Dance on the Wind tb-1

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Haw!” he roared as he flung back the leaves, every bit as scared those last few seconds as the fox was. It leaped back, bared its teeth, and lowered its head, snarling and yipping.

  “Get!”

  He waved his arms as he burst out of the leaves, scattering them all about him in a wild flutter of color and motion as he emerged. With a throaty whimper the fox whirled about and disappeared into a patch of fog.

  For some time he sat there in his bed of leaves, buried nearly up to his armpits, the blanket tangled around his waist. Waiting. Peering into the fog that had swallowed the fox whole.

  As good as that scrawny squirrel had tasted last night, he realized his belly was empty once more. Already he could recognize the beginning torment of its complaint. He would have to find more substantial fare today. No other choice but to hunt until he had some game. Even if it meant he wasn’t able to move as far downriver as he had vowed he would each day. Food had become his highest priority.

  But for now he had to take care of something else first.

  Kicking back his blanket and the thick layer of leaves, Titus emerged from his burrow at the base of the tree and looked about until he found a likely spot at a downed tree nearby. Backing up to it, he pushed the wooden buttons through their holes on the front of his britches, tugged them down around his ankles, then settled the backs of his thighs upon the cold, wet bark. As he emptied himself out and gathered a handful of wet leaves he used to clean himself off, Titus watched the patterns of frost that puffed before him with every breath.

  Snugging his britches back into place, he plodded back across the sodden ground and went to his knees by his blanket, drawing his kettle over. From it he took the last long drink of creek seep mixed with rainwater, then wrapped the kettle up with the rest and lashed it into the long roll he flung over his shoulder as he got to his feet.

  Draping his shooting pouch over the other shoulder, his rifle at the end of his left arm, Titus moved off, into the cold fog and his third day.

  Both times he stopped to rest that gray morning that bled itself into a grayer afternoon, he chewed on a peeled twig he had cut from a gum tree. Something to quiet his roiling stomach as he sat looking at the river beneath a sky brushed the same endless color. In Boone County as elsewhere on the frontier, it was often the older child who taught younger ones what they could eat when off to the woods gathering herbs for a mother’s cook pots. Some children came to favor dogwood with its taste of quinine, spice-wood preferred by others, or the stomach-soothing taste of walink, commonly called walking leaf. But they learned never, never to chew poison vine, or buckeye, or a bright, shiny, tempting poison-oak berry.

  Thinking back on how he had learned to feed himself from these woods as a child couldn’t help but aggravate that empty hole gnawing away at the pit of him, making him madder at himself for his failure, chipping away at his resolve piece by piece. As he walked on and on, it wasn’t a matter of thirst that made him drink as much as he could hold of the creeks and streams and every last trickle he crossed that long, wet day. He only knew that if he kept his belly filled with as much water as he could stand, it didn’t complain quite as badly.

  “Sun going down again,” he muttered aloud, then realized he had spoken out loud, looking left—then right—embarrassed.

  “Who the hell you talking to?” he said, wagging his head. “Ain’t no one to listen anyways.”

  Damn. Here he was, someplace he didn’t know of. Hadn’t eaten an honest meal in days, and he hadn’t scared up any real game to speak of.

  “Good goddamned hunter you are,” he grumbled, bringing his legs under him and rising to his feet, fixing to press on through the hard, leaden plop of that cold October rain.

  He didn’t know why—except that he was feeling the first twitches of fear. No longer merely disgusted with himself. No longer mad, the way he had been for most of that day. Instead, Titus was sensing the first self-doubts rattling within him like stones inside a dried gourd. And that made him afraid. Try as he might, he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why he was failing. Never before had he failed to bring down game, no matter what season he hunted. Why now? When it counted? When it meant the difference between surviving and starving? What had he done wrong?

  Through those tiny cracks in his confidence seeped the growing fear that reared its ugly head, tangled up with no small measure of superstition. Long ago he had learned from hunters much older than he that if a man had himself a run of bad luck in hunting, chances were he had been enchanted. His heart hammered twice as fast, just to even think on it. Possessed of a spell or hex that he would have to break.

  But there had to be a reason he had been hexed.

  “Think,” he chided himself, squeezing his brain down on it the way he stood there in the rainy forest squeezing a hand tightly around the leather straps that bound up his wool blanket.

  Maybe it was a curse put on him because he’d wronged Amy Whistler, maybeso wronged even his pap. Then again, maybe it had only to do with him: what had been happening to him in the last three days was simply telling him he’d chosen wrong, taken the wrong path for his life. Maybe … he was being told he should turn back.

  Titus stopped right there on the game trail, and for the first time in three days he looked back. Turned around and peered into the wet, soggy forest, back the way he had come. The tears were there before he could squeeze them off. A stifled sob was all that came out as he stared into the east. Upriver. Back to Boone County. As cold as his cheeks were, he could sense the track of every hot tear as it spilled from his eyes.

  Looking down at himself—his pacs, those double-soled moccasins, and leather britches soaked clear to the knees, forcing the rain’s chill straight to his core—only made him cry harder. He had never been so alone.

  “This is what you wanted, dammit!”

  And he swiped at the tears with a trembling hand, still looking down at his miserable self. Then, suddenly, he began to chuckle.

  Wagging his head, he murmured, “You … you surely are the sight, Titus Bass.”

  That chuckle felt good. Like a warm, dry place right down in the center of him. So good did it feel that he started to laugh. He was unsure about really laughing at himself there at first, but then he picked up one moccasin and looked at it hanging soggy and floppy from where it was lashed about his ankle with a buckskin whang. He sat it down on the wet forest floor and picked up the other moccasin—in just as sad a shape. Now he was laughing for real. That good, great belly sort of laugh. What a damned poor sight he was! Some great woodsman!

  Likely he’d be nothing but a rack of bones by the time he limped into Louisville. Looking like something ol’ Tink’d drag into the yard out of the woods.

  No chance I’ll go and land myself some work on the wharf, looking so puny and poor the way I do. A hiring man take one gander at me and think: man as can’t provide for hisself surely ain’t worth hiring on to be doing no heavy work.

  As his laughter withered, a faint and distant sound pierced the forest clearing where he stood. Not sure at first, he listened with all his being while human voices be came distinct. A slight echo reverberated behind what was clearly an attempt at song. With that echo, and its direction, Titus realized the voices came not from the forest surrounding him on three sides. Instead, the off-key melody rose from the timbered canyon of the Ohio River somewhere below him.

  Through the wet leaves and soggy grass he bolted away in the song’s direction. Perhaps only to see another human. Perhaps to assure himself that his mind hadn’t been teched after going without real food for so long, and three days without the sight of a human face, the sound of a human voice.

  Standing on the edge of the tall granite escarpment less than a hundred feet above the river, he gazed up the Ohio anxiously, not seeing a boat upon the water. Downriver he turned expectantly. Nothing there. Turning to peer upriver once more as the echoing voices drew closer, he watched a single flatboat emerge at the far bend from the great,
green, verdant tunnel of the Ohio. How many men stood on its deck, he could not tell at the distance, yet as the flatboat closed that next mile, their forms began to take shape.

  Foremost was the helmsman, standing as he was at the rear of the boat, one arm drooped over a long rudder pole set down in the forks of support that reached as tall as the man’s waist. Coming out of the turn, this steersman worked to inch his craft over toward the far bank, yard by yard, keeping his flatboat guided down the main channel of the river.

  Bass waved, hoping he might catch the pilot’s eye. But there was no sign of recognition from the boat.

  Closer they came, until Titus could make out two more men, one on either side of the craft, each squatting down inside the low gunnels of the boat, gripping a short oar they worked at from time to time as the pilot bellowed his orders above their song. Then Bass spotted a fourth man, who until now had been hunkered down in the front of the boat, getting up from his knees among the barrels and kegs, chests and bundles of goods. Crawling over and around them, he made his way slowly back through the center of the craft and disappeared beneath an awning of cloth stretched taut from a ridgepole that ran along the midsection of the flatboat. He emerged from the back end of the low, sideless awning and went to stand near the helmsman.

  Although Titus could not make out the words of their spoken voices, he could tell that those two were talking while the two oarsmen were singing their joyous air. For a brief moment it appeared they looked up his way among the trees at the edge of the escarpment. Bass waved again.

  Still no one waved back.

  “Halloo!” he cried out.

  It echoed back from the far side of the forested canyon.

  On the flatboat below, the singing immediately stopped. It seemed all four looked up to study both sides of the river, turning their heads this way and that, searching the forested banks.

  “Up here!” he cried out, waving his hat, holding the rifle out at the end with his other hand.

  Then one of the oarsmen spotted him and hollered out to the others, pointing with one arm. They all seemed to turn his way, so Titus waved his rifle again. Two of the boatmen took their hats off and gave a salute. They called out with a garbled, distant greeting he could not make out.

  It mattered not, for that place within him burned warm to catch this sight of others, his ears to hear the sounds of voices speaking, even singing. As they bobbed on below Titus, the two continued their off-key song. He watched them, his eyes bouncing over all four men as the helmsman began to ease his craft to the south channel of the Ohio before slipping through another bend in that mighty river where the mist and fog clung like dirty linen.

  Smaller they became, smaller still, until the flatboat disappeared around a piece of land, keeling to the north into the distant rain. Swallowed by the river and its canyon. In the silence of their wake, Titus could hear their voices fade for some time after they had gone from view. Then that too was gone, all traces of boat and crew.

  So close to others, for only moments. And gone so quickly that he felt strange, as if something had been torn from him whole. The loneliness returned, this time with a vengeance—a solid, metallic ache to it as he continued to watch the very spot where the flatboat had disappeared.

  Of a sudden he realized how quickly the sun was falling from the fading light. The river’s canyon below grew darker still as he gaped into its depths.

  He had to push on, keep moving until he ran across some game—or until it got too dark to hunt. Either one, and he’d finally give up and stop for the night.

  Turning back into the timber was like peeling away a strip of flesh from his own body, forcing himself to press on—back into the wet, soggy forest, teeth chattering, his nose so cold it had begun to hurt. Trudging on, he followed step by step the game trail as it wound higher along the side of the canyon, through the forest—as he prayed he would run across something. Even another squirrel.

  His stomach tumbled. Yes, even another damned squirrel. Far better than creek water and sucking on a gum twig.

  What little light there had been all that gloomy day was eventually squeezed right out of the river’s canyon, seeming to shimmer for a moment as the last rays peeked from beneath the western clouds. And with the sun’s sinking the wind came up, as cold as it had ever been. Enough to drive a damp, chilling finger all the way to his marrow.

  With no supper, and no prospect of bringing anything down—not even another squirrel—Titus ached all the more in every bone, knowing that when he would make another fire tonight, this time he faced climbing within his blanket-and-leaf burrow without even a few poor mouthfuls of some small, bony creature who haunted the ceiling of the forest above him.

  As it grew steadily darker, Titus found himself squinting at the ground, forced to let his feet in those soggy moccasins make out the narrow game trail for him. Feeling his way up the last of that climb along the south side of the Ohio, he slowly started a gradual descent as the river bent itself around to the right, flowing north by west.

  Once on that trip down he stopped and listened to the night, staring up at the sky. Back to the east no moon could he see. Everywhere else the sky thickened like blood pudding without a single star to mar its ominous monotony. In a matter of minutes he would have to think of moving up the slope to find himself a place to spend the night. A good chance of rain. The dark and the cold settled into his spirit. To stop and rest, however, would make for too much time to think. To brood on mistakes made, to conjure up the faces of folks left behind.

  As he hefted the rifle across his shoulder and stepped off the trail toward the timber above him, Titus heard something—a sound out of place.

  The way a man hunted the distance in a thick forest: looking for something that did not belong.

  But this was a sound the forest did not own.

  Immediately he stopped. Listened. Downriver. So distant he wasn’t sure. He might tell better if he moved on a while farther. Perhaps make it around the rest of that bend in the river. Then he would know for sure.

  Both his eyes and his toes strained to make out the trail as he leaned into a faster pace, spurred on by the prospect that those sounds promised. One hundred yards, then two hundred and he stopped again. Listening for several moments without hearing a thing.

  Just when he had convinced himself that his mind had been charling him—as cold and wet as he was, as hungry as he was for human company—just when he was about to give up and give in and make a camp of it for the night … he heard the voices.

  Bounding off into the dark, he found his heart thundering in his ears. Hurrying him ever faster.

  The closer he got, the more his ears made sense of things. Not just voices, but singing. A few thready notes of a wheezing squeeze-box. Behind it the low thump of someone drumming and another of them clacking tinware spoons in back rhythm.

  The trees a few hundred yards ahead seemed to part, and he caught a glimpse of light. Titus lunged to a stop, unable to see it now. Took a step, then another back and spotted it again. Flickering. Dancing. Firelight.

  Warmth. And they were sure to have food.

  On he surged, renewed, invigorated. Assured of closing the distance in no time now.

  And even sooner than he could have imagined, Bass stood at the edge of the trees, gazing down at the bank some thirty yards away. In those moments he remained motionless at the last fringe of timber watching that fire. The half-moon made its brief appearance below the clouds in the east. Below him lay a wide strip of the river, a flatboat tied up at the bank, gently bobbing in the cold, silvery light tracing lacy patterns on the black water.

  Laughter drew his gaze back to the fire.

  What that sound could do for his young soul.

  Laughter!

  His heart rising in his throat, Titus moved out of the timber, watching two of the men rise from their stumps.

  “Who goes?”

  He stopped, called back, “Just me.” And stayed rooted to that spot a moment mo
re. “I was the one hollered out to you while back. Upriver, it was.”

  One of the forms moved in front of the fire now, coming his way. He stopped, backlit by the cheery, yellow, beckoning flames.

  “You’re alone?”

  “Just me.”

  That one signaled Titus on. “You’ve got our welcome.”

  Bass inched into the light, licking his lips at the fragrance of something frying, smelling biscuits baking in a skillet to the side of the fire. He couldn’t take his eyes off that steaming kettle, the simmering coffeepot as his mouth worked at a gallop, salivating like a hound’s.

  “Hell, he’s just a boy,” one of the others grumbled, placing his fists on his hips.

  “Yeah,” the closest one cheered as Titus came closer. He had on a worn flannel shirt and buff-colored nankeen britches. “C’mon over here, boy. You look a mite hongry.”

  “I … I am. Real hungry.”

  The one in greasy flannel stepped close. As hairy as any man Titus had ever seen. “We got us plenty. You’re welcome to share.”

  “He don’t get none of my share,” a third, short and stocky man grumbled, then spat into the fire with a loud hiss. He wore a jacket and waistcoat of quilted Spanish silk.

  “How long it been since you et last?” asked the first man with his Kentucky accent.

  “Been a day … or two,” Titus said, his eyes wandering nowhere from the frying pan and kettle at the fire’s edge.

  “God-glory-damned, Ebenezer,” the last of the men exclaimed. “I do b’lieve this here boy’s done runned away from home!”

  7

  He couldn’t ever remember eating so much. It seemed his mouth and gullet and belly kept crying out for more, for every last bite he could lay his hands on.

  “How long you say it been since you last et?” asked Hames Kingsbury, the head oarsman, who wore beneath his blanket coat a shirt of poor man’s tow cloth, topped with a bright-red handkerchief for a cravat. Crowning it all was a dark-green hat in which a long red feather was prominently displayed—a strutting cock of a boatman’s symbol of martial prowess.