Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
PART ONE - EDOHI
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
PART TWO - JOURNEY
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTEREIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
PART THREE - BACKCOUNTRY
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
PART FOUR - CRALE
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY- FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
AFTERWORD
Teaser chapter
SURVEYING THE DAMAGE
The cabin door stood open and movement was visible in the shadows inside. Even so, the watching frontiersman on the ridge facing the cabin was unable to discern exactly what he was seeing.
Another man approached quietly from behind and dropped to his belly beside the first man. “How many killed, Titus?” he asked.
“Don’t know for certain. There’s one man visible there by the woodpile—he’s been scalped. Around the back there’s a woman and a boy, both dead, both scalped. But somebody is inside the door, moving around. Can’t see enough to know who or how many, though.”
The other man reached beneath his hunting shirt and drew out a small spyglass.
“What can you see, Micah?” Titus Fain asked.
“There’s a body in there. A man, I think, though I can’t see anything but the feet. But there’s somebody else, too. Can’t tell much, but I think it may be a child.”
Micah handed the spyglass to Fain, who adjusted it to his eye and peered into the shadowed doorway. He lowered the glass slowly. “It’s a little girl, Micah. I’d say ten years old, maybe eleven.”
“Any other sign of movement?”
“None. I’m going down there.”
“Hold a moment. That may be a little girl down there, but if she’s seen her family slaughtered, and if by chance she has a gun within reach, she could shoot you dead as you approach.”
“So she could. But so also could the tree above us fall down and kill us while we hide here. I’m going down there. It’s likely the poor little gal needs help.”
“Then we’ll go together.”
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Copyright © Cameron Judd, 2011
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ISBN : 978-1-101-55920-8
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PROLOGUE
AUGUST, 1786
Wilderness along the Doe River
Future state of Tennessee
She was old now, and hardly able to get out of her bed even on better days. This day was not a better one. She lay in her small, Cherokee-style cabin and stared upward, not even bothering to turn her gaze out the uncovered door to the lush woodlands around her. There was nothing out there for her now. The world had lost its life and luster.
She lifted her hand and looked at what she held. Small as gravel, but much more valuable, these yellowish pebbles had come from him. Any inherent worth beyond that was not relevant to her. She held them only because she could no longer hold the one who had given them to her.
Her name was Polly. She had been given another name at birth, but he had always called her Polly, so Polly she was. Names hardly mattered now, anyway.
She closed her eyes and slumbered. It was a hot and muggy day in the mountains, but the breeze was moving and angling itself just right to reach her through the door, so she was content. She moved the little stones in her palm with her fingertips and enjoyed the relative comfort provided by the light wind.
In her girlhood and most of her womanhood, her skin had been coppery and dark, beautiful to see. He had always told her that her skin was her most delightful feature, and she had treasured every moment when he caressed her, his rugged hands gentle on her flesh. She dreamed about it as she slept.
When she awakened the day had progressed and the breeze had changed its course so that it no longer came through the door. It was just as well. When evening came the air would be cooler and she would not want a breeze.
As the afternoon waned, Polly rose and with effort made her way out the door. She visited her privy area in the woods and headed back toward the cabin, but had to stop along the way and sit down on a stone to rest. It was that way now—shortness of breath, frequent dizziness, weakness. She despised what age and infirmity were doing to her.
Her eyes drifted closed, and when she next opened them, it was dusk, she was back in her bed, on her back, and someone was in the room with her. She looked over at the man, who was standing nearby. Like Polly, he bore clear evidence of a Cherokee heritage in his physical appearance, mixed with traits of an unaka, or white man. He was grinning at Polly. She said, “Hello, John.”
“Polly.”
“How long have you be
en here?”
“Since I carried you in. I found you on the ground, beside the big sitting stone.”
“I think I went to sleep.”
“Or fainted and went senseless.”
“I’m not well, John. I’m old and sick. I’ll die soon.”
“Don’t say such things, Polly.”
“I want to die. I’m ready. I want to join McCoy. I am alone here, barely able to feed myself.”
“We will keep you fed. I have brought you food today.”
“You have been good to me, John. You and all your family. But I am weary of being a burden to other people. I want to go on.”
“None of us has ever considered you a burden,” said John. “You have been a friend to us, like McCoy was. We consider you as one of us.”
Polly smiled a weary smile. “I have not seen Tom in the longest time,” she said. “He used to come and see me sometimes.”
“He has hidden himself more than before,” John said. “As more people move over the mountain into the backcountry, he hides himself more and more in his shame.”
“There is no shame in having been touched by the Creator.”
“The unakas do not think in the same way about such things, Polly. To them such things are the mark of badness.”
“They are wrong.”
“They are. About many things. But there are more and more of them. They keep coming and the Indian people are pushed away.”
“I want to go to McCoy’s grave now, John. While there is still a bit of sunset light to see it by.”
“Can you stand? Can you walk?”
“If you will hold to me, I can.”
With her every move deliberate and slow, and the woman growing wearier with each step, John led Polly out of the cabin and around to a small meadow, where they stopped at the side of a mounded grave. It bore a plain wooden grave marker that was already beginning to weather and weaken. On it was inscribedMCCOY ATLEY
B 1724 D 1786
The old woman, helped by the man, knelt and touched the carved-in name, tracing her fingers over the letters while tears stained her face.
PART ONE
EDOHI
CHAPTER ONE
“We named her Deborah,” the old clergyman named Eben Bledsoe said to his visitor. The Reverend Professor Bledsoe puffed lightly on a long clay pipe of the same sort taverns kept atop mantelpieces for the shared use of patrons. “After the Old Testament prophetess and judge. It was our hope she would grow into a strong and God-fearing woman like the one she was named after.”
The clergyman’s listener nodded. He was a lean, gray-haired frontiersman with a clean-shaven face of leathery countenance, a face long exposed to sun and wind. He, too, puffed a pipe, one made merely of a hollowed half length of corncob stemmed with a hollow reed. The frontiersman’s name was Crawford Fain, though he was sometimes called by the Cherokee name of Edohi. He was a man of some fame, known across his own country as a great hunter and tracker, and in parts of Europe because of his mention in a fanciful, idealized, and highly popular epic poem about the American frontier. The poem was the product of a dandified baron who had scarcely set foot off his own English property, much less ever visited America’s wilderness.
Wearing a long hunting shirt that was sashed about his lean middle, Fain slumped casually under the flap of a tent pitched in the log station that was home to one James White—hence its name of White’s Fort. It was the heart of a settlement that would be known to future generations as Knoxville.
“Yes, you told me her name in the letter you sent me,” Fain said, frowning at his pipe, which had gone out. “Fine name, Deborah. I’ve always favored it. If ever I’d fathered a daughter, I might have so named her.”
“You have but the one child, sir? A son, I believe?”
“That’s right, Reverend. My boy, Titus. He’s a fine young man. Proud of him. A chip off this old chopping block, as they say. Twenty-five years old now. I can’t believe that sometimes. I wish his mother was living to see him.”
“Same woodcraft talents as his father?”
“The lad could trail a bug’s track on polished granite. Good rifleman and trapper, too.”
“Perhaps he can help you with what I’m asking from you.” It was Bledsoe’s first direct mention of the matter upon which he had summoned Fain to White’s Fort. Fain himself lived in a smaller forted station of his own a few miles away on a stream called Edohi Creek.
The frontiersman looked out through the open stockade door. “Truth is, I ain’t decided yet as to whether I can do what you’re wanting from me.”
Bledsoe’s countenance fell. “Those were not words I’d hoped to hear from you, sir.”
“And I hate to speak them. But I must look at matters as they are, and myself as I am. I’m not the young man who used to drift from fort to fort, station to station, Reverend. I waken each day with ankles and knees aching and a back that don’t want to straighten up for a good hour after I’ve risen. I ain’t the spry pup I was back when I hunted with Mansker those years back.”
“I do understand, sir. I feel Adam’s curse in my own body and bones. But with such an increase in sightings of Deborah of late, it was my hope that the time was right to at last find her.”
Fain knocked the dead ashes from his pipe. “I don’t want to promise what I can’t fulfill. I’ll have to think on this awhile.”
“I would expect nothing else. It’s a daunting challenge I have laid before you. But at the very least there are now signs and trails to follow, something mostly lacking in past years.”
The frontiersman tucked his pipe into the deer-hide pouch that hung across his hunting shirt, slung on a rope strap across one shoulder. “Can I talk to you open and honest, Reverend? Ask you things that need asking without you taking offense to it?”
“Again, I would expect nothing other.”
“All right. You say there are ‘signs and trails’ to follow, but from what you wrote in your letter, I have to consider that these stories you’re hearing could be about any number of people. Your Deborah ain’t the only child who has been took by Indians in this wilderness country of ours.”
Bledsoe nodded. “No, sir, she is not,” he admitted. “But the stories of late talk of a woman with hair yellow as the sun, and describe her as being of the age Deborah would be.”
“Has she any marks or scars or such of the sort that would linger from her earliest days on to her grown-up years?”
“One. A mark in the colored portion of her left eye. A gray streak in the brown of her eye, spanning from the pupil downward. There since birth, and I’m guessing a mark that would last for life.”
“And have you heard anyone say that this yellow-haired woman you’re talking about has such a marked eye?”
Bledsoe stared off past Fain, unhappy. “No. No. The honest truth, sir, is that I can’t know if the young woman I hear of is my own missing girl. All I know is that she might be. I must find the truth, but I am not equipped with the skill, the youth, or the knowledge necessary to engage such a quest myself. And thus I have summoned you here. I wish to hire you to follow the track of these tales, find this yellow-haired maiden, and determine if she is my own Deborah.” He paused. “And if she is, I want you to see if she might be persuaded to let her old father see again the child of his loins, after so many years of separation. And of course I would pay you with liberality, and we can strike our agreement in writing, if it would please you.”
Fain thought deeply a few moments, silent. He sincerely pitied the old clergyman, but he was a man of the frontier and aware of hard realities Bledsoe might be inclined to overlook or push aside. He had to speak.
“Reverend, sir, you told me I could speak forthrightly, and I shall. The fact is, according to the facts you provided in the letter that brought me here, the woman you believe may be your Deborah appears to be moving about freely, traveling alone, not among the Indians at all. You say she’s gone from station to station, settlement to settlement, seemin
gly unencumbered. So I must point out, sir, that this woman, if she is your daughter, could have sought you out on her own if she had a mind to do so. It is well-known that you are where you are, that you are creating churches across this wilderness and talking much of building an academy to bring schooling to the frontier. The fact that she has not sought you out of her own will might indicate either that she is not Deborah at all or that, if she is, she is content with her state of life and not prone to unsettle it by returning to her long-ago past.”
Bledsoe’s lips moved slightly as if to reply, but no words came. He appeared to be on the verge of tears.
Fain went on, gently. “It happens, sir. I’ve seen it more than once. A child, even a child of some age, is taken by the Indians and adopted into their society, and over time becomes accustomed to such a life. Refuses to acknowledge the former life or return to it even if opportunity arises. It is a more common thing than you might guess.”
Bledsoe nodded sadly. “I’ve heard such stories, and acknowledge that such might apply. But keep in mind another possible reason for this state of affairs, sir. If the yellow-haired woman is indeed my Deborah, and if indeed she is now free and moving about the wilderness at her own behest and whim, she might not have come to me simply because she does not know her own parentage, does not know who she is. Deborah was taken as a small child. I doubt any memory remains of her earliest days, or her capture. And those who took her would likely not have either the knowledge or the inclination to tell her of her past.”
Fain pondered and nodded. “I won’t dispute a word of that, sir.”
“There is only one way to settle these mysteries and make peace in my own mind, Mr. Fain. I must locate this enigmatic young woman and learn for myself whether she might be the child wrested from me all those years ago. And there is no one within my reach better suited to undertake such a quest than the famous Crawford Fain, the great long hunter.”
Long Hunt (9781101559208) Page 1
