People of the Weeping Eye (North America's Forgotten Past) (5 page)

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Authors: W. Michael Gear,Kathleen O'Neal Gear

BOOK: People of the Weeping Eye (North America's Forgotten Past)
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T
he Copper Lands lay along the rocky western shores of the great lakes. Some called them the Freshwater
Seas. For generations local peoples had mined sacred copper from the green-crusted rocks. Copper was Traded the length and breadth of the great rivers. Beaten flat, sculpted into images of gods, heroes, and sacred shapes, it was prized by the great lords of the south for its polished beauty. Shaped into ax heads, maces, and jewelry, the mere possession of it demonstrated a man’s authority, wealth, and status. Ownership of copper was the province of chiefs and chieftesses, of Priests, Dreamers, and great warriors. The mighty and influential adorned their bodies and buildings with it, and the lucky few carried it with them to their graves.
A small nugget of copper was worth a man’s life. Empires had risen and fallen over its control. While occasional small nuggets had been found in the southeastern mountains, the finest copper came from around the great freshwater lakes. Mostly the locals mined it, hammered it into shape, and Traded it downriver. But on occasion, a willing individual with more than his fair share of ambition dickered with the local tribes for the right to mine his own.
The man known as Trader wiped a gritty sleeve across his sweat-streaked face and looked up at the gray scudding clouds. They came in low over the choppy waters of the great lake, driven by a wet and pregnant north wind. Trader could smell the moisture, cool, promising rain and dreary skies.
For three days he had worked in this hole. Spoil dirt from generations of previous excavators had trickled down the steep slope. From the lip of the hole, Trader had a good view of the river valley below, where Snow Otter’s village—a cluster of bark-sided lodges—stood on a knoll above the sandy beach. Canoes, looking like dark sticks from this distance, were pulled up on the bank. Smoke puffed from the lodges in blue wreaths.
The surrounding hills were covered with thick growths of pine, hemlock, silver fir, birch, maple, and cedars. To the north, he could see the endless horizon of the great
lake. He had never felt comfortable in these far northern lands. Born in the warm hickory woodlands of the south, he’d never adjusted to the chill that stalked the blue shadows beneath the conifers and birch. He could sense it, waiting, knowing that the days need but shorten before it would creep out and smother the trees, soil, and stone.
Trader swiped at the cloud of mosquitoes humming around his head. He was handsome, with a finely formed face, strong jaw, and high forehead. Not particularly tall, he was wide shouldered and well muscled from years of plying a paddle against the current. His face bore only outlines of tattoos, as if they had been interrupted before being finished. His eyes were surrounded by forked-eye designs; and a bar ran from ear to ear high across his cheeks and over his broad nose. When he laughed, his teeth were white and straight, his lips mobile and full. Women smiled when they met his gaze, a quickening sparkle in their eyes.
He turned his attention to the depths of the hole. An oversize wolf might have worried such a lair out of the earth’s bones. The walls were irregular where stones and soil had been pried away. Trader shuffled his feet on the broken rock and squatted, a stone maul in one hand, a hardwood stake in the other. Bending, he picked a crack in the greenish stone and began driving the ash-wood stake into it.
“You work like a beaver,” an accented voice called from above. The man spoke in the pidgin common to the rivers, a mixture of Mos’kogee, Siouan, and Algonquin tongues that had adapted itself to the Trade over the generations. Like Trade itself, “Trade Tongue” was sacred. Those who spoke it did so with a sense of respect and awe. It was said that the gods listened in. Rumor had it that nowadays even some chieftains spoke in Trade Tongue when finalizing the most solemn of agreements, wanting the imprimatur of its Power.
Others insisted it was yet another trick that rulers had
taken to, one they used when intent on fully duping their subjects.
Trader didn’t look up from his labor as he hammered the splintering stake into a widening gap in the rock. “I paid you a great deal to come and sweat myself to death in your hole. Don’t distract me. I want to enjoy every moment of my suffering.”
Trader didn’t look up as Snow Otter laughed, then said, “In a very short time you’re going to be wet to the bone. Rain’s coming. I can smell it.”
“So can I, but you don’t have to stay here. Go keep dry and warm. I’ll be down to the village by nightfall.” Trader glanced up, seeing Snow Otter where he crouched at the edge of the excavation. The man was fingering a white shell gorget that hung from a string around his neck. Yes, paid well, indeed. The southern chiefs would have killed him on the spot if they’d known he’d Trade a sacred artifact like that to a northern barbarian. The concave surface of the gorget bore an image of the three-tiered cosmos with a spiraled pole rising from the sacred fire cross in the center. The Four Winds were depicted by woodpecker heads on each side. The Mos’kogee believed the image to have Power. Not the sort of thing to be bartered off to a nonbeliever like Snow Otter.
Trader smiled at the depths to which he had fallen. Who would have thought?
“I have copper,” Snow Otter insisted. “Lots of it. Enough that you don’t have to labor like some southern war slave. Come away from here. Let’s go down to the village. My wife’s roasted whitefish wrapped in goosefoot leaves. She’ll lay it on a steaming bed of wild rice. I’ve got some of that raspberry drink left.”
“I thought you said we drank the last of it last night.”
A pause. “I might have miscounted the pots in my cache.”
“Just like you’d miscount those pieces of copper you want to Trade me.”
“You wrong me!”
“A man who knows you as well as I do would never wrong you by making a simple statement of the truth.” Trader reached for another wooden stake and glanced up at Snow Otter. The man looked as if he’d just suffered a terrible affront. “Oh, stop that. How many years have I been making the trip up here?”
“Five, perhaps six.”
“Yes, my friend, and in that time I have come to know you inside and out. You’ll do anything to come out ahead. I think you’d sell your souls if it meant gaining an advantage.”
“And you wouldn’t?”
If you only knew how foolish I’ve been.
Trader chuckled, hearing the satisfying smack as he used the stone-headed maul to drive the stake into the crack, widening it further. “I just Trade to Trade.”
Silence was broken only by the snapping impact of the stone hammer on the hardwood stake.
Finally Snow Otter asked, “So what do you want? I’d really like to know. Season after season, you travel the length of the rivers, make the portages, and carry your goods from one end of the land to the other. In all that time, never have I heard you talk of home. You speak fondly of no people. I don’t even know your nation. Not one single woman seems to linger in your thoughts, yet you watch any attractive female with a wistful longing in your eyes. It’s as if you are cast loose, like the wild birds … a thing that migrates and has no will to stop.”
Trader looked up, rubbing a grimy hand across his forehead. “Maybe that’s what I am, nothing more than a bird.”
“What’s your name? Seriously. You just go by Trader. It’s as if you’re not even a full person. You have to have a name.”
“Trader is enough.” He lowered his eyes to the stake where it wedged into the rock. “A name is nothing. A word. Once it passes from the lips it might never have
existed. Like the breath behind it, it’s gone. And so shall I be. And soon, Snow Otter. Very soon.”
“That’s all you want from living? Just to pass like a word?”
Trader managed a bitter smile. “Maybe all I want is wealth. Something that will take a high chief’s breath away. Something so precious I can Trade it for a whole fleet of canoes. Yes, that’s it. I want something so precious that the very sight of it will make people swoon and gasp with awe. I want to see their eyes fill with envy!”
“For what purpose? Just to have it? To hoard this great wealth like a packrat over a gleaming white shell? Bah! You’d rot on the inside trying to keep it.”
“Maybe I’d Trade it for something.”
“Ah, now that makes sense. Would you buy yourself a farm, slaves to work your fields, and compliant women? Is that it? You’d lie around, get fat, and sire children?”
Trader shook his head. “What? And send my harvest off to the high minko of whatever land I ended up in? No, I’ve seen that and want no part of it.”
“So I’m back to my original question. What do you want?”
Trader hammered absently at the stake. “Great wealth.”
“Just wealth?”
“That’s right.”
“Just to have it?”
“That’s why I’m down here digging,” Trader muttered. “I can feel it.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, I can feel the copper. It’s here.”
“Of course it’s there,” Snow Otter agreed. “I’ve pulled a lot of copper out of that pit, but it’s all been small nuggets. Small nuggets aren’t that bad. You can take a lot of little pieces of copper and beat them into one sheet.”
“The color’s not consistent.”
The first drop of rain spattered on Trader’s neck. He grunted at the cold trickle that ran down into his collar.
As the rain increased he resumed his hammering, letting the cold impacts on his back goad him to further effort. Sand caked his damp hands, grating on the wooden handle of the maul. Snow Otter’s questions left him irritated and touched at the old wound deep between his souls. He had been stripped of all the essentials that made a man: family, status, place, and possessions. A man with nothing wanted everything. One day, he would obtain some item so valuable and rare it would be the envy of all: chief, Priest, warrior, farmer, and slave. Then, by blood and pus, he’d show them.
“You’re a fool!” Snow Otter called from the rim of the hole. He was holding a section of tanned deer hide over his head. Rain battered at them.
“So are you … for staying here.”
“My conscience won’t allow me to leave an idiot to his fate.”
“And you’re curious,” Trader muttered under his breath as he straightened his back against the strain and selected another of the hardwood stakes. Through the pelting rain he could see another crack opening to the side of the rock he worked on. Bending at the hips, he began hammering another of the pointed stakes into the faint gap.
“You’re a lunatic!” Snow Otter called from above.
The rain fell in relentless sheets, turning the hole into a mucky mess. Trader slopped about on soaked moccasins. He could feel sand between his toes. His long black hair had matted to his head, and cold droplets were tracing paths down his cheeks. The stone mallet head now slipped when he pounded it against the mushrooming wood.
“That hammer’s going to fall apart,” Snow Otter observed from above. “The head is only held on by shrunken rawhide. Once it’s wet …”
“I know.” Trader whacked the stake with growing frustration.
Cold fingers of water trickled down his ribs. Was it
worth it? Snow Otter’s wife would have a smoky but warm fire going down in the village. He could imagine that baked whitefish melting on his tongue. This was crazy. What had prompted him to think he could dig his own copper anyway?
“I’m leaving,” Snow Otter said pointedly.
“Smart man,” Trader muttered, whacking the stake one last time.
The rock shifted enough to allow him to slip his fingers into the crack. Trader lifted, feeling stone slide on stone. He rolled the angular fragment to one side, staring at the backside of the rock as rain spattered it. The stone looked as if it were veined with fungus. Lines of green seemed to dive into the rock’s heart. Green. But not metallic.
You’re nothing. Just some bird. You lost it all, and you’ll never have anything again. Not a friend. Not a wife. Only a canoe, and whatever trinkets you can barter.
A memory flashed from deep down between Trader’s souls. He saw his brother Rattle’s eyes, the cunning and deceit turning to fear as Trader’s club whistled. He felt the anger surge within, a hot red Power, as he put his weight behind the blow. He remembered Rattle throwing himself backward in the vain attempt to save himself. Trader relived the instant that sharp stone ax had smashed into his brother’s head. He could still feel the blow that crushed Rattle’s skull, as if the memory was embedded in the bones and muscles of his arm.
I killed him. Became the man I swore I never would.
Trader blinked it away. He was once again standing head-deep in a mucky hole, wet, cold, and hopeless. Frustration made him lift the hammer high. The blow struck the center of the mottled green stone, the crack like thunder as the hammer head disintegrated into shards that spattered around the inside of the hole.
“Hey!” Snow Otter cried. “That’s my best mallet!”
Trader stared at the ruined maul, then at the cracked
stone. With one hand he pulled a spalled section away and blinked. The color was unmistakable.
“You’re going to have to replace that!” Snow Owl insisted from above. “Good hammers like that are hard to come by. I spent days making sure that one was just right. It cradled in my hand like a fine woman. It had a special balance.”

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