Cherokee woman, with the concepts of God and living and dying.

  “I do thank God,” he said quickly. He struggled to throw off the blankets and said, “I’m too hot.”

  “Your fever was bad. We had to wash you down with cold springwater to keep you from burning up,” Sequatchie said. “You eat. You hungry now.”

  Josh tore at the meat with an almost animal-like viciousness, barely pausing to chew it. He was starved, and even as he ate, he could feel the strength seeping back into his body.

  Carefully he said between bites, “Do you know who it was who shot me?”

  “White man,” Sequatchie said, staring at him calmly.

  The brief words startled Josh, for somehow he had assumed that it had been an Indian. “Did you see him? What did he look like?”

  “Big man. Heavier than you, and a man of the forest.”

  “But what did his face look like? What color were his eyes?”

  Sequatchie shook his head. “I saw only his footprints in the snow. He wore white man’s shoes. He waited for you and shot you from where he hid. He took your horse, too.”

  A pang went through Josh. “He took my Rusty?”

  “Yes, if that is what you call your horse.”

  “I’ll miss that horse,” Josh said briefly. He handed the plate back and asked, “Could I have some more of that tea?”

  Sequatchie turned and spoke to the old woman, who quickly came and filled Josh’s cup.

  He drank it and said, “What is it?”

  “Chuckaberry, very good for you,” the woman said.

  Josh was surprised that she spoke English. “It was very good.” He hesitated, then said, “I hate to be so much trouble.”

  Neither of the two who watched him responded. They stood there looking down on him, and finally Josh found that despite himself, he was drifting off into sleep. “Can’t stay awake.”

  The last thing he heard was the woman saying, “Good. He live now.”

  “Yes, until he gets shot again.”

  Sequatchie’s voice seemed to come from far away. Josh wanted to argue that, but sleep spread over him like a warm blanket and he drifted from the land of consciousness into that other place where the spirit seemed to be hidden in deep mist.

  ****

  “Good. You strong man.” Sequatchie had pulled the bandage off of Josh’s chest and studied the raw, puckered scar.

  Josh moved his shoulders carefully. There was still pain, and he knew he would have discomfort for some time. Yet for the past three days he had grown steadily stronger. He looked across at Sequatchie, who was sitting on a log outside the cabin. It was cold and snow covered the ground, but the Indian wore only a thin doeskin vest, a pair of leggings over his breechcloth, and a pair of calf-length moccasins. From inside the cabin, Josh heard small thumping sounds. He knew it was Awenasa pounding corn to make meal. “Maybe I could help with that,” he said. “I would like to do something.”

  “Woman’s work.”

  “I wish my mother had thought that way,” Josh replied.

  Sequatchie smiled briefly. There was a sense of humor in the man tha
t had surprised Josh. He had thought of Indians as being stoic and devoid of humor. However, the few days he had spent with these two and others from the village who came to sit and watch him from time to time had convinced him otherwise. As he observed them, he discovered that their humor ran freely when strangers were not present. They had learned through sad encounters with the white man to keep themselves behind a stolid wall of seeming indifference.

  Josh was sitting on another log that was chopped halfway through. He picked up the hatchet that had been used to do the job. It was a rather flimsy instrument made of inferior metal. He looked at it and at the log. “You need a good ax. You could cut through a log like this a lot quicker with one than with this hatchet.”

  Sequatchie shrugged. “That my father’s tomahawk,” he said, as if that settled all things.

  Quickly Josh looked up, and a thought came to him. These Indians. They don’t like change. He’d rather chop through a tree with this tomahawk and take two days than have a new ax. Josh was, however, aware that Sequatchie was interested in the white man’s ways, for he asked many questions and seemed willing enough to answer Josh’s inquiries. One of the first things Josh had asked was, “Did he take my gun—the man who shot me?”

  “Yes, take everything you have. Except your clothes.”

  Sequatchie looked at Josh again, his face steady in the bright sunlight. There were children playing around the other cabins, their thin voices sometimes laughing, sometimes crying out in anger. The adults of the tribe, especially the women, were busy moving about their work. There were no men in sight, and Josh asked, “Where are the rest of the warriors?”