Eye of the Raven

by Eliot Pattison

  “We met Skanawati on the old trail,” a familiar voice interceded. With an uneasy glance at Duncan, Conawago settled on the other side of the woman. “We spoke and we listened.”

  The woman’s eyes lit with something like joyful anticipation. “I only knew you were wise in the ways of the old prayers. Johantty did not tell me you were also the one my son met on the trail!”

  Duncan did not at first understand when she gestured to Conawago’s shoulder, but his friend did. Loosening his buttons, he slid his shirt off his shoulder. She stared at the sign of the dawnchasers in silence, wonder rising on her face as it had on Skanawati’s when they had first met him on the trail.

  “Jiyathondek!” she suddenly cried, loud enough for all to hear. Hearken! In moments a dozen villagers had crowded round, looking at the tattoo with the same awed expressions. The woman called out Johantty’s name, and the drumming faltered a moment as the drummers changed. “Johantty and his uncle, Johantty and Skanawati, found what they think is the beginning of the dawnchaser path,” she declared, glancing again at Conawago’s tattoo with the excitement of a great discovery.

  His uncle. In the Iroquois world, a boy’s maternal uncle played a much bigger role in his life than his father. Johantty had been at the chief’s side at Ligonier and had played a role at every stage of the violent drama since. Skanawati had been preparing him.

  “Tell them,” the woman said to the youth.

  “Rocks like a—” he turned and asked a quick question of Conawago, who offered a whispered reply, “—like a chimney. Signs of animals carved in the rocks, below a sign of the rising sun.”

  “A giant cottonwood at the opposite side of the clearing,” Conawago put in, and Johantty nodded excitedly.

  “Skanawati was like a boy when he returned that day,” the woman continued. “It was a sign. He went to the Grand Council in Onondaga,” she explained, referring to the capital of the confederation. “He said we could say no to the Europeans now.”

  “No?” Duncan asked.

  “No. No to everything.”

  It was, he realized, the beginning of the chief’s efforts to return his people to their own traditions. “What happened?”

  The woman shrugged. “He spoke for hours that night, won many chiefs over. But the next day British traders arrived with new guns and rum and bolts of red wool. When he came back he said he had misunderstood, that the sign was meant just for our village. That is where we are moving, to be close to the old shrines.”

  As Johantty bent with his wooden shovel to toss on a final scoop of loose soil, the objects around his neck swung outward, an amulet pouch, and on a separate strand something else Duncan had not fully seen before. He remembered the feeling of long hairs dangling on his neck the night Johantty had jumped him and had assumed they were bundled with his amulet. Now Duncan plainly saw the separate object, a piece of wood with threads, not hairs, fastened to it. He had seen an identical one the day before, in Ohio George’s horde of stolen objects.

  When Johantty finished Duncan gestured to the strange necklace. “Did you make that?”

  The youth shook his head. “Magic spider. Dances in winter.”

  Not comprehending, Duncan tentatively reached out. Johantty let him touch it, lift it. It was incredibly light. He saw now that the wood was a small oval cork, the threads silk. “Where did you get this?”

  It was Stone Blossom who replied. “His uncle brought it back from the settlements. A friend there gave it to him to be remembered to Johantty, as a gift.”

  “Settlements? You mean Shamokin?”

  She shook her head. “The Quaker city.”

  “Why?” Duncan asked urgently, knowing he was touching again on the mysteries of the boundary trail. “Why did the chief of the Grand Council go to Philadelphia?”

  Stone Blossom looked back over the new grave. “I like the sound of the river from here. It makes a singing over the rocks.”

  She was as inscrutable as an old monk, Duncan thought to himself. He gazed at the villagers as they retreated toward their houses. He saw sadness but no despair. All about him, in this town that was the most removed from European influence of any he had ever known, was a harmony such as he had not experienced since leaving the Highlands. The matriarch rose and began walking toward the stockaded town, as Johantty joined a half a dozen children sitting on the slope below town and began speaking to them with gestures toward the sky. The sun was fast sinking.

  “Skanawati made that young one spend a year at the seat of the Grand Council,” Moses said over his shoulder. “Hours every day Johantty sat with the old men and women to learn all their stories, the rituals, the names of chiefs long dead. Skanawati places great hope in him.”

  The village quieted as the sun disappeared, the inhabitants gathering near their hearths, a small group at the central fire pit continuing the prayers to the spirits, led by Stone Blossom. It was two hours later, the evening meal finished, the other villagers retired to their pallets, when Duncan approached her at the fire, dropping an object from his pack onto the ground in front of her.

  The matriarch did not react at first when she saw the soiled, crushed moccasin in front of her. It had the look of a beautiful thing that had died, a dead flower of the forest.

  “She was killed with her new husband at the boundary tree by the bloody water,” Duncan began. “I think she had started to clear away the debris that would show it to be one of the ancient shrines.”

  “My grandmother’s grandmother,” the woman said at last, “and all the grandmothers before, taught that such places were what rooted our people into the earth, like the—” she looked to Moses, sitting nearby, for help, “—the heavy weight that holds boats safe.”

  “An anchor,” Moses offered.

  “Like the anchor that keeps us safe in all weathers. For centuries the old shrines were maintained and our people lived as one with the spirits of the land. I am to blame, and my brothers and sisters, for it was in our lifetime that the shrines were forgotten, that the children and grandchildren lost interest and stopped tending them.”

  “You sent your adopted daughter to clean the shrine,” Duncan said.

  “She was one of the few who bothered to learn the old ways.” The old woman looked down at the moccasin with a desolate expression. “It is time we moved on. Too many of our buds shrivel before they can blossom.” She turned to Duncan. “They had a Christian marriage in Shamokin, for her husband’s sake, after a bonding ceremony here in the village. There was a great celebration. It was then that Skanawati and I learned she was going with her husband to that far end of the Warriors Path.” The woman looked up, first at Moses, then to Conawago, before turning to Duncan with apology on her face. “If we could open the old root shrines, let the Grand Council know they had been discovered again, we thought all the great chiefs would have the strength to stop selling our lands.”

  Stone Blossom lifted the shoe, futilely rubbing at the stains on the pale doeskin. “I made these for her, in the winter. I would get out of my blankets in the middle of the night and work on them so she would not see. By a fire in the snow I whispered old songs over them to bring her good luck.” A tear rolled down her cheek and landed on the moccasin.

  Duncan looked into her haggard face. “Grandmother,” he asked after a moment, “how many of your village did you send to find the old anchor shrines?”

  “Three. The three who had spent the most years learning the old ways. Then my daughter went with her husband. All gone now. When my son told me of the first two dying I said the spirits must have needed them on the other side more than we needed them here. He said that could be true, but it also could mean someone was trying to keep the old shrines from being reopened along the Warriors Path. He and I did not believe what all those fools said about those lumps of metal being the remains of their souls. He said we owed condolences, to reach them on the other side.”

  But condolences were given by the guilty party. Duncan knew better than to push the
old woman to explain. As he struggled to understand her meaning, a familiar voice solved his dilemma.

  “Skanawati is both war chief and peace chief,” Conawago reminded him. Duncan did not know how long he had been there listening. “Our Skanawati has more of the peace in him. Perhaps his uncle had more of the war.” Something about his day with the dead had calmed his friend. He was still distant, but the anxiety, the strange longing, was gone from his eyes.

  As Stone Blossom nodded, another tear rolled down her cheek. Duncan’s mind raced back to the words of the renegade Red Hand and, as he looked into the old woman’s face, he realized they were probably true. The prior Skanawati, who had died of the pox the year before, had killed the first surveyor. The tribes may not have continued the violence on the survey line, but they may well have started it, playing to the hand of a distant conspirator.

  “The spirits we need,” the matriarch said in a tortured voice, “are not the ones awakened by blood.”

  They sat in silence. Moses heaped more wood on the fire and joined them as they watched the sparks mingle with the stars. The spring frogs chirped.

  “When that first surveyor died,” Duncan asked, “was it known in Shamokin?”

  “I don’t understand,” Stone Blossom replied.

  “The killers now are trying to make it look like Iroquois from Shamokin are responsible for all the deaths.”

  It was Moses who answered. “There was some survey equipment. One of the warriors with the last chief sold it in Shamokin for rum. When he got drunk he did not mind speaking about what he and the old chief had done, killing an enemy of all our peoples.”

  Stone Blossom rose and disappeared into the nearest longhouse, returning a moment later to drop a doeskin packet into Duncan’s lap. “I was going to bury it,” she said. “It is tainted.”

  He unwrapped it to discover an elegant little wooden box, of a kind made for jewelry or keepsakes. It was artfully worked, with an inlaid pattern of diamonds across its front. But a crude design had been scratched into the hinged top, in the shape of a turtle. On the bottom was more scratching, though in very careful block letters. F. Townsend, it said, 1756.

  As Duncan turned with more questions a low rumble rose from the direction of the new grave. Someone was beating the great log drum.

  “Johantty said you must join him after the moon rises, to sing the dead.” Stone Blossom gestured toward a dark object at the edge of the ring. Conawago had retrieved his pack, with his pipes.

  Duncan solemnly nodded. “Can you first tell me when Skanawati learned he was to be a negotiator for the new treaty?”

  “He had already gone down the trail,” the chief’s mother said. “A messenger was sent to him with the news from Old Belt. Johantty is one of our fastest runners. Even so Skanawati had gone very far west.”

  “But Skanawati had been here, preparing the rituals, readying for the move.” It was the closest Duncan dared approach to the dream that had changed the chief’s plans.

  Stone Blossom stared into the fire a long time. “I do not know you well enough,” she said.

  “All the leaders of my clan were killed,” Duncan whispered to her. “I will not let it happen to yours.”

  The old woman studied him with new interest. “A message came from the other side. When I showed him he knew everything had changed.”

  “Showed him what, Grandmother?”

  “I took him to the sacred place that once anchored our village. I showed him the crack in the world.”

  Although they left just after dawn the next morning, when they pulled their canoes onto the bank two miles upstream, Johantty was there with his three companions, tending a fire by a small sweat lodge. The youth had not slept, Duncan was certain, for the two of them had drummed and piped at the graveyard, looking over the river, long past midnight. Wary of asking more questions, Duncan watched as Conawago began stripping to a loincloth, then Johantty pointed to a small wooded island opposite the lodge. They had to cleanse themselves before venturing to the sacred place. Stone Blossom appeared from behind a shrub, wearing nothing but a woolen breechcloth herself, and entered the lodge, into which the other youths were carrying hot stones cradled with sticks. Johantty tossed Duncan a length of wool. Duncan stripped and arranged it like a kilt before stepping into the purifying steam of the lodge.

  An hour later Duncan warily watched the island as Conawago, Stone Blossom, and he approached it. From a distance it had appeared to be just one more wooded hump of rock in the center of the river, an island perhaps two hundred feet long. But in a river filled with little tree-covered islands this one stood out for its dramatic rock formations and clump of misshapen beech trees at the northern end.

  Duncan kept as silent as his guide, watching the old woman, then mimicking her action as she plucked a sprig of sweet cedar from a small tree. Yet even when she stopped and placed the sprig on a flat slab at the highest point of the gnarled ledge rocks and looked at him expectantly, he did not understand. But then he heard the gasp of surprise behind him, and he turned to see Conawago staring at the rock at their feet.

  What Duncan had taken to be cracks and seams in the rock were carvings, dozens of primitive symbols of animals and men, trees and fish. They were very old, even ancient, and the effort to make them with stone-and-wood tools would have been extraordinary. The styles and size varied, some of the carved petroglyphs so worn by weather that they were barely visible. And almost none were entirely visible, for they had been attacked.

  Hammers or axes had been taken to the signs, cracking and splintering the rock, obliterating the stone so that in some cases there was nothing but a rough, shallow bowl of freshly exposed rock left.

  But that was not the worst of the damage. With a long, quivering wail that sent a chill down Duncan’s spine, Stone Blossom knelt at the largest of the carvings, a three-foot-long image of a raven. It was the centerpiece, as if the bird were the leading deity. But the raven was dead, split down the center by a narrow crevasse that continued for over ten feet to the end of the ledge. As the old woman laid her arms on either side of the image and bent low, whispering to it, Duncan followed the crack to the side of the exposed ledge and saw the black burn marks there. Knowing it was made by gunpowder did not change the effect of seeing the crack. It was gut-wrenching. The most remarkable Indian shrine he had ever seen had been destroyed, desecrated by European tools. He could not argue with Stone Blossom’s perception that it portended something terrible for her world.

  “It was here we came to on festival days,” Stone Blossom explained when she was done. “When I was a child, when I was a young woman, when I was a wife and mother. Even as a boy Skanawati would come and sit here for hours. It was always a place of great power.” Her voice choked with emotion as she gazed over the destruction. When she spoke again it was in her native tongue, answering questions softly asked by Conawago.

  Duncan roamed around the wide-open ledge that gave a view of the river in every direction. The symbols were everywhere, and as he found several still intact at the rim of the broad ledge he thrilled at the thought of the ancient hands that had reverently chiseled them into the stone. He touched one of the overhanging beech trees, twisted and stunted by the river winds, and saw how thick its trunk was. It too was ancient. It had witnessed the reverence, heard the chants that would have been used to empower the completed figures.

  He paused, studying the way the rock fell away at the north end. Crude steps, long ago overgrown with lichen, had been cut there. He bent and pushed through the laurel along the edge, dropped off the ledge, and followed the barest shadow of a trail that ran from the bottom step. Broken stems hanging over the bushes indicated that others had recently found the shallow cave at the end of the trail.

  Ancient hands had also worked the walls of the cave, some with chisels like on the ledge above, some with pigments. Most of the images had been recently scraped away with a blade, some covered with bear grease, but he could see features here and there of hunters
with spears, of huge oxlike creatures with short horns, of moose and bears three times the height of the human figures. As he stepped inside, an unmistakable odor rose from the rear of the cave. Someone had defecated against the back wall.

  “She weeps,” Conawago said behind him. He pulled a heavy branch back to let more light into the cave. “She weeps,” he repeated.

  The pain on his friend’s face was so deep Duncan expected to see tears there too. But Conawago’s grief was tempered by an intense fascination, an awe he could not hide. Gazing reverently, his eyes came to rest upon the most intact of the little images. It was a human figure facing one of the ruined bears, holding out not a spear but what looked like the skull of another animal. “This,” he said, “is who we were.”

  He walked slowly along the walls, pausing at each image. “For generations, she says, since long before the formation of the confederation, people of her clan have come here, left offerings, sat under the full moon and performed their chants. Even in the middle of a war the enemies could come here and be as one.”

  Duncan could hear the excitement in Conawago’s tone. Their journeys during the past months had been in search of such places of power. “This is who we were,” Conawago repeated as he gazed again at the image of the man reaching out to the bear, then gestured toward the feces on the wall that had ruined another painting. “This is who we become.”

  “Surely it was Europeans who did this.”

  “Stone Blossom knows who did it. Shamokin Indians, town Indians. Some Iroquois, some town Delawares out on a trapping expedition. They had little success and were on their way home. An English trader going up the river found them camped here and bartered a keg of rum for the few skins they had taken. They spent the day getting drunk here. One of the Indians had been instructed by missionaries and told the others their bad luck came from these graven images. They spent hours drinking and destroying. At some point one remembered they could sell the old images to collectors in Philadelphia, so they tried to pull some up. There used to be a shrine of old human skulls, holy men of the tribes, some from many generations ago. They threw them all in the river.”