Beyond the Quiet Hills

by Aaron McCarver

  Disappointed and angry at the refusal of the Cherokee to join in the war, Logan turned toward the Clinch and Holston rivers. He and his marauding warriors rode with a vengeance, stealing, burning, scalping, and ravaging the frontier settlements and the thin line of forts along those rivers. At each place after the raid, Logan left a war club behind as a threat and a challenge. War clouds hung over Watauga and other settlements in the area, and unless something was done, no whites would be safe in the territory. It was a time for action, and unless something changed, the whites of the Colonies would be kept pinned to the small strip along the eastern seaboard, and the great westward migration would stop before it actually began.

  ****

  As soon as Elizabeth saw Hawk’s face, she knew something was wrong. Rising from her chair where she had been sewing a new garment for the baby, she came to him at once. Her voice was breathless, as it sometimes got when she was under stress. “What is it, Hawk?” she murmured, reaching up to lay her hand on his chest.

  Covering Elizabeth’s hand, Hawk shook his head. He had left early that afternoon, and now a vague, troubling expression reflected in his eyes as he said, “Lord Dunmore has called for the militia of the Holston Territory to join him in fighting the Shawnee.”

  Elizabeth’s heart suddenly beat faster, and her hand trembled under his. “Will . . . will the Watauga militia join?”

  “Some will.”

  Elizabeth knew him very well, and a small shiver of fear gripped her heart as she asked, “That means you, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, I’ll have to go.”

  Elizabeth had endured the rumors of the outbreaks of the Shawnee with fortitude. Now, however, that the moment had come for her husband to put himself under the threat of the vicious and bloodthirsty tribesmen, she felt terribly weak. She suddenly had a frightening memory of her husband, Patrick, his bloody body as he had been cut down by Indians, and something in her protested, No . . . no, not again! Once was enough! Despite her resolutions, tears gathered in her eyes. She blinked them away quickly, however. I must be strong. I can’t let him see me like this. “When will you leave?” she asked quietly.

  “At first light. We have a long way to go.” He put his arms around her, and for some time they stood there, not moving. A quietness filled the room and both of them were saddened by the sudden interruption of their lives. Hawk knew better than Elizabeth the dangers that lay ahead, but he knew that her fears were greater than his.

  “I’ll come back to you,” he whispered and then kissed her cheek. He stroked her hair and was filled with the surprise that always came to him at the blessing of this woman whom God had sent into his life.

  Elizabeth wrapped her arms around him, clinging to him as a drowning swimmer clings to a log that comes floating by as the last hope. He was strong and vital, and the life in him was powerful, yet she well knew that one arrow, one musket ball, or one blow of a tomahawk could end all that in an instant. She buried her face against his chest and shut her eyes tightly. “Come back to me, Hawk,” she whispered, then lifted her arms and pulled his head down to take his kiss.

  ****

  Hawk had explained to the children all of the news that he had given Elizabeth the night before. Now as he put on his hunting shirt and picked his rifle from the pegs over the door, he thought how hard it had been. “It’s different for a married man,” he had told Elizabeth. “Especially for one with children.” It had been Sarah who had taken it the hardest. She had been afraid and unable to conceal it. The boys had done better, but he saw the looks of apprehension in both of their faces.

  Now as Hawk slung his gear together, preparing to load his horse and join the others, he looked up to see Andrew come in through the front door. He was wearing buckskins with his coonskin cap and holding his rifle firmly in his hands.

  Taken somewhat by surprise, Hawk said, “You going hunting, Andrew?”

  “I’m going with you, Pa.”

  Hawk blinked with surprise and turned to face the young man. He had half expected Andrew to do something rash. As mildly as he could, he said, “Andrew, you’ve got to stay—”

  “There’s no sense talkin’, Pa. I’m old enough to be in the militia, and I’m going. It would be better,” he said quietly, “if you took it well. I’d hate to have to sneak around and join behind your back. You can say anything you please, but my mind’s already made up.”

  “Have you told your mother about this?”

  “Yes, I told her just now.”

  “What did she say?”

  Andrew hesitated, then shook his head. “She’s afraid for me, of course, just like she’s afraid for you. But this isn’t a thing that I can put off.”

  At that moment Elizabeth came in from outside, and Hawk saw that she was keeping her composure only by a distinct effort. Her face was usually in repose, but now there were lines of strain, and a panic appeared in her eyes that she could not hide. She stood beside Andrew and shook her head slightly. “Must you do it, son?”

  “I’ve got to, Ma. I couldn’t call myself a man if I didn’t do what I could for this place and for our neighbors.”

  “Son, you have to think—”

  “I know what you’re going to say, Pa. Somebody’s going to have to stay here and take care of Ma and Sarah, Hannah, and Josh, but Jacob will be here to do that.”

  For a few moments they stood there, Hawk trying to persuade Andrew to change his mind, but finally Hawk saw that it was useless. He went over and put his arm around Elizabeth and fixed his eyes on the strong figure of his stepson. “I’m against it,” he said quietly, and then he found himself smiling. “But I have to tell you, in all honesty, I’m proud of you, Andy. You’ve become a man.”

  Elizabeth knew there was no persuading him to stay. She gave one final look of half desperation to her son, then said, “Hawk, watch out for him.”

  Andrew laughed. He felt better now that both his parents had agreed and said in a teasing fashion, “I’ll look out for him, Ma.”

  At that moment both Sarah and Jacob came in the door, and Sarah said, “You’re not going, too, are you, Andy?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Sarah had already seemed about to cry, and now tears formed in her large eyes.

  Andrew stared at her with astonishment. “Well, I can’t believe that you’re going to miss me!” He went over and put his arms around Sarah and kissed her on the cheek. “Don’t worry, sis. I’ll be all right.”

  Jacob had watched all this with astonishment. Andrew had said nothing at all to him about going, and it came as a shock. Somehow he felt that he must do something to equal his brother, and he said quickly, “I’ll go, too.”

  “No, son. Someone has to stay behind with Elizabeth and the children.”

  “Then Andrew should stay,” Jacob said, his face flushed.

  Andrew was the younger of the two, but somehow he seemed more mature. He turned to face his half brother and said quietly, “I guess you got more reason to stay than I have.”

  At once Jacob understood that he was referring to Abigail. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came to him. Somehow he felt that he had been amiss not to have volunteered to go with his father. After all, he was older. And now as he looked at the pride in Hawk’s eyes as he gazed at Andrew, Jacob felt a tinge of misery but saw that it was useless to protest. I should have done what Andrew’s done, he thought, watching his father’s face carefully. Then he would have been proud of me instead of his other son.

  Sarah did not sense the interchange between her two brothers, and now she piped up, asking, “Are you going to go tell Abigail good-bye, Andrew?”

  “No reason to,” Andrew muttered. Then he forced himself to smile. “You tell her good-bye for me, all right?”

  “All right. I will.”

  Hawk hated good-byes and now said, “Well, the quicker we go, the quicker we’ll get back.” He embraced Elizabeth, kissed her, then went over to the cradle and picked Joshua up. “Son, you be a good boy. Grow up
while I’m gone. Put some meat on your bones.” He then turned to Hannah and held back the tears as he kissed her good-bye.

  Andrew embraced his mother, then said, “I guess I’m ready, Pa.”

  Hawk picked up his rifle and his gear, and when he reached the door, he suddenly turned and looked at his family. “I’ll miss all of you,” he said simply.

  Elizabeth moved outside, holding the baby and watching as the two men arranged their gear on their horses, then swung into the saddle. “God go with you,” she whispered and waved as they turned and left at a fast gallop. “I think it would be good to say a prayer for them,” she said. “Jacob, you’re the man of the house now. You pray.”

  Taken off guard, Jacob managed to mumble a few words, asking for a safe return. When he had said the “Amen,” he found himself wishing for the first time that he could have prayed to God as he should. He watched his father and brother disappear, and something cold grew in his stomach and he found himself more miserable than he would have imagined. He had not realized how his feelings for his father had begun to change, and even how close they now felt, despite their problems. Now as he turned to begin the chores, he felt a heaviness he knew would not soon pass away.

  ****

  Almost at the same time that Chief Logan had tried to entice the Cherokee to join his rebellion, Virginia’s military commander, Lord Dunmore, began to pull his forces together. Sending out an order for the militia to gather, he formed a plan to divide his army into two wings. The southern wing, under the command of Colonel Andrew Lewis, would be composed almost entirely of mountain men from the western counties. The other wing Dunmore himself would command, and many of the northern frontiersmen were gathered at Fort Pitt. Dunmore’s initial plan was to build a fort at the Kanawha River at Point Pleasant on the Ohio. Then the two forces would combine to strike the Shawnee villages along the Scioto River near the Pickaway Plains.

  It was only in the later days of August that the Watauga militia met the rest of the command at Shelby’s Fort. From there, the entire force set off for the Ohio River, a march of some two hundred miles. They reached Point Pleasant on October 9 and set up a camp.

  Unknown to Lord Dunmore, or any of the militia, Chief Cornstalk, the most powerful of the chiefs that formed the enemy army, had been watching both wings through his spies. It became obvious to Cornstalk that the large army was still faraway. He summoned the Shawnee warriors and the allies—the Mingo, Delaware, and Wyandot to arms, and they rushed to the call in large numbers. Cornstalk’s aim was to destroy the smaller force under Colonel Lewis, which included the Watauga militia, then attack the larger force.

  The attack began when Cornstalk’s forces halted just above the mouth of the Kanawha River. After dark they crossed the Ohio River, and just as dawn was breaking, the large force of Indians waited the signal to attack the white men who camped below in a valley. The warriors were painted for war, hungry for scalps and for revenge. As the first gray light of dawn touched the hills to the north, they crouched hidden in the forest, gripping their muskets and testing the edges of their tomahawks, their eyes glowing in the early-morning light.

  “It’s been a hard trip, Andrew,” Hawk remarked. He was sitting in front of a small fire roasting a squirrel, and now he took it out and tested it with the tip of his knife. “Not quite done,” he remarked.

  “Mine is,” Andrew said. He was also roasting a squirrel, and now he pulled it back and tried to pull it off of the green stick of wood. “Ow!” he yelled. “It’s hot!” He juggled the brown bit of meat until it grew cooler, then began tearing at it hungrily. “Sure tastes good. I just wish squirrels were as big as coons.”

  “Would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Hawk was more patient, and finally his meat cooled. He began to pull it off, chewing thoughtfully as he studied Andrew. He was pleased with the young man’s endurance, for it had been a hard march down to the Pickaway Plains. They lay now in the fork of two creeks, and dawn was only minutes away.

  “Wish I had some of your ma’s flapjacks and johnny cakes and fried ham,” he said.

  “Ah, you’re just soft, Pa,” Andrew grinned. He chewed the tough meat, then smiled and nodded. “I wouldn’t mind havin’ some of that myself.”

  Hawk looked over the forces and tried to estimate how they would do in a pitched battle. Almost all of them were experienced frontiersmen, but at least a fourth of the men had never heard a shot fired in anger. They were new to the frontier, untested and untried, and as Hawk lifted his eyes, trying to peer through the darkness, he wondered how many Indians lay out there somewhere. A vague feeling of unease moved through him, and he thought, Am I getting old or am I afraid of a fight? He stood up, holding the remains of the squirrel in his hands, cocked his head slightly to one side, and listened intently.

  “Do you hear something, Hawk?” The speaker was a young man named Tom Feller, one of Hawk’s neighbors. He was just married, with a baby on the way, and his wife had cried and begged him to stay home. Feller, however, had merely laughed, telling her, “Don’t worry, Edna. I’ll be back.”

  Now Feller was watching rather anxiously. He was a good shot, but he had never been in any sort of battle, having arrived in Watauga from North Carolina only a few months earlier. “What is it?” he asked nervously.

  “Nothing. That’s what bothers me.”

  “How can nothing bother you?” Feller demanded.

  Hawk did not know how to explain it. It was something that was built up in a man over long periods of time in the wilderness. Sometimes silence meant as much as a noise. For example, he knew that right now there was an absence of the usual animal cries that one would have expected to begin at dawn. Perhaps it was nothing—but he well knew that the birds and the animals quieted when there was human movement, and the unnatural silence troubled him.

  At that moment Captain Lewis came walking rapidly out of the waning darkness. “You all right, Spencer?”

  “Yes, we are, Captain,” Hawk replied.

  Lewis was a short, muscular man with a deep chest and a full beard, rich brown but beginning to be speckled with gray. His deep-set eyes swept the territory as he peered into the darkness. “I don’t feel good about this. We’d better pull ourselves into tighter ranks.”

  “All right, Captain,” Hawk said. He liked Lewis and had confidence in the man who had survived more than one Indian war. Now he murmured, “Some of the men haven’t ever heard a shot fired.”

  “That’s right. Have ’em scattered out among your more experienced men.”

  “All right, Captain. I’ll do that.”

  But he had no time to carry out the order, for even as the two men stood there speaking, a broken cry rose up and was cut off abruptly. It was a cry of fear, of terror, and it ended with a slight gurgling noise.

  Hawk knew that sound. It was a knife slitting the throat of an unwary militiaman. “Indians!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “Heads up! Make every shot count!”

  His father’s cry caught Andrew MacNeal off guard. He had just bitten off a huge bite, but at the scream that split through the morning’s silence in an eerie, ghostlike fashion, and his father’s urgent warning, he spat it out and made a wild grab for his musket. Shots suddenly rang out up ahead at the joining of the creek, and he heard his father calling out to form a line of battle.

  “Find yourself some cover. They’ll be coming in soon,” he yelled. Then he turned and said, “Andrew, get behind that log over there.”

  “Yes, sir!” Andrew threw himself behind the log, checked his priming, and quickly put his powder horn and cartridge box beside him. He was surprised to find that he was calm. One part of his brain was screaming out that he might be dead, but he found himself able to override the fear as he watched the experienced mountain men find cover. He had no time to think for long, for a flicker of movement caught his attention and his father’s musket suddenly exploded, almost in his ear. Andrew heard a muffled cry, and the movement suddenly ceased.

  “You got that on
e,” Tom Feller grinned. “Now I’ll get me one.”

  Straining his eyes, Andrew saw little to shoot at. He had thought that a battle would be where two forces would come together, both in plain sight, but he soon discovered that the Indians were too wily for that. They flitted from tree to tree, almost invisible, so that all he ever got was a glance. Three times he shot, and three times he was bitterly disappointed, knowing that he had missed.

  The battle had not gone on for more than five minutes when suddenly Jude Satterfield, who was standing behind a tree to Andrew’s left, stepped out to get a better shot, but he never got it off. Andrew heard the sound of the bullet as it made a dull thud, and he saw Jude driven back. He fell to the ground, and Andrew sprang to him, crying, “Are you all right?” But looking down, he saw that the bullet had taken the man directly in the throat and blood was spouting like a fountain. Jude was trying to speak, but he could not. As he bent over the man and pulled him half up, he tried to stop the flow, even though he knew it was hopeless. He saw the frantic light of fear in Jude’s eyes, and then the eyes dimmed, and with a cough Jude kicked twice, clawing at his throat, then stiffened and drew still.

  “Andy, watch out!”

  Andrew heard his father’s cry and leaped for his musket, which he had just reloaded. This time he did see an Indian, a coppery figure painted with lurid colors who had burst out of the trees and was running straight for the line. He was joined by others, but Andrew could only see this one. His eyesight seemed to play him a trick so that the fierce visage of the Indian swelled and grew enormous before his eyes. He could even see the markings clearly on the face. Lowering his rifle, he put the bead right on the man’s chest and pulled the trigger almost without thinking. The spark hit the frizzen and the rifle exploded, the shock of it striking hard against Andrew’s shoulder. Involuntarily he closed his eyes, but at once he lowered his musket and saw that the Indian had stopped, as if he had run into a tree. He stood for one moment, looking down at the hole that began to leak red blood down the war paint, the blues and greens and ochres on his chest, and then he fell forward, his fingers clawing at the ground.