The Eden Hunter (8 page)

He woke the others and they readied themselves. It began to rain, light at first but then much heavier. No sunrise raid came and the redsticks relaxed some. Hungry Crow tried asking Morning Star who was hunting them, but without Blood Girl the prophet was now silent and useless. Hungry Crow asked again but Morning Star turned away, walking off in the rain with his sick horse.

 

KAU VOLUNTEERED TO scout for the shooter. None of the redsticks objected and so he went off alone down a trail that ran along the edge of the canebrake. Here a hill of iron hardwoods rose up from the lowlands. He sat in the rain and watched. Soon three jake turkeys came working across the wet hillside, scratching for rising worms, and Kau waited until the last of them had vanished over the crest of the hill. The turkeys never spooked, and this satisfied him that the shooter was gone.

He left the muddy trail and began to cut for sign. Midway up the hill he found a plug of spent spit tobacco. He took it into his hands and watched the brown leaves break apart in the rain. The wind picked up and rainwater creeks formed in the furrows of the
hill. Suddenly there was thunder on top of lightning and he was chased back into the canebrake. He ended his search and returned to the redsticks, announcing his approach with a cardinal whistle that was smothered up by the slapping rain.

Hungry Crow and Little Horn sat huddled beneath the wide stomachs of their stallions; both Morning Star and his horse were missing still. Hungry Crow called out, but Kau ignored him and instead went to Little Horn. He knelt beside the hobbled horse and spoke. “I believe that we are safe now,” he said.

“Was it a white man?”

“I think. But his tracks are gone.”

Hungry Crow had left the shelter of his own horse and joined them. The redstick’s wet strip of hair was pasted flat against his skull. “Gone?” he asked.

“Yes. Washed away by the rain.”

“So you say, baby slave.”

Kau nodded and then walked off. There was a cypress on the riverbank that had been killed by pecky rot. Lightning flashed all about, yet he took refuge inside the hollow tree without regard. He draped the damp horse blanket over his shoulders, then began to squeeze water from his breechcloth. He was exhausted and miserable, and a piece of him wondered if to end his life here—beside a rain-dimpled river, inside a warm tree—was about the best he could dare hope for in this second world. There was a shimmer of blue light, and for a single second he saw Benjamin alive and standing in the hard rain. The hay hook dangled from the boy’s throat, and his thin white shirt was red with blood. Then thunder boomed and it was dark again. Kau pressed
the tip of his knife against his bare chest and was not afraid. There was comfort for him there, knowing he had that one power still—the only absolute power that any man ever truly possesses.

 

IN THE QUIET that followed the thunderstorm he returned to the camp and found Little Horn stabbing at the wet ashes of a fire with a crooked stick. The redstick looked up at him.

“Where is Morning Star?” asked Kau.

“He has left us for now.” Little Horn shrugged. “I think he will go searching along the river for Blood Girl. That would be important to him.”

Kau sat down on his heels. “But not important to you?”

“I have seen many deaths.”

“And him?”

“Him, too,” said Little Horn. “But he has let them stir at his mind.”

“You do not believe he is a prophet?”

“I suppose he could be many things.” Little Horn drew a cross in the dead ash. “But does it even matter?”

 

WITHOUT MORNING STAR, Kau came to doubt that they would ever learn exactly who had killed Blood Girl during the crossing. Little Horn suspected the highwaymen but Hungry Crow disagreed, promising that they were still at least a day’s ride from the cave where the white thieves lived. In the end Kau decided that it did not matter really. She was dead and had died poorly, shot like a deer in a bean field.

Hungry Crow and Little Horn rode north, following the river, and he trailed after them for all of the next day. That night they made a fireless camp and then, at sunrise, left the two remaining horses secured in the canebrake. A short stretch of creek led them to the foot of a steep ridge, and Hungry Crow pointed to where bits of stone showed through a thick green layer of wild grapevine and creeper, explaining that the whole of that broken ridge was hollow, that inside was the cave they were seeking.

“And the entrance?” asked Little Horn.

They crept forward and took cover in the branches of a fallen magnolia. Hungry Crow aimed his longrifle at a rent in the side of the ridge. “There,” he said. “Hidden.”

 

MIDDAY A THIN white man dressed in fine clothes emerged from the cracked earth. Kau saw now that a series of ropes had been woven into the tangled vines, forming a sort of ladder that fell down across the side of the ridge. The man slung a sagging feed sack over his shoulder, then began to climb the twenty yards of rope ladder one-handed. Two pistols were tucked through the red sash that ran around his waist. Little Horn full-cocked his Jaeger rifle but Hungry Crow stayed him.

The man made the climb to the top of the ridge, then stretched and removed a silver length of metal from some hidden pocket inside his loose shirt. He sat down on a stone and lowered his head, blew a long and steady whistle that confused the birds, and for a moment, quieted the forest.

Soon Kau saw movement at the far end of the ridgeline. Four stocky ponies came trotting from right to left along the rise, and the man poured oats for them. He emptied the sack and then patted the mud-splashed neck of the closest pony.

Kau watched as the man stood atop the ridge and surveyed the forest below. The sun was at his back and he seemed afire. Finally the man took hold of the rope ladder and began his descent. Once he had returned to the hollow of the earth, Hungry Crow spoke. “We will come for them tomorrow,” he said.

 

A HUMID NIGHT in a dark camp and then came dawn the next morning. Hungry Crow knew of a path that led from the canebrake around to the top of the ridge, and after hiking for about three hundred yards they reached the feeding place above the cave. The redsticks scraped two deep troughs in the black dirt, then Little Horn settled into one and Hungry Crow into the other. Kau concealed them with handfuls of oak leaves, then retreated alone down the ridgeline.

 

HOURS LATER THE same lank man emerged and began to climb the rope ladder. Kau issued a series of squirrel barks to alert the redsticks, and when the white man blew his whistleflute Little Horn and Hungry Crow erupted from the dry leaves like graved corpses come alive. Kau ran to join the two redsticks. The man had begun to scream, but then Little Horn swung his war-club and all was silent.

 

THE HIGHWAYMAN WAS a gaunt man with wide-set mole eyes, a short blond beard and enormous ears. Little Horn knelt to cut the scalp as the summoned ponies appeared on the ridge, and if they smelled death yet they did not show it. The boldest of the four ponies pushed Little Horn aside with its muzzle, then began to nudge at the feed sack that lay resting in the turned leaves.

 

THEY DESCENDED THE rope ladder like scrambling spiders, and Hungry Crow motioned for him to go first into the dim cave. Kau had strapped his saddlebags to his body, and his longrifle was now pinned against him. He slid the flintlock free, then turned sideways and began to shuffle through the thin crack in the earth. There were words scratched in the rock walls, and he stared at them for a moment, wondering what they might mean.

The narrow entrance soon opened into a wide chamber. He crept to the center of this square cavity, and as his eyes adjusted he peered into the corner shadows and spotted two blunderbuss muskets wedged into a cairn of piled rock, their belled barrels aimed at the opening of the cave. He turned and looked back toward the glow of the yellow entrance. The floor of the cave seemed to sparkle, and he realized then that he had somehow walked safely through a shimmering web of silk trip lines. He dropped down to his stomach, and had started to call out a warning when Little Horn entered the cave. The redstick took a step into the chamber before he seemed to sense the trap. He stopped but then Hungry Crow pushed past him in a rush. Kau saw a moccasin connect with the first of the trip-lines, then both spring guns threw sparks and roared. Smoke and
dust filled the cave, and he began to cough and then choke as he felt around for his dropped longrifle. Finally his hand found the barrel and he pulled the flintlock to him.

From the dark heart of that hollow ridge an angry highwayman yelled out, and when the air cleared Kau crawled forward and saw that Little Horn was dead. His bare chest was riddled like the breast of a shot duck, and blood seeped from the socket of his missing nose. Hungry Crow was laid out beside him. The redstick had taken beads of lead to the fronts of his spindly legs and could not walk. The highwayman yelled again, and Kau watched as Hungry Crow dragged himself to the entrance of the cave. The redstick had his longrifle in his lap. “Do not run,” he said, but then he slumped over and was dead.

Kau shoved Hungry Crow aside and then slid his own longrifle back between the cinched saddlebags. He squeezed out of the cave and sunlight blinded him as he stumbled gasping into the day. The ground dropped off beneath his feet, and as he fell he reached out and caught hold of the rope ladder. Something clattered off the rocks beneath him—the longrifle, lost—and more shouts came as he began to climb.

At the top of the ridge he looked down and saw that three dusty white men had emerged from the cave and were now climbing one by one toward him. He began to saw at the rope ladder with his knife, but then a black-haired man aimed a pistol up at him and so he fled. He circled back down the ridge, following Hungry Crow’s path to the canebrake and then the river. Morning Star was on the opposite bank, watching, and his diseased horse lay dead in the
shallows. The prophet motioned for him to cross the river, but Kau hesitated until he heard the highwaymen entering the cane behind him. Finally he splashed into the water and began to swim. The saddlebags threatened to sink him but he was able to push on.

He reached the other side of the Conecuh and found Morning Star kneeling on the bank. The prophet smiled at him, revealing his own cut teeth, and then he began to sing, his long silence finally broken. Kau listened and was reminded of the songs of the Ota. He tried to make sense of the words being chanted over and again:

Morning Star seemed almost to be screaming now. Shots were fired at them from across the river, and finally Kau took off running into the forest. He would be traveling alone again, he realized. The prophet was singing a death song.

S
OUTH, THEN EAST. With the longrifle lost he kept slow, vigilant and—as if engaged in some barefoot child’s amusement of balance—walked heel to toe in the way of his people, the bone club held loose in his hand, his breechcloth snug against him. Water was plentiful, and his saddlebags still held some of the smoked venison; it would be days before he needed to hunt again.

This was a Spanish territory in name, but he saw that more than anything it was an everyman’s land. Country where a lone Ota trespasser walking with the pole star off his left shoulder belonged as much as the assortment of runaways and filibusters and renegades who shared the forest with him. On occasion there were shots in the distance, sometimes even the hollerings of men, and he
saw that all but the ignorant or fearless moved after sunset, eyes averted from the bright moon to maintain their night vision.

Most travelers rode horses and came so rank and noisy that he could avoid them with ease. Only the runaways moved on foot, and at certain moments in the dark flatwoods strangers would each become aware of the other approaching. Like the warm-water sharks that had once circled his slave ship, as they neared they would both veer slightly so that to a next-day tracker it would appear almost as if the first had careened off the second, that directions and destinies had been forever altered by that chance encounter.

 

FOUR NIGHTS AFTER the clash with the highwaymen, the deaths of Little Horn and Hungry Crow and Morning Star, he arrived upon a place where the pine forest was split by a wide creek. He was filling his canteen when there came the pungency and then the whinnies of upwind horses. He made to run and hide himself but then he grew very angry. He was tired of playing the coward, and so instead he pushed open his saddlebags and removed Lawson’s hunting pouch and powderhorn, the boy’s tinderbox. These pinewoods had not seen rain in many days. A great flash of light and then a fire began to spread slowly through the dry forest. He stowed the tinderbox and walked away, crossed one creek and then a second.

 

MUCH LATER THAT night he looked back and saw that the entire western horizon was glowing orange like some false sunrise. He shimmied up the trunk of a high pine, and for a long time he sat among the branches and watched the forest burn. This was yet
another horrible thing to have done. Somewhere on the other side of that fire, Samuel now slept alone in a slave cabin, and the boy lay dead at the bottom of a river. He thought of them both and he wept.

 

IN A DOGHAIR thicket of loblolly he came upon a family of runaways asleep among the dense young pines. A large woman rose up and he went still. She was scolding him like he was her son—saying, “Don you go wanderin, Toby”—when she registered her mistake and screamed. All souls scattered and for the entire night forth, like a cock quail gathering a busted covey, the desperate father whistled from a nearby hill, pleading with his family to come and join him.