The Winds of Autumn

by Jim R. Woolard

  We wound down from the cliffs and traveled north by west several miles. Wentsell’s shortcut brought us into better country: The hills were less steep, the woods thinner, the brush less prominent, the water courses shallow and easily forded. We deliberately skirted the towering mass of Pine Knob in a circling sashay. Near the end of our night trek, one final obstacle barred us from the Scioto and Hurricane Tom’s Town: Big Beaver Creek.

  The skeeters renewed their feast a distance from the creek’s south bank, and blunt words of warning sailed rearward on the night air from the front of our small column. “Yuh pry open that fat tin agin, them Shawnee won’t be your biggest worry.” Lem’s softly muttered reply went no further than my ears.

  Taller trees surrendered to willows dotted with slough grass. I heard a splash, and Wentsell ordered an immediate halt. Beyond him and Blake, the dull sheen of standing water spread in a wide arc.

  “How deep be the Beaver?”

  “Waist high most times. She’s over our heads tonight,” Wentsell predicted.

  Lem shoved me aside. “Don’t by any lucky toss of the bones have another canoe hid out hereabouts, does yuh?”

  At Wentsell’s shake of the head, Lem groaned and said, “Ain’t no horses ta be had neither.”

  “We’ll raft her,” Wentsell decided. “Spread out an’ hunt. A dozen logs six feet long, six inches round’ll ferry the gear an’ vittles.”

  “Whatayuh mean gear?” Lem protested. “What ’bout us’ens?”

  The fear in an otherwise brave man was genuine. Wentsell recognized it as such, and placed a consoling hand on Lem’s shoulder. “I allow yuh swim like a rock. I don’t fare a sight better my ownself. But we can’t tarry cuttin’ timber big enough ta fashion a raft for the bunch of us. Come daylight, we need be under cover an’ on the lookout. We’ll tie yuh fast an’ float yuh across. Yuh three hunt the wood. I’ll be back.”

  We searched upstream and down, and scavenged the required logs from the largest limbs strewn along the Big Beaver by the high water of recent days. Wentsell reappeared bearing evidence he’d been equally busy: About his shoulders hung lengths of grapevine writhed and knotted into tying rope. He separated the two longest logs from our pile, then trimmed and laid the balance alongside each other, creating a rectangular platform. We bound them tight with the vines, passing the lashings over and under. The longest logs we positioned across the narrow span of the rectangle a foot from either end. Binding the cross-members to the platform with buffalo tugs from Wentsell’s possible sack completed an unwieldy craft on land that nonetheless floated handsomely.

  “Yuh know what’s next, Lem,” Wentsell said, fishing the strap of his shot pouch over his head. “Down ta bare hide for everyone.”

  We stripped naked and wrapped rifles and gear in frocks, breeches and leggins. The saddle pouches made a separate bundle. Lem danced from foot to foot, swatting skeeters before and after they tasted him, mostly after. “Wade in the creek ta your ears an’ they’ll have less of yuh ta chaw on,” Wentsell urged. “It’ll wash the stink offen yuh too, thank the Lord.”

  Lem plunked his bundled gear and rifle on the raft and hastily dropped one foot in the Big Beaver. His skinny frame twitched with fright and cold in the faint moonlight. Puckered welts scored the center of each buttock. “That scar Sadie O’Ryan given yuh ain’t bright red no more,” Wentsell teased.

  “Sadie O’Ryan?” a puzzled Blake repeated.

  Lem tiptoed into waist-deep water and spun to face the bank. “’Tain’t no cause ta tattle on a proper friend, Tice.”

  Blake glanced up from lashing Lem’s gear to his own. “Yuh never told Blaine an’ me ’bout no Sadie O’Ryan. Yuh told us yuh was branded by that African emir.”

  “Branded!” Wentsell exclaimed as we drug the raft toward the suddenly sheepish Lem. “He was branded, all right, marked forever by a charwoman tired of his strayin’ paws. She burnt his behind with a hot poker when he missed the latchstring fleein’ for his very life.”

  Amidst our laughter at Wentsell’s disclosure, the floating raft bumped Lem’s scrawny chest. “I’ll have my day, Tice Wentsell. I’ll—” The old sergeant’s feet slipped from under him. His mouth sprang shut and he grasped a front cross member to keep his head high and dry. Then the water reached our chins and we were each manning a corner of the raft, too busy for anything else.

  When we were clear of the flooded bank, the undertow of the main current pulled at our legs and feet. The raft bucked and tossed on the boisterous surface, dunking our heads and threatening our grip. We clung tight, kicked hard and paddled with free arms at every opportunity, the long shank of our craft aligned with the flow of the creek. The far bank, a scalloped border of treetops above the blur of rushing water and bouncing raft, loomed no nearer.

  “What now, Wentsell?” Lem bellowed.

  Wentsell hooked an elbow on the deck of the raft and hoisted his bearded face, nose ring dripping wet, for a look-see downstream. He hurried not at all figuring our location on the creek. We rested, awaiting his guidance. I stretched a leg, easing cramps, and prayed we hadn’t successfully canoed the mighty Ohio only to perish in the much smaller Big Beaver. For the chill wet and numbing cramps, I damned the Shawnee.

  “Pull starboard, Sergeant,” Wentsell commanded. “Give her hell, Tylers!”

  At the stern cross-members, Blake and I resumed kicking and stroking. Wentsell did likewise at the left front corner. The trees of the north bank, our destination, walled off the stream ahead, warning of a sharp bend southward. Wentsell’s tack was no mystery: Angle starboard and land before the creek turned on itself in the bend and become a whirlpool of thrashing water.

  “Don’t quit. It’s now or never!” Wentsell roared.

  Blake and I gave it our all. Inch by inch and no faster, our efforts altered the course of the raft, overcoming the force and drag of the current. Nearly done in, I levered my head up to check our progress, and knew instantly there would be no easy landing. We were still caught in the full flow of the flooding creek well into the sharp bend, having already overshot our mark. The inescapable thrust of the current was about to fling us hard ashore, regardless of any wishes to the contrary.

  Lem realized what was coming too. Over the corner of the raft I saw him wrap his arms round the cross-members by his head and lock them together. I looked past him and shuddered to the toes. The old sergeant had no inkling the raft was angled with him betwixt the rough logs and the onrushing bank. I ducked under the corner of the raft and lunged toward him. “Watch out! Get back!”

  He heard me, but his fear of drowning had him hanging fire. With time in desperately short supply, I made a fist and punched him at the nape of the neck. His grip slackened. I latched onto his shaggy hair, pried him loose and yanked him underwater with me, kicking backward.

  We surfaced none too soon: I was holding the stern cross-member with one hand, a flailing and choking Lem with the other, when the swirling torrent we crested slammed us into the rock-studded north bank. Wood cracked and splintered. The raft stopped with a jarring thud and bounced upward, tearing Lem’s hair from my fingers. I hit bottom with my head above water and barked a shinbone. Pain lanced through my leg and squeezed my eyes shut.

  Wentsell yelled, “Stand and walk! Stand and walk her out! Smartly now!” I popped tearing eyes open. The raft rested on a tilt, partly in and partly out of the shallow water. “Get up, lad. We have need of yuh,” Lem beckoned.

  Hopping mostly on my good leg, I gritted teeth and helped lug the battered raft onto high ground in the willows and slough grass. There I fell on bare haunches and rubbed my bruised shin to chase the pain. Blake crawled beside me, one cheek swollen and puffy, blood running from a gash on his chin. “Pesky devils won’t have ta bite no more, they can drink their fill,” he said swiping the cut dry. “Yuh hurt bad, little brother?”

  I poked and felt everywhere. “Nothin’ but a banged leg.”

  Lem wobbled past, eyepatch askew, right flank caked with mud from
armpit to ankle. “By God, that was akin ta bein’ wedged arse first through a knothole.”

  He knelt at the edge of the creek and splashed with both hands. “Much as I’s washed tonight, next thing yuh’ll be callin’ me Lord of the Water.”

  “Doubtful. Yuh ain’t never gonna smell like Hannah Ferrenden,” Wentsell quipped. The platform on the raft had survived with lashings unbroken. Wentsell began parceling out bundles of wet gear. The rattle of shattered crockery jerked Lem’s head around. “Sergeant, I’m afeared we’ve suffered a horrendous setback,” Wentsell said, voice flat as a muffled drumbeat.

  Bath totally forgotten, Lem snapped his sagging frock from Went-sell’s proffered hand and unwound the sash belt securing it. Brown pieces of different sizes and shapes fell about his naked feet, accompanied by a shower of droplets the same color. He moaned and toed the largest shard. “Yuh saved me for naught, Blaine.”

  “Wasn’t but a slurp left,” Blake reminded him.

  “The last be the finest, ’specially if’n it’s doubtful when a body’ll taste another.”

  “Yuh won’t be without for long. Yuh need not stoop ta water quite yet.”

  Lem bristled. “Don’t pull my halter.”

  “I’m not,” Blake insisted. “Ain’t them Shawnee packin’ enough rum for half of Kentucky? They’d not miss a keg or two, Would they?”

  “Whoa here now,” Wentsell cautioned.

  But Lem wasn’t to be put off for all the coin in the King’s treasury. “Whoa your ownself. Didn’t yuh promise anythin’ we lacked, we’d steal from the Redsticks?”

  Blake moved behind Lem and winked at the now bristling Went-sell. “He did, an’ he’ll keep his word like always, won’t yuh?”

  Wentsell checked his temper, and that knowing grin slowly curled his mouth. He snorted and admitted, “I can’t argue with the both of yuh. The faster we lighten out, the sooner we maybe replace your jug.” He slapped flesh at the hip. “An we don’t cover ourselves, we’ll be nothin’ but bone.”

  We made haste unwrapping weapons and donning soggy clothing. Once the raft was unloaded, at Wentsell’s insistence we tore it apart and pitched the logs into the Big Beaver, his keen regard for the Shawnee enemy never more obvious. That chore done, we gathered in thicker cover for a sorely needed resting of lung and limb.

  Though beaten to a fare-thee-well and starved as newborn colts, we first paid homage to our perpetual fear of damp powder. With no hollow tree handy for muffling the reports, we screwed worms on ramrods and wrested the seated balls from our rifles. Covering the same metal worm with oiled linen provided sponges for drying and cleaning the barrel. We reloaded with fresh patching and French black, and as an extra surety, double-reamed the touchhole before recharging the pan with priming powder dry as dust.

  Unwilling to risk a fire, we each sprinkled a palm of meal with Wentsell’s canteen and kneaded the mixture into nocake. Combining the moist batter with rationed slivers of jerk, we enjoyed a chewy repast that stuck to the roof of the mouth but tamed much of the growling emptiness beneath our ribs.

  Armed, fed and breath caught, we looked to Wentsell. A breeze stirred the dawn air, foretelling heavy morning fog in the lowland bottom of the Scioto. He stood, leaned on his flintlock and held a licked finger aloft. “Winds from where we’re headed, an’ a goodly thing too. The old war trail them heathen follow hugs the near bank of the river, not more’n two miles yonder northeast. They’ll wait an’ ford upstream after the water sinks more, meanin’ they pass by today, an’ I prefer we spy them first.”

  His cross-eyes met mine. “Today we dasn’t stumble over our own moccasins. Today we expect the Redsticks ever half step. They may camp at Hurricane Tom’s Town or further north. So right off, we hide where we can watch the town site and learn how soon we might do them women a good turn. Any questions?”

  Cradling his long rifle in the crook of his arm, Wentsell winked and flashed his most crooked smile. “We sweated a bunch of country reachin’ here, and that was the sweet part, buckos. Now let’s go see can we grab the catamount’s tail ’thout gettin’ clawed.”

  Chapter 12

  Morning till Afternoon, September 14

  The advance scout of the Shawnee war party, lean-bodied and long-limbed, wore an oversized trade shirt of faded blue, red cloth breechclout, deerskin leggins and centerseam moccasins. His skull had been plucked bald except for several topmost scalplocks, two of which trailed in braids adorned with circular brooches; quill wrappings held three others stiffly upright. Behind the crown of his head, hawk feathers sprouted from a final tuft of hair. Silver cones distended the lobes of his holed ears, and rings of the same metal pierced the dividing ridge of his nostrils. Streaks of vermillion daubed in a spoke pattern extended from the hinge of his jaw across the full width of his cheeks, and solid lines of black surrounded the dark eyes.

  The war paint marked the Shawnee a hostile Injun. But what made him so menacing in the round eye of my spyglass was his weaponry. Behind the right shoulder on a loop sling hung a Brown Bess musket of .74 caliber. Lem had taught us utmost respect for the favored shooting weapon of the Shawnee and their Redcoat allies. The smoothbore Brown Bess came equipped with a heavy breech that withstood constant firing with few instances of bursting. It reloaded faster than guns with rifled barrels and was deadly at one hundred yards, accurate to seventy. Lem preached it was no disgrace for the slower-loading rifleman to deal with the Bess from extreme long range, survival being the better part of valor on most occasions.

  For close-in fighting, the Shawnee scout carried two additional weapons, a sheathed knife strung on a thong necklace and a long-handled war club thrust inside his woven belt. The war club’s jutting bead matched that of a snake, the carved jaws fastened on a ball capped by an iron spike. All in all, he was a properly dangerous foe, well-armed, trail-wise and trained to kill enemies of every stripe without forethought or hint of mercy. The fact that four dozen warriors just as scalp-hungry were following close on his heels made me scrunch down a tad more.

  Three doe deer, flushed by the scout’s arrival on the Scioto’s gravelly bank, bounced past under the bluff where we lay watching, long necks and high backs brown ships sailing the gray sea of early morning fog. The sharp eye of the Shawnee caught the deer’s lunging flight through swirling mist and wind-swayed willows from fifty yards away. His painted face swung our direction. We were well concealed beneath the peak of the bluff and the scout would spot us only if we moved our hatted heads: We were still relieved when horse sound from downriver drew his keen scrutiny elsewhere.

  From our high vantage point the whole of the narrow plain bordering the Scioto, once the location of Hurricane Tom’s Town, spread before us. The rough clearing was empty of bark dwellings now, the name all that remained of the village founded by a French trader decades ago.

  The tangled, fogbound bottom of the Scioto stretched north and south from the old town site beyond the range of my spyglass. Black walnut, hackberry and sycamore choked both banks, wild grapevine overgrowing them to their very tops, interlacing from tree to tree in a solid mat of spiraling green. Underbrush and weed growth was no less abundant, and watery lagoons from past floods spawned countless small marshes reeking of rotting vegetation and ankle-deep mud.

  “Bad place even for Redsticks,” Lem observed. “Snakes an’ skeeters thicker’n fleas on a hound that can’t scratch.”

  The Shawnee column straggled onto the narrow plain in clusters. They’d marched long hours, for their heavily burdened pack animals showed much sweat and were worn down at the hock.

  The savages were a dusky-skinned, sinewy lot, the muscular and lean winning out handily. Paint of various colors overlaid a forehead here, an upper body there. Every scalplock, shot bag, breechclout, leg garter and moccasin, whether decorated with feather, quill, bead, claw or ribbon, had its own special design. No pair of copper arm bands, shiny gorget or dangling ornament of silver matched precisely. I realized as I searched among them for sign of Sarah tha
t the old saw sworn to by borders everywhere was plainly untrue: All Injuns didn’t look alike. They were as different one from the other as my white companions.

  Three Feathers walked from the cloaking trees leading his tall horse. An unsaddled paint pony bearing Hannah Ferrenden followed. The leather rope circling her neck was wrapped in the fist of Stick Injun, who marched at her knee. Atop her head sat the rakishly peaked hat her new master had claimed from the muddy Ohio, feather stubs drooping every which way. Best I could tell, the near-drowning and manhandling she’d endured hadn’t diminished her fiery spirit. The judge’s daughter rode ramrod straight with chin tilted skyward.

  Wentsell, flattened belly down beside me, shook with silent mirth and spoke in a whisper. “Prayin’ for an openin’ ta kick that runt where it’ll do the most harm, an’ the hell with the consequences if’n I knows that gal atall.”

  Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for Sarah. She too was tethered, the short rope circling her throat held by Simon Meek. They were both afoot, Meek in the forefront, tugging on the rope every step. Sarah’s head slanted downward and she stumbled over her own feet. Resting at my other side, Blake grew rigid but said nothing. Words weren’t needed. His fingers drummed on the stock of his Lancaster and he watched Meek with an icy glare colder than a winter grave.

  We sighed thankfully when a shouted command from Three Feathers echoed the length of the column, halting the pack train. Bundles and kegs were unloaded on the spot, then the horses bunched and led to the riverbank for watering. The remaining Shawnee checked the open ground and nearest trees for firewood and kindled half-a-dozen cooking fires.

  Stick Injun separated himself from Hannah Ferrenden’s knee and motioned for her to dismount. She slid gingerly from the paint, grasping the taut rope on the chance her captor had a punishing trick in mind. Just as leery, Stick Injun kept a wide space between them, well beyond the reach of her foot.