The Trees (22 page)

He turned back figuring out what to say to Louie. Where could he hide his rifle? How could he get him lead for next time? As if he wasn’t down far enough in the mouth, close to a run he jumped two bucks. The young one went sailing over a hazel patch, but the old one held up his rack of horns and watched him. Spit on a boy, his looks said! What could a boy do to him? And there was Wyitt without a ball in his rifle.

It was at this time he recollected the spent ball back in the poplar.

He had to dig mighty hard for that lead. The runbush limb had slowed it down some but the soft white wood of the poplar had let it in easy. It was a good thing, Wyitt reckoned, that black squirrel wasn’t on a hard hickory or his ball might have flattened out like a ball of mud. Now he pounded it a little between two rocks, and shaved it round again with his knife till it rolled free in his rifle bore. This time he poured heavy powder in the barrel and in the pan, too. He set the patching on the muzzle, the spent ball on top and pushed it in. He cut around the patching with his knife as carefully as Sayward cutting out a new shortgown, and rammed that ball home till the thin hickory liked to dance in his fingers.

Both bucks were gone till he got back to the hazel patch, but they mightn’t be far off. This was feeding time. He could follow the young one a ways. Under the leaves his tracks cut deep in the black earth at every jump and slid like a mud boat at the wet places. It was getting along toward dark now, time long since to have gone for the cows. Well, Achsa could chase cow tails tonight. Dark came early to the woods in the fall. Now the color was fading fast from the leaves. A while ago when it was still light he had a bead on a buck and no ball. Now he had a ball and nothing to draw a bead on.

Forty or fifty paces further on some shadow
feeding in a spicewood thicket raised a head. If this wasn’t the old buck, Wyitt told himself, it was his twin brother.

The boy’s hand trembled as he opened the set screw on the hammer and turned the flint to a fresh side. He scraped his thumb nail down the frizzen channels. Never, he told himself, did he need a spark like now. Oh, he wasn’t tired. He could hold his arms steady as a rock and yet that long rifle sagged and shook like a fit of the aguers. He crawled to a log and propped his barrel so he could draw a bead. Then he set his mouth and pulled the old blacksmith trigger.

The long white flash from the priming pan liked to burn his eyes out, but he held fast as a glut in a log. That was a green hand’s trouble with a flintlock, dodging and flinching and spoiling the aim. The rifle when it went off shook the earth. He felt blind and deaf as he crawled up to the spicewood thicket. He told himself that old buck had never held still all the time between the hammer snap and gun discharge. No, when the pan flashed, if not before, it had reared up and sailed away like a pheasant over the tallest bushes.

Ahead was a brown log he hadn’t seen before, and when he looked hard, that brown log was the buck lying there in the spicewood thicket.

Was or wasn’t that buck lying? Now it must have woke up that he was close and now it was trying
to get up. He had to cut its throat quick if he wanted to keep it down. Oh, he better stay out of the way of its bad front feet. He straddled the neck from behind but before he could get his knife out, that old buck was up in back and front with him on top. And now he had to leave that knife in his belt, grab fur on the cape and hang like grim death on Billy Allen’s blind pony.

That buck’s hair was turning all the wrong way. It whipped around like a crazy thing, bucking and kicking and running in circles. It bumped against this and that. It scraped every place it could to get him off. It dragged him through prickly haw thickets. One of his legs or the other it kept whacking against trees. How his knife stayed on he didn’t know. His powder horn went, his leggins got torn to rags on thorns and brush and the roots and branches of windfalls. He could feel warm blood now but it was his own trickling down his legs that were wrapped like death around that deer’s belly. No man could tell how this would come out. All he knew was his first buck wasn’t going to get away easy.

“It kin throw me,” he told himself, “but I won’t stay throwed. It kin kill me but it kain’t whup me.”

Once it started to go, the hurt buck fagged fast. It was going down now in the black night. Wyitt pulled his knife and felt his way to finish it. He stood a while still straddling it while the dark trees
went around. Half his clothes were torn from his body. The sticky blood kept drying on his shoulders, sides and legs.

“That paper was true,” he thought like a shaft of golden lightning in the woods. His lips repeated silently, “Who carries this rifle will be lucky.”

He took out a flint and struck sparks from the back of his hunting knife. Now he blew up a fire. By its light he worked carefully. Not even his father had ever skinned a buck as smooth and even as he would this one. After while he would cook him a venison steak on a green stick. He would hang up the hind quarters for the night and make him a great fire to keep off the wolves. Last he would make him a nest in the leaves and lay down with that warm hide over him, bloody side up, till day. Then he would have plenty time and light to go back over his tracks and pick up his powder horn and rifle.

When Wyitt didn’t come home for supper, Sayward put his victuals on the hearth to keep them warm. When it got late without him, she and Achsa lighted candlewood and went over to the Covenhovens. The Covenhovens were both in bed but big John came to the door with his great coat around him, his bare legs and feet sticking out below.

“He never showed up for the cows,” he told her
a little angrily. “They had to come home themselves. Long after dark.”

Sayward didn’t make excuses for Wyitt, nor did she flinch from John Covenhoven.

“I don’t think any harm’s come to him,” Mrs. Covenhoven called from her bed. “Louie left word yesterday he wanted to see him.”

Achsa’s black eyes were mighty bright in the torch light as if she knew something and couldn’t tell.

“If he don’t show up,” Sayward said with dignity, “Achsa’ll git your cows tomorry.” To herself she added that if Achsa hid out around this time, she’d fetch the cows her own self.

She asked nothing what Achsa knew on the way home. The best way was to go to bed now. If Achsa wanted to keep back, she could.

It was noon next day when Wyitt turned up at the cabin. He must have moved mighty quiet on the path. The door was open and still they didn’t hear him till he stood on the log step, powder horn slung over one shoulder and over the other a long rifle with barrel shoved through a great knot of hide so heavy it hung down and dragged on the ground behind.

Achsa jumped up but Sayward stayed sitting.

“Whar was you last even?” Achsa said to him in her coarse voice. “If you reckon I’d fetch your cows, you’re fooled.”

“I don’t keer about any cows,” Wyitt said. “I was out a gittin’ you some meat.” He staggered in and slung the heavily packed hide to the floor. “I shot it my own self,” he told them. Now he held his rifle in front of him so they could plainly see.

Achsa shot a quick look at Sayward to see how she’d take it, but she sat there looking at Wyitt’s shirt and leggins. From the front you couldn’t see much but both sides had been cut to ribbons.

“Whose gun you got?” she asked.

“Mine.” He stood there straight as he could like Louie. Oh, you could see he was mighty proud of being a man today.

“Whar’d you git it?”

“George Roebuck’s.”

“Louie’s, you mean, don’t you?” she asked him a little sharply.

Now how did Sayward know of that? He bristled at her defiantly.

“Louie said I was big enough for a rifle this long time. Ginny says so, too.”

If Sayward felt a twinge inside of her for Genny, her face gave no sign. So that was it, she told herself stolidly. She had wondered how long Louie could stay put with his woman’s folks to keep in meat when all around him the woods and prairies ran a thousand miles for his itchy foot to wander. Oh, he would scheme out some way to get him free, if it meant sneaking a gun to an eleven year
old boy and getting him half killed by a buck many times bigger than he was. For Achsa, Louie gone would be good riddance, but she didn’t like to think it might be the last time they’d lay eyes on Genny.

She climbed a stool and lifted down a bundle of dry boneset hanging from a joist.

“I’ll make tea and you kin wash out them hurts of yourn,” she told him.

Wyitt stood there, trying not to show the whooping in his mind. Hadn’t she as much as said now he could keep his rifle, for she hadn’t said he couldn’t. He set his gun by the door where the best light would fall on it. Then he came over so she could see his hurts.

“I’ll let you wash me off your own self if you want to,” he told her, noble as could be. “I’ll keep you in meat, Saird. You better have Achsa fetch the cows from now on, for I won’t have the time. I’ll git you calico for a fine shortgown, if you want one.”

“It’ll take all your skins to buy powder and lead,” Sayward said shortly.

“Oh, no it won’t. I’ll have more skins a curin’ around here than a body’ll know what to do with.”

He stood stiff and still while she peeled torn shirt and leggins off him. His arms and legs were a mass of gore as if a bear had clawed him. A dull resentment for Louie Scurrah rose in Sayward. Wyitt was watching her face.

“You kin tell easy who I take after. Kain’t you?” he said eagerly.

Sayward sopped the wet rag over his hard, naked, young body. When the caked blood washed off, you could see deep cuts in plenty places. He would carry scars and welts from this. Oh, she knew a long time whom he took after. He’d grow up a hunter like his pappy, following the woods, moving on with the game. If it was in him, it would come out. There was no stopping such kind.

She could see him in her mind, yonder through the ups and downs of life, skinning deer and trap-drowned mink and otter, giving a rap over the head to foxes that hid in bushes ashamed to be caught and to coons that sat up as big as you please on a log as if they didn’t have a trap and clog hanging to one paw. Snared panthers would shed real tears when he pulled out his hunting knife, and beaver would swim out of their smashed houses and find he had left no ice for them to come up and breathe under. No, they would have to come out on the bank where he would take them by a back foot to bleed them. If he took them by a front foot, they would bite him.

That shock of sandy hair would be farther down over his shoulders then and his young face that had hardly fuzz on it as yet would be covered thick with a sandy beard. His buckskins would be bloody where he wiped his hands, and his hair would be
full of nits. Not often would he wash, least of all his itchy feet. Where those feet would take him, a sister had no means of knowing and no business if she had. Didn’t Worth say once he hadn’t seen his brothers after he was fourteen? And Jary and her sisters never heard from each other again.

She better wash him tender whilst she had the chance. Later she’d think of this many a time when he had gone off yonder with none perhaps but an Indian woman to tend him and a gray moose cow for milk. For all she’d know then, her brother Wyitt might as well be dead and buried, deep in some woods or plains she never saw and never would see.

“Now stand up to the fire and dry yourself warm,” she told him. “I’ll git something on you till I fix you a new frock and leggins.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
OUT ON THE TRACT

T
HAT
first winter Wyitt had his rifle, they had tracking snow from Martinmas till Maytime. The cold stood on end longer than anybody could mind. Even in late spring the frost held. The new leaves had to push through cold and snow. Skins stayed prime for six months, more or less, and if game got scarce, wolf skins still fetched nigh as much as panther hides at Roebuck’s.

They came around the cabins at sundown thick as corbies by day, the little brown curs that yelped and barked and the big gray and black night dogs that howled their heads off. Wyitt and the bound boy couldn’t hear hardly a word of what the other said all the way home from the post one moonlit evening. When dark came, Wyitt would build a fire and lay in his half-faced cabin waiting for a pair of eyes to shine. But Sayward would make
him mad. As soon as they got to carrying on good and loud around the place and it wouldn’t be long now till he got a shot, she would come out of her door and whack a clapboard against the side of the cabin till they’d stop.

Oh, he knew why she was touchy, though it made him mad just the same. She was thinking of Genny out yonder in the woods where the drifts piled deep as leaves in the fall. For Genny would not come in as long as Louie was on the outs with Sayward, and Sayward would not make it harder for Genny by traipsing out. Sometimes Achsa went, sliding the crust or breaking through, to see how her sister Genny was making out, for Louie had naught against Achsa.

But now Achsa wasn’t to home. She was off helping out Sally Withers with her work and none was left to go but himself.