Dance on the Wind tb-1

by Terry C. Johnston

  He waved both hands at the hound, to keep him moving.

  By the time Tink got close to the porch, Titus was crying. And that made him madder than anything.

  Angrily he squatted, scooping up the new shirt and the biscuits, retying the arms around an end of the rolled-up blanket with the rest of his necessaries before he unknotted the thin strip of leather he had used to secure the boots to the bundle. These he pulled over his bare feet, then dragged a hand beneath his drippy nose.

  Looking one last time at Tink as the old hound clambered up onto the porch, turned, and lay down with his muzzle between his front paws, Titus was almost certain he heard the dog whine. Mournful.

  A dove called out from the canopy being brightened by day with more and more of autumn’s fire.

  Swiping a shirtsleeve under both eyes, Titus took one last, lingering look at the family’s place, that cabin where the rest would live out most of their lives. The barn where his father’s animals were kept, critters that helped Thaddeus in the farming. The hog pens. The summer kitchen and the smoke shed.

  He didn’t belong here, he knew. So why was he crying?

  Swallowing down the sour taste of his empty belly, Titus turned from the glade, stepped into the timber, and was lost among the shadows and the game trails, all those sounds of the small things up and moving to water that dawn.

  He didn’t fit in here no more, he had decided. Knowing it was now up to him to find someplace where he did.

  6

  He kept moving that first day. Not once did he stop any longer than it took to lay the longrifle down atop his small bundle of possibles and stretch out from the bank of some small creek or stream, his upper body held over the trickling flow to immerse his face and slake his thirst. Renewed and refreshed, he moved on at a trot, reaffirmed in the rightness of his quest.

  If his pap came looking after him, he wanted to be far, far ahead. Mindful to leave as faint a trail as he possibly could. Titus wasn’t so sure how a man accomplished that. As he brooded on it throughout the morning and into the short afternoon, he decided a hunter was always able to find game by following the game trails, by looking for the spoor of his quarry: antler rubbings, tufts of fur torn loose against brambles, piles of droppings.

  So it was he was mindful not to let his rifle’s stock rub against the bark of trees, taking care not to allow the brambles to snag and catch at his pitiful few belongings wrapped in that roll of wool blanket. And the one time he was forced to stop for longer than stolen moments, Titus made sure he found a patch of old undergrowth where he could kick the vines and creepers aside, pull down his leather britches before squatting to do his business, then kick that undergrowth back over what he left behind. Unlike the deer or fox or even the bear, he was not about to leave as plain a sign of his passing.

  “Damn well smarter’n that,” he had told himself as he set off once again at a trot.

  But more than anything else, Titus Bass made sure not to stay with the game trails as did the other animals. Heavy with the scent of the hunted as well as the hunter, such faint and narrow paths crisscrossing the forest plainly would be the way his father would come looking for him. Instead, the youngster kept to the heavy timber, crossing the trails but never using them as he hurried north to the river, then turned west.

  For something longer than a moment that dawn, Titus stopped at the edge of the trees and looked down from the rocky bluff as the autumn sun paled the sky in the east. Back yonder—upriver it was—sat Cincinnati. A seductive place, that one. A town grown big enough to be called a city—and thereby luring to a man. Even if one weren’t quite yet a man.

  But that would be the first place they’d likely come to find him; at least to learn word of him.

  No, his best bet lay downriver, where he wanted to go anyhow. East and upriver—why, that all represented the past. West and downriver—now, that carried with it the promise of the future.

  He looked down the sixty or so feet of adamantine slate dotted with brush and trees sunlit with the fires of the season at sunrise, gazing down at the slow, rolling current of the river. And turned his face to the west. No matter that he knew not how far west his intentions might take him this winter. Or the next. Maybeso only to Louisville. He had heard of Louisville. Just someplace down the Ohio before another winter grew old. How little it mattered. Only that he was moving west step by step, following the river for as long as it would let him.

  “Oyo,” he said quietly as he set off in earnest above the westbound beacon.

  O-ee-o. Long ago some white man had garbled the Iroquoian name for the waters moving past his rocky bluff. Oyo. Ohio.

  Which got him to wondering on the Indians west of him. Over there, after all, on the north bank of the river sat the place named for them—Indiana. This all was country to the Miami. Seneca. Shawnee. And Mingo. All the whole damned Iroquois confederation. They had been England’s Indians during the war with France to determine just who would rule North America. Soon enough England had set those very same Indians down upon her colonists west of the Alleghenies when it came time for herdsmen, and farmers, and cottage craftsmen to tear themselves away from the crown.

  Titus scratched and scratched at his memory throughout that day, wary of every new sound from the forest—afeared it be a black bear or a roach-topped Seneca—yet he could not come up with a recollection one of any recent troubles with the tribes.

  “Moving on west, they are,” folks had said with no small gratification.

  As the upper Ohio Valley was slowly settled, cleared, surveyed, and mapped, the wild creatures were pushed on. Bear and elk, lion and Indian too.

  “It’s the way of civilizing folk,” Thaddeus Bass had repeated many a time. “As the hand of man crosses the land, the godless heathen and the beasts are driven before him.”

  In the end maybe that was the reason Titus had sneaked out that morning, so he told himself while he cleared a small ring of leaves on the forest floor as night fell quick and cold about him. He scratched at the bottom of his pouch and pulled out his fire-steel and flint, struck it to catch a spark on the charred cloth. Blowing against it to keep the cloth glowing, Titus laid it in a small piece of old bird’s nest about the size of his thumb, then blew gently some more. With the tinder caught, he set it upon the ground, where he began laying slender twigs on the single struggling flame.

  As he watched the tiny dancing tongues of blue and yellow catch hold, Titus remembered the only stop he had allowed himself that day. After trotting less than five miles downriver from the young settlement of Rabbit Hash, he tarried long enough to see one last time what drew the common and uneducated rivermen to land and go ashore for more than fifteen years already. As time went on, word spread of the Big Bone Lick where the Ohio and Mississippi Navigator, a river pilot’s indispensable guide, stated a visitor could view remarkably large bones that must have belonged to some monstrous animal now extinct.

  Gazing down at those partially unearthed bones of some creature once as big as his folks’ cabin had given Titus the shivers. He trembled again, thinking of the size of such a monster. Wondering if there were any animal at all in those western territories where Levi Gamble had gone that could rival such beasts.

  As he shivered again now over his tiny fire, Titus told himself such stories were nothing but hokum. No creature could ever grow to be that big. Those bones had to be nothing more than rock.

  Night came down quickly. It grew cold. And he lonely. Even more lonely than that night he’d spent in the barn, locked out of the cabin. Titus chewed on a biscuit and washed it down with the small tin cup filled with creek water. It tasted good, this long, cool draft of freedom. So each time he grew lonely, or anxious at some sound come to him from the dark, Titus took a drink. Savoring its taste upon his tongue. Telling himself he had done right.

  For every man there came a time to leave home. A time to try out his wings before he beat himself to death with them struggling against the confines of his parents’ nest. />
  The water had never tasted so good as it did that night.

  He kept his little fire going through the night more for companionship than for warmth—although he was cold, chilled through that single blanket he found crusted with frost when first light seeped across the glade to touch his stand of gum trees. It had been the coldest he had ever been. Surely the coldest night he had ever spent. Then he realized he had never slept in the forest before.

  As much as he hunted, as much as he had haunted the forest, he had never once set off and slept out on the night’s own terms. All of his journeys, all of his hunts, had found him back to the cabin at night. So he congratulated himself as he arose within that crinkling, frost-laden blanket and carried the tin cup over to the creek, where a layer of mist hung across the bank like a wispy fragment of Amy’s petticoat. He dipped the tin into the cold water, the creek rimed with a thin layer of ice—sensing the warmth her remembrance brought him. It was as easy as closing his eyes there on that streambank, in the overwhelming silence of that forest, to remember the feel of her beneath him.

  That served only to make his mouth go dry, causing his heart to hammer all but uncontrollably. Titus opened his eyes and stood, feeling the cold once more, remembering he was alone. Cold and alone by his own choice.

  Laying some more twigs on the embers of his fire, he dragged out another biscuit and sat eating it, feeding wood to his smoldering, sputtering companion. Besides being cold and frosty, the air was damp. The wood struggled to catch the flame, more often than not only smoking without real heat.

  It was his own stupidity, he cursed himself.

  From now on he’d simply have to learn better to protect some wood from the dews and damps if he intended on having himself a morning fire. That’s how it was for a man, Titus convinced himself. A man had to teach his own self. No one could do it for him.

  After lashing everything together into a tight bundle he could loop over his shoulder, he retied his crude moccasins. He hadn’t walked long yesterday morning in his hand-me-down boots before yanking them off and putting on the moccasins.

  Like most folks who had settled on the borderlands, he preferred the softer, conforming footwear. Besides, most frontier settlers simply did not have what it took in the way of money to purchase shoes and boots for expanding families. No matter—they were stiff and cumbersome, simply could not take the soakings you could give moccasins. A lot simpler to patch up the sole of a moccasin, laying in a new piece of leather. He had two extra pair in his possibles, older ones, some he had almost outgrown. But Titus figured he could always put them on, get them duly soaked, and thereby stretch them out to wearable if need be.

  That second morning of his journey, he felt no pressing need to worry on his feet. Surely there was plenty of time for him to shoot a deer to fill his belly—which would as well provide a hide he could soon learn to cure, just the way the tanner back in Rabbit Hash did with the pelts and skins brought him by the settlers in surrounding Boone County. The place had stunk, smelled to high heaven of death or worse still, what with the pelts stretched out and nailed to every wall of the tanner’s sheds or lashed inside great rectangles formed from elm saplings. All manner of skins cluttered that tanner’s place at the far edge of town, every hide to one stage or another scraped free of fat and loose tissue.

  Titus set out at a walk this day, the sun rising at his back, intending to bring down some meat before that sun would set. Perhaps even that morning, as the critters moved out of their beds and went down to water, went in search of graze. This would be the time of day to keep his eyes open for sign, his ears alerted to any sound the cold breeze might bring him. If nothing presented itself this morning, then he’d just wait—evening would be the next-best time of the day to run across game.

  His belly’s angry, rumbling protest convinced Titus he shouldn’t wait until the end of the day.

  With cold, wet feet and a belly filled only by the last of his mother’s baking-soda biscuits, shivering within the linsey-woolsey shirt he wore beneath the thick wrap of a leather jerkin, he strode on into dawn’s mist tumbling over the great river. He promised himself he’d buy a needle and some thread once he reached Louisville. Already he felt one of his long stockings wearing thin across the toes. If he walked all the way to Louisville—why, surely, his stockings would be in sore need of repair after all those miles.

  Morning passed without so much as a chance for a shot. Not that he didn’t see a few deer. But they were too far off, or bounded away too quickly, or he simply knew no more of them than the sound of their flight through the forest that swallowed all trace of them. The forest denied him all morning long.

  Near midday he came across an outcropping of slate that hung some two hundred feet or more above the wide river. As it tracked low in the southern sky, the autumn sun graced the rock with a sharp slant of light and, so he hoped, with warmth. Clambering up to the flat shelf, Titus shed his blanket and shooting pouch before leaning back against the gray rock. He turned his face toward the sun, soaking up the warmth from above, greedily drawing in what heat radiated off the slate beneath him. The river below lay twisted, a great tawny road that snaked its way almost due north toward Cincinnati in this, the great bend of the Ohio.

  Off to his left the river flowed. Yonder to the unknown. Away to far places he could only dream of—for no man he knew could lay claim to setting down tracks out there.

  Oh, like so many others in Boone County, Titus had heard tell of a band of his nation’s explorers setting out for the far western sea, returning three years later, taking that long to cross everything in between. There had been lots of wondrous talk about that journey at the Longhunters Fair every summer the last few years. Fragments and shreds of speculation and legend, rumor and fable: the size of the animals, the sheer number of the beasts, those high mountains one had to cross, heights where the snow never melted … and the Indians. Yet what stuck more than anything else in his memory of such talk was the description of the land. The sheer immensity of it. The way some folks claimed a man must feel all but swallowed up by the land.

  Too, some spoke of the way a man could see much, much farther than he could in this closed-in country, could look back behind him all the way to yesterday … look all the way ahead into day after tomorrow.

  Titus closed his eyes. Trying desperately to imagine. Struggling to picture just such a land. Hoping to capture a glimpse of it somewhere in his mind, if not his heart. Perhaps one day. One day in the years to come, when he was finally ready to look back into all his yesterdays, ready at long last to look ahead into all his tomorrows—then he would find a way to take himself toward that unknown land.

  But for now he sat at the edge of what was frontier enough for most any man. Behind him lay most of what passed for civilization. Ahead stretched a wilderness dotted irregularly with little sign of the white man save for outflung settlements huddled by the river, separated by many, many miles of thick forest still dominated by the beasts and the Indians.

  He sighed behind those closed eyes, conjuring up an image of an Indian. Not the sort he had seen a few times back on his one trip to Cincinnati years before, or on those annual treks to Burlington’s summer fair. A handful of Indians always showed up with squash and other crops to barter. But he imagined they could not be real Indians—not the way they had taken to wearing the white man’s shirts and vests and tricornered hats. Seemed just about all the Indians Titus had ever laid eyes on took a real fancy to the white man’s headware: poking feathers and birds’ wings or some other totem into the tricorne’s folds for decoration.

  No, he decided as the sun’s warmth cradled him: those Indians upriver simply couldn’t be the real thing. Downriver—that’s where he’d find some wild Injuns. But, then, he knew nothing about anything downriver. At the same time, he was certain his pap and the other men of Boone County knew something of what lay down the Ohio. Being farmers sending off their produce to sell downriver every harvest, they had to have dealings wit
h the sort of man who plied the Ohio in the flatboats Titus and other youngsters watched floating south and west with the current in all seasons. Kentucky broadhorns bound for the unknown just around the far bend. Even if his pap had never once directly engaged a riverman to carry the family’s produce west, then Titus was sure his father had many times talked with men who had.

  With a twinge of remorse now, he regretted that he hadn’t paid more attention each fall as their harvest of corn and wheat was carted into Rabbit Hash, there to be joined with the produce of other farmers, and flatboat pilots contracted to take the year’s harvest down to Louisville, farther still. Perhaps down to the mouth of the Ohio at the great Mississippi. To places that had foreign-sounding names on his tongue when he repeated what others spoke of with such a mysterious air. Perhaps if he had paid more attention—at least one time—he might now know more of what lay downriver.

  As it was, all he knew lay up the Ohio. Cincinnati. Pittsburgh.

  The first to recognize the crucial military importance of the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, which joined to form the Ohio, were the French who built Fort Duquesne in 1754 near the site. Following their defeat of the French, the British changed the post’s name to Fort Pitt, and by 1803 that surrounding community of nearly two thousand inhabitants was already known among area settlers as Pittsburg, “The Key to the Western Territory.” As early on the frontier as it was, the town nonetheless claimed a sprawling public market, a pair of glass factories, cabinet and coopers’ shops, nail works and tobacco manufactory, along with more than forty retail shops, all thriving on the steady influx of settlers.

  Yet it was flatboats and their bigger cousins, the keels, that made Pittsburgh truly famous in its early days. For more than half a century one out of every two citizens in the town was involved in boat building, boat selling, or boat buying.