by Lori Benton
Blackbird glanced at the scalp she’d worn that day along the Yadkin, hung now as a trophy, and Alex knew the answer.
“More would have died,” she said, “had you not given chase.”
He put his head in his hands, fingertips encountering the swollen wound at the back of his skull.
“Best leave it be,” Pauling advised. “Your skull isn’t cracked, God be praised. But I’m concerned with the brain inside that thick-boned head of yours. What made you do it?”
Despite the humor in the reverend’s words, the man was pale with concern. Not just for his physical state, Alex suspected. “Ought I to have let the rascal get away with killing the woman?”
“It was well done. Cane-Splitter will accept this.” Blackbird spoke with such finality the rest let the subject drop, focusing instead on Alex, whose head had cleared enough to wish them gone, both so they wouldn’t see how the incident had shaken him and how discomfiting he found Blackbird’s admiration.
He’d killed men before—in pitched battle. This had been different.
He was glad for the distraction when Little Thunder came running into the lodge, needing to hear the story told. Blackbird did the telling. Before the end of it, Alex had fallen into a doze and must have slept the rest of the day. When he woke, the lodge held its familiar night shadows. The fire was low.
Blackbird lay beside him.
She awoke when he stirred, her hand coming cool around his shoulder. “You are well?”
“Aye,” he said, glancing across the lodge to see Little Thunder asleep in his place.
Blackbird took her hand away. “It is not long until dawn. Will you still go on the hunt with Fishing Hawk? He asked this while you slept. I did not know what to tell him.”
He didn’t feel like going hunting but didn’t wish to remain behind. “Aye. I mean to go.”
She sat up. “Will you return?”
At first he wondered if this was her way of saying he was liable to get himself killed in his condition. Then he knew that wasn’t what she meant. “Aye, I will. I wouldna go without a word to ye and the lad.”
She held his gaze a moment more, then turned her face away, eyes catching a glimmer from the fire’s embers.
The Return
AUTUMN 1748
Whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.
—JESUS OF NAZARETH TO HIS DISCIPLES, LUKE 9:24
36
OCTOBER 1748
“Will you return?” It was Blackbird’s question but not her voice. Squinting into the lodge shadows, he saw it was Joanna, only now it wasn’t the lodge. The light was wrong—striped, as though it fell through slats. It was the smokehouse, and Joanna was locked inside with him, wrapped in his arms, her hair fallen loose. His fingers tangled in it. It was as soft and thick as he’d known it would be. He lifted her against him so their faces were level and knew exactly what he’d say to her question if ever he stopped kissing her…
Heartbeat slamming, he opened his eyes to ghosting breath and stars banded cold across a sky beginning to gray. He was surrounded by the hunters of Fishing Hawk’s band, sleeping in their sheltered ridge camp, save the solitary blanketed figure on watch, staring at him. As dawn edged near, it was light enough to identify Cane-Splitter. The Wolf Clan warrior had arrived in camp last night with no explanation—in Alex’s hearing—of why he’d belatedly joined the hunt.
Alex sat up. Behind him Fishing Hawk spoke. Runs-Far replied. The hunters, nine in number since Cane-Splitter’s coming, were waking to a second day on the trail. They’d yet to find fresh buffalo sign.
“They are not as plentiful as in the time of my grandfather,” Runs-Far had explained, as eager as Alex to see one of the beasts.
Fishing Hawk had added that since white men started wanting skins and furs, some Indians hunted more than was needful. “We want your guns and hatchets.” He’d fingered the honed blade of his trade knife. “Our women want your kettles and needles, your cloth and ribbons.”
They shared parched corn and jerked venison, rolled their bedding, layered on clothing, checked muskets, which each carried save Runs-Far and Alex, and started out.
As the morning passed, Alex’s thoughts fell into a well-worn groove, passing the same trail blazes like a man going in circles. Scotland, the colonies, the Cherokees, Severn. He never wanted to see that plantation again yet ached to know how Joanna fared there. Had the dream been a portent? Did she need him?
“Will you return?”
At the very least he should leave Blackbird’s lodge. Probably leave Crooked Branch’s town. But what was he to do about Pauling? Or—more immediately—Cane-Splitter, still giving him a baleful eye for avenging Wild Goose in his place.
Like as not for more than that.
By the time the hunters reached the ridgeline above their camp, the rising sun streamed over their shoulders. The peaks to westward were catching fire by light and leaf.
That wilderness of cloud-kissed heights and misted bottomlands, with a stream or a deer or both around every bend, so minded him of the remote glens of Scotland with their tumbling burns and stags rising from the heather, he knew he needn’t return across the sea to find what he’d had there. Rory MacNeill was gone, his parents long dead. He’d no close familial ties to draw him back. He could know contentment in this land but for one thing. He wanted it with Joanna Carey, despite reason telling him it could never be.
Still…Jemma was settled. He could leave her with a clear conscience. But what of Pauling?
His mind made another loop on its inward track as, bow in hand, he followed the hunters coming down a shoulder of the mountain on a trail they knew.
Pauling had asked him recently to share the details of his leaving Severn. “Why would Phineas Reeves have set you free? Have you never questioned that?”
“I have.” They’d been alone at Pauling’s fire; he’d spoken freely. “Questioned it from the instant I realized who released me.”
A frown troubled Pauling’s brow. “I’ve been thinking much of Edmund of late. And Joanna. I’ve spoken with Jemma—Walnut, I mean.”
“She tell ye something troubling?”
“It’s what she hasn’t said that most troubles me.”
“Blue Jay.” And who’d fathered him, though Alex was certain he knew. “Are ye minded to go back?”
“There’s still much for me here, but I’m praying about it now.”
Alex hadn’t been as annoyed by the answer as he’d once have been, but he ended the conversation by rising to go before it took a turn he didn’t want—Pauling asking him to return to Severn, against all sense of self-preservation, if not his heart’s tugging.
If he did so, and was caught, what would be the penalty? Hanging? Imprisonment?
“Edmund could show mercy,” Pauling said before he made his exit, as if he’d read Alex’s mind.
Mercy. A thing he’d long since learned to mistrust. Alex had glanced back at the man by the fire. Pauling looked tired, and old. “What d’ye think he’d do?”
“That’s part of what troubles me,” Pauling had admitted. “You aren’t the only one who noticed the influence young Reeves has upon Edmund. Or had. Things may have changed.”
“Aye. Maybe.” But for better or ill?
Ahead on the trail the hunters halted, gathered around a pile of dung still faintly steaming. More scattered the slope ahead. They’d crossed the path of a buffalo herd, Alex gleaned from the talk around him. Eagerness pushed all thought but the impending hunt to the edges of his mind.
Two hunters went ahead to scout. The rest came along, taking stock of the terrain with which they’d have to deal. Runs-Far was shaking with excitement when the scouts returned, reporting a dozen buffalo sighted. Likely more were hidden among the wind-stunted thickets dotting the grassy slope. They hadn’t found a convenien
t cliff over which to drive the herd, the easiest method since the fall did the killing, but there was a steep-sided draw at the base of the mountain’s shoulder toward which the herd was grazing. A stream threaded it. Trees grew thick enough for concealment.
Four of the most experienced hunters, including Fishing Hawk, would drive the herd, a task requiring both a canny sense of the beasts and practiced timing. The remaining five would wait in the draw, the three with muskets on the eastern slope, Alex and Runs-Far on the western, staggered many yards apart to prevent them hitting anything other than a buffalo.
When Runs-Far warned Alex not to aim an arrow too far to his left or right, to be sure he grasped the importance, a few of the hunters grinned. Alex caught a sharper flash in the eyes of Cane-Splitter as the Wolf Clan warrior left to take up his position at the head of the draw on the eastern side. Sent to the head of the draw on the western side, deeper in than Cane-Splitter, Alex was told the wait could be long but he’d know when it was ended. First would come shouts and musket fire, then if all went well the buffalo on the move.
For no reason was he to get himself in the path of that stampede.
“You might be taller than a buffalo,” Fishing Hawk said, “but that means little. You will see.”
Hunkered behind a stump sprouting a sapling from its rotting remains, Alex waited.
A breeze rustled the trees, scented with leaves taking fire with the season’s first frosts. The creek chattered. An occasional hawk or eagle circled high. Morning warmed toward noon. What frost lay at that elevation retreated into shade.
Alex fingered the arrows in a quiver at his hip. Strung his bow. Tested it. Decided to remove his outer shirt.
Before he could do so, a distant whoop came from up the mountain. Another. Then a single musket’s firing.
Alex’s heart leapt with the sound. Blood hammering, he searched the bend in the draw where the buffalo would appear, waiting for the thud of hooves.
Movement across the draw drew his gaze. At first he thought it a deer bounding through the tree, spooked by the ruckus from above. Then it passed through a break in the foliage.
It was Cane-Splitter.
Alex marked his progress, wondering if the drive had gone amiss and the warrior was headed to tell the others it had failed. The buffalo weren’t coming. Heart sinking, he watched the next break in cover, but the Indian didn’t pass it. He’d stopped. Directly across the draw.
Then Alex heard what he’d been waiting for, a rumble like a landslide coming down the mountain. As the lead buffalo, a heavy-shouldered bull, came into view around the bend, a musket fired.
The stump Alex hid behind exploded in a shower of wood pulp.
He’d shut his eyes reflexively and leapt aside into the brush. Still gripping his bow, the noise of the stampede swelling in his ears, he scrambled up.
Cane-Splitter’s shot—it had to have been his—had sent the herd veering toward Alex and Runs-Far’s side of the draw. Massive brown bodies, humped and horned as Blackbird had described, careened in his direction, those at the edge already in among the trees, cracking saplings, tearing loamy ground as they came.
Down the draw Runs-Far shouted, but Alex couldn’t make out his words. He’d seconds before Cane-Splitter reloaded, but now many buffalo were between them, cover enough to do what he’d come to do. Hunt.
The herd was nearly upon him, a wooly-coated wave about to crash. Alex ran to meet it, reaching for his quiver—and found he’d lost his arrows when he dove into the ferns. All but one. He snatched it up and ran along the slope, above and a little ahead of the nearest massive forms, a cow with a trailing calf. His path to the beasts and theirs along the tree line converged like the tip of a spear.
A sight just past that tip chilled his blood. Runs-Far, perhaps confused by Cane-Splitter’s premature musket fire, had run out to see what was happening.
Alex bellowed, waving him back into the trees.
The lad stood transfixed, staring at the buffalo cow bearing down. The buffalo saw Runs-Far. Its massive body swerved, not away from the lad but toward him.
Alex, dodging alongside the herd, was fitting arrow to string when another buffalo plunged sideways to avoid a tree too large to trample, looming so close he felt the brush of its coat against his arm.
For an instant, awe and terror blocked all sound. There was nothing but the creature, the hot musk of its hide, the sense of its immensity shuddering up through the ground with each hammer blow of hooves. A blast of breath. The roll of a white-rimmed eye. A presence like thunder incarnate that swallowed his own before the animal swerved away again, a tree came between them, and they were once more distinct. Man and buffalo. Hunter and prey.
No more than a second had passed. Runs-Far was moving now but wasn’t going to make it into the trees before the cow overtook him.
“God Almighty, save him!” Alex raised the bow and let the arrow fly, knowing it couldn’t stop the creature. It arced wildly, then curved back in its flight. The cow’s head dipped and shook.
Still, the massive creature barely slowed before the herd swerved back toward the eastern side of the draw and careened on. Musket fire erupted, along with the shouts of the drivers running at the rear of the herd. Fishing Hawk raced past, never seeing Alex or Runs-Far in the raised dust, but Alex saw his son’s crumpled body on the ground. His heart split wide with grief as he reached the lad, who sat up, coughing and coated with dust.
“Where are ye hurt?” Alex threw down his bow and put his hands on Runs-Far—neck, shoulders, arms—looking for injury and finding naught but scrapes. The lad’s eyes held wild excitement.
“I thought me dead. That cow…You shot?”
“I dinna ken. My arrow went wild.”
Runs-Far laughed. “Why else cow turn? I hear you call Heavenly Father.”
“Over that commotion?”
“God Almighty, save him.” Runs-Far looked him in the eye as he quoted what Alex had shouted. “Maybe this is like the snake,” he went on in Tsalagi, “the one that did not kill.”
Alex stared, dumbstruck, as the last buffalo galloped past. His arrow shouldn’t have touched that cow. Pauling shouldn’t have survived that canebrake’s bite unscathed. Jemma shouldn’t have done half the things she had. How many miracles did he need to see before he surrendered to this One who seemed to have a plan in place for his life whether he agreed with it or not? Or understood it.
Must he understand why sometimes the snake didn’t kill and sometimes it did?
Not if the One behind the plan truly had his good in mind.
“Blessed is he who believes without seeing,” Runs-Far said, young face earnest. “Yet you have seen His power and still do not believe?”
Alex stared at Jemma’s lad, cut to the quick by the words, and by a flood of understanding. Joanna. She’d been granted no miracle, no signs, no great show of power, yet instead of bitterness she professed belief.
“Aye,” he said. “All right. If the Almighty wants me that bad, He can have me. Now go! Kill a buffalo. Give the hide to Shelled Corn, ask for her daughter. Ye’ve my blessing—not that ye need it.”
“I want it!” Runs-Far blazed him a beatific grin, then was gone down the draw where Alex could hear the clatter and bawl of the herd, the muskets firing.
With a frisson of alarm, he remembered Cane-Splitter, but when he looked round at the settling dust, there was no sign of the warrior who’d tried to murder him. Perhaps not for the first time.
Nor the last, if he stayed.
37
Runs-Far’s mother met them with news that Reverend Pauling lay ill in his lodge. Shouldering his share of the hunters’ meat, Runs-Far hurried toward the Longhair Clan lodges. Leaving his share at Blackbird’s lodge, Alex followed, finding Pauling in the grip of fever. He crossed the lodge and knelt beside his sleeping bench.
Jemma
hovered near. “Me and Squash Blossom been caring for him with willow bark, but it don’t help like that other kind—Jesuit bark—and he outta that. What we gonna do?”
If Alex had needed confirmation, he had it. “I’ll be taking him back across the mountains.”
He stood, the decision resting like an anvil on his chest.
Runs-Far stood behind Jemma, a hand on her shoulder. “Is he able?”
Alex exchanged a look with the lad. “I have to try. Dinna say anything of it yet. I must go and speak to Blackbird.”
* * *
“I not like you go,” Blackbird said in English once he’d said all he meant to say on the matter. “But you will do what you must.”
Alex gazed at the fire warming her lodge on that chill autumn day, then around at its familiar shapes and shadows, wishing briefly there was no claim on his heart to draw him away. No other need. He went to the place where he slept, to the knapsack he’d found outside the smokehouse the night Reeves set him free.
“Already you go?” Blackbird said behind him.
“I’ll move my things to Pauling’s lodge for the night, help watch over him.” He’d have to decide how to transport Pauling if the man wasn’t capable of walking. Perhaps he could construct a travois as they’d done with the buffalo butchered in the draw.
“You want horse, carry holy man? I cannot give the one was his. The warrior who took it will keep. I give mine.”
Blackbird had only one horse. “I canna take your horse, not after ye’ve given so much. To me and the lass. The reverend too.”
Blackbird tilted her head. “What have I given? Food. Shelter. Clothes.” She shrugged. “That is reasonable.”
“Maybe so, but that’s not all I meant. I speak of your friendship, and that of your people.”
She looked at him searchingly. “Not all my people.”
Not until that moment had Alex known whether he meant to tell her of the incident in the draw. If he thought Cane-Splitter’s attempt to shoot him had merely to do with his presumption in avenging Wild Goose’s death, he wouldn’t concern her with it. But Cane-Splitter had disliked him from the moment Blackbird showed interest. And something else, a suspicion only, yet if it was true, it concerned Blackbird more than anyone. So he told her.