Dance on the Wind (34 page)

Clenching his teeth was the only thing that kept him from hollering out right then and there—to tell that Indian the doe was his. Instead, Titus struggled to fight down that impulse, his mind racing to sort out what to do with a problem he had never before confronted. A man could figure out an answer to everything, he reminded himself. If he just had enough time, and thought on it hard enough. It wasn’t like he was the smartest fella in school back there in Rabbit Hash. Not the quickest, but he could learn, once he put his mind to it. And this couldn’t be any different, he told himself.

Just maybe he could show himself and somehow work it so the Injun and he could split up the doe. At least he’d have half the meat that way … and a damned good story to tell the others when he finally showed up downriver a ways.

Yet just about the time he was convincing himself of the wisdom he would show by negotiating half the doe with the Indian and was finally ready to show himself, Bass snapped to a sudden stillness.

A chirping whistle floated from the nearby woods.

That’s a Injun. Damn, if there ain’t another’un out there.

As he crouched lower in his stand of brush, frozen and wide-eyed, Titus watched the would-be thief stop and listen, then eventually put a hand to his mouth, answering in the same chirping birdcall. Another whistle came from the forest, this time from a different direction than the first. This second call, too, was answered by the meat thief.

It was with the keenest curiosity that Titus stared at the four warriors who emerged from the woods to join the first. One of them carried what appeared to be an old smoothbore musket. For a few moments all five appeared to share some words, yet their talk was so quiet, he could
hear nothing of it. From the far timber came another chirp, which one of the newcomers answered. They all turned to gaze toward the north.

Like them, Titus watched that fringe of the timber, when his wonder turned to nothing but cold, dry fear in his belly. Swallowing hard around the lump swelling in his throat, he counted six more of them emerging from the shadows—four carrying short bows, and another two with guns, what appeared to be a pair of old French fusils. Half of them already dragged some haunches of meat and green hides they had rolled up, all of it placed on improvised sleds they had constructed from saplings cut down and lashed together with ivy and grapevine. It would be easy enough to pull those sleds over the brush and what little icy snow slicked the ground.

They all came to the doe, talking a little louder now that there were so many to discuss what had been found by one of their number. Still, he could not make out much of the words at all, only fragments of sounds that meant nothing to him in the least. Except to realize that these were red men. Hunters and warriors. The sort his grandpap had fought back in the Shawnee War and two years later in the Cherokee War. These were the sort of Indian the white settlers were driving right up against the Mississippi, he figured. Not the sort of Indian to take kindly to a solitary white hunter caught alone and far from his own.

The breeze tousled their hair, some of which was left long. For others the hairstyle of choice was a roach greased so that it stood straight up from the forehead to taunt any would-be enemy into taking that war trophy. Yet none of them wore any paint. From his grandpap and the old men, Titus had heard so much about the hideous paint—looking now to study each of the faces of the eleven who continued to argue something with growing urgency.

One of them pointed—south. An older man wagged his head emphatically, pointing off in another direction. Back to the north.

A third stepped forward, gestured to the doe, then gestured to the south with his bow. Several of the group
grunted their agreement with whatever he had declared, for they nodded as they inched up to stand behind him.

Honest-to-goodness Injun warriors! It sent a new shiver down his spine.

A heartbeat later it began to sink in. They were discussing him! Talking over who must have killed the doe. They had to realize the hunter was somewhere close—simply because the carcass was still warm when found. They had to figure the hunter couldn’t have got very far before the deer was discovered.

He wasn’t sure he breathed at all, afraid even to do that right then in his hiding place. With growing certainty Titus feared these warriors were sure to hear his heart hammering against his ribs if it continued to get any louder—what with the way the blood rushed up his neck cords and roared in his ears, thundering in his temples.

Some of them crouched to study the ground around the gut-pile and the carcass, then peered off into the forest, talking to one another, gesturing. There wasn’t any one thing he could put his finger on to tell him that they knew of him—maybe just the way they turned their heads to regard the woods around them, the way their voices got quiet, the way the eight of them strung their bows and the other three slowly brought up their long-barreled guns, those huge muzzles swinging out toward the timber surrounding the small glade like wide black eyes.

He could not remember ever finding himself on this end of a gun before—staring down the barrel of a weapon that might well be used against him.

With that moment came clarity of thought, the sharp-honed realization they were bound to discover him once they spread out and crossed those few rods between them and where he crouched in hiding, his legs beginning to cramp in pain. He had to act.

Simple, untarred fear was what compelled him to move at last. Nothing as complicated as the consideration of his options. To his uncluttered mind in this, his first confrontation with real Indians, Titus decided he had no options. It was run or die.

As he exploded from the brushy undergrowth, heading back toward the river at a sharp angle to the southwest,
Titus heard them shout to one another behind him. Surprised, confused for the moment—perhaps even afraid there might be more than one. How he hoped their fear might delay them, if only for a moment or so to contemplate what they should do, how many they might be facing down, if there might be more enemies lying in wait for them to make a mistake. Oh, how he wanted them to be seized with some of the uncertainty, nay—the outright fear—that drove his cramped legs into frantic motion.

Leaping, dodging, sprinting, making for the far-off riverbank still at least a mile away. How far down the others had gone before they put to and tied up to await his delivery of their evening meal … he had no idea. Only a hope. Nothing he could call a real prayer—the way his folks prayed, or the prayers of that circuit man who came around to hold his Bible meetings, then went home with one family or the other, gone to dinner and a dry place to sleep before moving on to another village the following day.

No, what Titus did as he sprinted through the icy forest, trying his best to stay where the thin layer of wet snow did not blanket the ground near as deeply, was to try to will those four boatmen to sense the danger he was in. To call out to them with nothing more than his thumping heart, since he could not cry out with his throat grown raw from every gasp of the cold air he dragged into his lungs. So far away, they wouldn’t hear him anyway, he told himself.

But Titus could hear the hunting party coming: whooping, hollering, crying out in shrill voices. Those yelps, more than the crashing brush he heard whipping his pursuers, drove him onward. Wishing he had loaded the rifle as soon as he had shot the doe. At least he would then have one shot. One last shot before they came within reach of him. To drop one of his killers—a way to even things up, he thought.

But that didn’t matter either. He cursed his luck. Cursed his stupidity. None of it mattered because he hadn’t loaded his rifle. Never had to think about it before. Forests where he grew up, hunted, came of age as a woodsman—those wooded hills were no longer haunted
by red men. His grandpap’s kind, and a few expeditionary army forces—they had pushed the Injuns farther west. Bass had simply never had to worry about bumping into redskins before.

He stumbled, spilling to one knee, the rifle skidding from his grasp in a skiff of snow iced across a patch of leafy brush. Lumbering to his feet, Titus told himself to forget the pain crying out from his knee. Scooping up the rifle and a handful of dead leaves, he pushed on through the woods, trying to forget the bare limbs and thorny branches that whipped at his face.

They thundered behind him, breaking through the underbrush, some exhorting the others with chants and war cries—he swore he could even hear the hard breathing of a few of the closest ones, grunting as they chased him.

Plunging into a thicket of bramble, he felt the thorns claw at his jerkin, catch at the cuff on his britches, slash the back of his hands to ribbons as he swept ahead—struggling to hack his way through to the far side of the briars. Now he had a good-sized gash on one eyelid, and it was beginning to ooze enough that it hindered his vision from that eye. As slow as he was in breaking through to the other side—Titus was certain with his every step that he would feel a bullet catch him, maybe an arrow driving deep into those thin, sinewy muscles of his back. By their growing shrieks he knew they were closing on him faster than he would have ever imagined possible.

But then he remembered this was their forest. Not his. And he became all the more frightened—figuring they knew where he was going much better than he. Something cold clutching his belly in a knot made him fear some of the fastest ones might even get somewhere ahead of him and be waiting for him.

The breathing, the grunts, the yelps he heard at his heels, all made him fear that his first run-in with real Indians was going to be his last. Something he simply would not live to tell his grandchildren of, the way his grandpap had sat the young’uns around his knee and told them the chilling, hair-raising stories of just what a dark and bloody ground that Ohio River canebrake country had been of a time not all that long ago.

An angry whine sailed past his ear, followed a heartbeat later by the roar of a musket behind him. He’d never been shot at. Now he felt as if he had become the fleeing game, the bounding, hard-pressed buck or doe, pursued by the hunters, chased through the thickets, driven across the snow as his heart pounded in his chest until he was sure it was going to burst with its next beat.

What a fool he had been to go so far inland to hunt!

His stupidity, along with the fear, the exhaustion, and the utter hopelessness of ever reaching the boatmen alive … it all came slipping in on him like separate fingers to claw the courage right out of him. At least a mile inland, and they must surely have gone much more than a mile downriver. That meant that no matter how he cut back to the river at an angle, he still had more than two miles—maybe even twice that—before he would reach the boatmen’s camp.

How he wished Ebenezer had been with him when the first Indian showed up. For sure he wouldn’t have frozen in fear, Titus thought. Not the way Abigail had told him of how Zane had waded right into the rivermen fixing to abuse a friend of his, Mathilda. The river pilot would do no less for Titus, would he, now? Any of them, maybe even Reuben, the sourest of the lot, would have helped him take care of that first Indian … and they could have slipped away before the others had happed onto the clearing.

His breathing came a little easier. Titus figured he was getting his second wind. Chest didn’t hurt so much now. And the soles of his feet inside that double pair of moccasins didn’t pain him near as much as they had there at first. Maybe they were simply numb. He couldn’t tell, really—not able to feel anything from the ankles down. Like something cold clinging from the end of his legs.

What a fool he was for going so far inland to hunt. A fool for seeking the aloneness with the woods and what game he might find … for now the boatmen could not hear his yells, even if he could have forced his dry mouth, his aching throat, to break free a yelp of warning. There were two things he realized had a crystal certainty at that moment: the Indians were still behind him, crashing
through the brush in his wake; and the boatmen were still somewhere ahead of him, floating somewhere downriver before tying up for the night to await him and the game he was to bring in.

That almost made him laugh, and almost laughing made him want to cry. Instead of carrying in some haunches of fresh venison, he was bringing in some Indians right behind him. As the limbs and thorns whipped across his face, slashed at his eyes, Titus tried to focus on each of their faces, one at a time, to imagine how the four rivermen might look as he came down upon the camp they had made.

Sitting there circling their fire.

Fire!

He could almost smell it. Wanting so bad to stop long enough to get himself a good, long whiff of that fragrance on the cold wind. But he dared not stop for anything … hearing the Indians renew their yelps and cries close behind him. Perhaps they smelled that fire too. Maybe it wasn’t his imagination, after all.

Then he realized warriors would figure on redoubling their efforts to get to him before he got any closer to any sort of help.

It was his sensitive nose that led him across that last half mile of chest-heaving sprint. As an animal might catch the scent of danger on the wind, this time Titus followed the scent of man’s woodsmoke toward the east bank of the Mississippi.

Then in the murky light of that late afternoon as the air seemed to grow all the colder, he thought he spotted a distant twinkle of light. Almost like a faraway star flung against the dark shimmer of twilight coming down upon that river valley, a flicker of something against the dark, rolling band of the Mississippi itself. The light danced and rose, quivering from side to side. Their fire!

He tried to yell, but nothing came out—finding his tongue pasted to the floor of his mouth, unable to budge it free.

Then he saw movement cross in front of the light of that fire, remembering how he had happened upon the four of them early last autumn, back on the upper Ohio.
Their black shadows momentarily cut off the light as they moved about the fire. He tried again to yell, his tongue freed a bit, and sensed his warning come out as a squeak escaping his parched throat.