by Alix Hawley
—Your stomach certainly must believe in buffalo now.
Stewart is doing his utmost to skin the carcass. The hide is difficult to pull away and too heavy to pack along with us, but he will not stop. We all watch him putting his shoulder to the body, trying to get the remaining attached side free until he gives it up. Sitting wiping his knife, covered in greasy smears, he looks perplexed and says very heavy:
—I told my Hannah I would get her some furs for herself. Not just to sell.
Findley says Stewart can embrace the carcass tonight and feel himself wrapped in victory. And besides, he says, buffalo hides are worthless on the market. Now he raises his flask:
—To buffalo. And their killer. And their would-be killer.
And in the end Stewart raises his as well.
The way remains easy enough, but the clouds spin themselves into a thick wool. A thin crust of snow remains in a hollow where we camp. Here Stewart catches fever overnight, and we have to stop to nurse him. He is sorry for his sickness, he keeps saying so, he clenches his rattling teeth to get the word out between them: Sorry. He is angry at the fever and at himself. When he improves, we go on slowly, though he is not quite well and looks pale and hollowed out. He keeps close to me, I feel his eyes on my back. He is not fit to hunt properly yet. We see no more buffalo, though I get a deer now and then. We begin to grow used to the country.
Hill does not like being used to anything, as I know. He does not like this landscape, as yet he sees no useful land he might sell. And there has been little enough adventure to his taste. He has fallen out of excitement into a pit of ugly boredom. At the fire his face is dull. He takes out his papers and ruffles them, but he announces:
—Nothing to write home of.
He has a trick of becoming like a straw pallet we have to drag along and try to amuse, though who can amuse a pallet?
He is quiet for a morning. Then he calls ahead to Findley:
—We ought to set up our station camp and set the Boones to hunting, if this is your great place.
Findley pays him no heed and carries on riding. He has taken us into some low hills and down along the side of a river, where we have to walk the horses. Hill persists:
—We expect to see a wonder at any moment.
Findley looks back with a smile and calls:
—This river, my dears, is the Red River.
We pick our way through the remaining patches of hard snow and the high stalks of cane along the water. We have to walk the horses, they do not like it here. The cane brake is higher than our heads in places, it is like being in a stiff cage. A stalk pokes Hill near his eye and he says:
—Who says it is the Red River? On whose authority is it the Red River?
I pay no heed to these two. A broken cane now scratches my face from ear to neck and I feel a drip of warm blood, which I touch with my finger. I taste it.
I am alive here, my blood is alive. I want there to have been no one here before us. I want the river not to have a name. I sprinkle blood from my finger into it where a creek joins. Lulbegrud Creek I name it, for Gulliver. One of his words. Behind me Findley says:
—I say so, yes. On my authority. I was one of the first to come here and the only one to go so far. The trading post was beyond here if I remember, and I do—
He turns and walks out of the cane. And there indeed is the post. Only burned. The foundations look like agonized jaws caught open. The stockade still stands in a few places, grey and beaten and sorry. A few mouldy pumpkins and cornstalks are sinking into the ground. The horses stop to crop at the thin, tender grass trying to come through the rags of snow and ashes. For a moment Findley looks disconcerted. Then he picks his way into the centre of the ruins.
—Ah.
He sifts through the snow, taking up a handful of ash and charred lumps, looking intently. He half-sings:
Any old needles, any old pins. I might perchance have left some here for the Indian maids of Eskippakithiki. Oh the Indian maids—
Hill stalks into the ruined post as well:
—Keep your goddamned bog-Irish puke in your hole. Sickening us all.
He walks footprints all over the snow and ash, looking sidelong at Findley, then pushes over a burned pole. It falls too gently for his liking. He jabs at it with his boot and says:
—Is this all?
Findley says:
—Is this what?
Hill blows out a rush of air:
—You are an arse of a know-nothing with nothing to show us, I have seen that from the first day out. What exactly is it that we are doing? Why do we find nothing at all of use? And why have you nothing to show for your trip here, you bastard liar?
Findley tosses the handful of ashes and charcoal into the breeze, and some of it scatters across Hill. I see the rage travel up Hill before he spits at Findley and reaches into his belt. Findley says very soft:
—A group of Shawnee and French took my skins and furs on my last trade trip. Did I not say? But there are plenty more for the taking. Plenty of land where no one has yet been. And the Indian maids, my friend. Think of the maids. I have seen the maids, I have unmade them myself. There may be one left for you, or one you might unmake again, if you use your celebrated imaginative powers.
Hill draws out his blade. He is no knifeman and will certainly blunder about it. I say:
—Have you not had your fill today, our Hill? Buffalo is better eating as we know, thanks to our bony friend.
Hill stands swaying on his planted feet, holding his knife thrust out at Findley and enjoying his own fury. He loves to be whipped by great feeling, he loves a scene. Squire is watching carefully, Stewart leans his head against his horse. Findley aims a grin at me and his eyes say: I stayed at the Monongahela to see what would happen. I saw you run. What will you do now?
He steps forward and sings lightly:
Oh, the Indian maids.
Hill’s arm tenses, he is set to see his performance through. He curses and throws the knife wild. Findley dodges it easy. I take it up and give it a spin as I toss it so that it spirals into the tree nearest Hill’s arm but catches the edge of his shirt. I say:
—Hill, Findley has not been lying. He knew how to get us here. He has been here, it is true. He knows this place.
Hill tugs out the knife. He looks at me for a time. Then he gives me his friendliest smile, as though we have never been anything but the best of friends. His eyes uncloud, he laughs with his teeth apart. Now he walks over and gives Findley a tap on the breastbone with his knife handle. He says:
—When you die, I will eat you. I will chew you.
He turns the knife about in his hand. A laugh flees Stewart like a nervous dog. Findley bows, unsmiling now, and says:
—I shall look forward to such a rare fate.
And he turns. Without looking at us he swings up onto his chestnut horse and jabs its ribs with his thin legs. He rides swiftly away from the river up a slope into the trees until we cannot see him. We are left staring stupidly. A weak ray of light makes its way through the cloud, and in it the ruined post looks more sad and lost than ever.
My hunting shirt grows cool against my back, a breeze flips past us and swings round in our faces. Hill curses at length, they are quite good curses and imaginative ones. I am loath to admit that I can see why he is angry. But I can.
We do not move. I do not know precisely where we are. Stewart looks at me with his exhausted face still feverish and asks:
—Are we lost?
I say:
—Perhaps. No. Let us say we are bewildered.
We stay where we are for the night. Nobody speaks.
When the sky lightens, I unhobble my horse and mount. Before I can go, Hill raises his head and curses:
—Goddamned bastard Irish peddlers!
But he follows quickly, satisfied again with having something fresh to do. Squire rises and helps Stewart mount, he pulls himself up and off we ride. I take Findley’s trace. He has made it easy, knocking twigs from
trees and catching his knife on others to make pale gashes.
After some hours we come to a rocky incline, very steep. It soon becomes a sheer cliff. Findley’s chestnut horse is hobbled at the bottom with a surly look. On seeing us it stamps one forefoot again and again. We leave ours to keep it company. They begin to stamp as well, bang bang bang.
The only way is up the rock. I say:
—Well, boys. To Heaven.
The wet stone scrapes my fingers and palms, my feet slip again and again and fly into the empty air beneath me. The horses beat their hooves as if to drive me mad. There is a great rock hump I must hug myself to, angling out over the earth below, but I climb its spine and get over it to the top, where I lie on my belly at the edge with my head dangling. Below me are the upturned faces, all curious.
—Well, Dan. What now?
This of course from Hill. Squire gives Stewart a leg up. Stewart is slow, but he manages it, though he is very pale after I haul him up the last few feet. Squire shins up quick and then he and I pull Hill over the hump. We all sit panting. The horses stamp and nicker below. Findley’s looks up, it flashes its teeth and gums.
The trees are in a thick dark knot round us. Stewart points a shaking arm:
—There.
And there is Findley, waiting against the crook of an elm some yards off as though he was born there. He has been watching.
We push through the trees into the daylight and stand before him, still breathing hard. Hill spits at the ground, pah, reminding us of his powers of spitting. Findley hums a tuneless little song and says:
—Here you are now. Please to go ahead. Your servant. See it without a bog-Irishman in your view.
He gives another little bow and a flourish. His eye is on Hill. He steps aside.
There is only our breathing and the far echo of the horses’ stamping. Stewart and Squire stand where they are. Hill goes straight up the small incline towards Findley, brushing past him. I go to the left, to the other side of the tree whose branches make a thin awning over me. At the cliff edge I am the first of us to see it, the huge spreading plain below, a shimmering carpet of grasses with waves of treed hills rising behind. Peaceful but entirely living, a vast breathing thing with a rippling green heart and lungs. My own breath is puny.
A very light rain is beginning. I open my mouth and catch it on my tongue, it tastes marvellous, like a splinter of sky or like a secret, as I imagine.
—Kentucky.
As Findley says this word it seems to me that I have known it all my life. It seems to me that I have been dreaming of this place without knowing how to say it, without giving it a name. And it is the most beautiful name. Hill is breathing over my shoulder, the others are coming now, but I stare down over the spread of grasses, and I say:
—Empty. Is it?
Findley answers quiet:
—Buffalo enough, and bear and deer and beaver and all else you might want. Keep watching and you shall see.
—Indians, surely.
—Not to live. Some of them agreed with your good King to keep it as a hunting ground only. Of course your King did say you would keep out of it as well. I am proud to say that I supplied some of the silver chains and bangles he sent to seal the bargain, did you know it? But then my country does not recognize any English king’s authority, no. And perhaps he will not be your King for long. This country does as it pleases also.
He waves his hand at it.
I watch the grasses lift and shiver as if they are a thing stretching its back. I want to believe what Findley says. I want to believe that we are the first to see this place from this cliff. I want to believe it is its own place.
I want to believe that this is Heaven now just here, as Findley promised. Is there any great wrong in wanting Heaven now?
HEAVEN SENDS hornets to sting Hill’s throat and swell him to bullfrog proportions. He is forced to keep to his bed at the station camp we make at a grassy place on a wide creek near a salt lick. Findley and Hill make a quarrelsome household there in the lean-to. Squire and I privately agree he ought to stay as their hunter and keeper to make sure they remain alive. Stewart and I rig up a platform high between trees for the hides we will get.
From the tree he has dragged himself up, Stewart calls:
—Let the bears and wolves try to get them up here.
I say:
—Hill will keep them off.
Hill smiles fatly, deep in his flask, and answers in a rasping whisper:
—If I am to die, my spirit will contact you from the next world, Dan. It will come in search of you wherever you may be and give you word that I am safe. I am sure I will be safe. But my spirit will tell you so, you need not worry.
Hill, at this time it seems to me your spirit must be a wobbling lump of flesh somewhere in your entrails, something that will crawl about of its own accord whether you are living or not. I do not forget your words.
This speech costs him some effort and he lies back with his tongue out. I look at Findley to make sure he will be all right staying here. He is no hunter but is a fair enough cook. He crouches over Hill, patting the fattened head, and says:
—Go, go, Dan, and take your big Stewart. I can live in peace with any man who carries such a supply of rum and who has so birdlike a voice.
So Stewart and I continue on the Warrior’s Path, seeing no Indians. We cross the broad Kentucky River, which Findley said we would find, in a sandy shallows. I lose no pleasure in saying Kentucky. I say it to myself whenever it comes into my mind.
We keep to the woods at first. Stewart always says, After you, whenever we come to a narrowing of the path or a small ford on a creek. I tell him not to say so anymore and he says:
—All right then, Dan.
He is very happy now, though still not well, and I am happy for his silence. The sounds here catch at me. Birds calling and crying like water dripping, like thin strings and like bells. Insects buzz and crawl into our ears, and the wind has its own dry voice. We see a tree on fire with blossom, rustling and continually moving like the bright grass in the open meadows. I want to tie blankets about the horses’ hooves to muffle them. I want to hear everything.
We camp on the edge of the open meadows. We go out shoeless at dawn when the beautiful grasses and clover are wet and bluish, leaving the horses. We are the more silent, though we cannot help but leave footprints everywhere. Stewart’s shooting has calmed since the first buffalo, he follows my lead. We track the feeding deer early in the morning. The little camps we make as we progress are loaded with skins swinging in packs from the trees, all fine-haired spring skins ready for market. We pass deeper into the thick heart of the country.
The weather relaxes into summer, and we hunt in our breech-cloths only, greasing ourselves with bear oil against the insects. Our own skins deepen their colour in the sun. Stewart has regained of his health. It seems that we are transformed, that we are alive in some new manner.
The grass grows higher and thicker and has great sudden ripples of movement running through it, but the game does not escape us. Every evening we sit scraping and stretching yet more skins at our fires after we eat. We have been out for months.
Out of the quiet one night Stewart says:
—I cannot see how we will be able to pack all of this back to the station camp. But we will be rich, just as your friend Hill said.
His eyes flash like his knife as it scrapes the hair from another buckskin. I say:
—Well, Stewart, I am glad you are so sure.
I cannot help but think so myself, though. It is easy to feel a part of all of this richness and easy to feel ourselves lucky. We know the country well now, the terrain and all the paths of the creeks and rivers. We have gone north as far as a great grey river, which I believe to be the Ohio. We feel entirely at home.
Stewart stretches his dirty toes and gives his barking laugh. He says:
—What will you do with all of your money?
I think for a time and I say:
—You remember the big bones we found at that big lick.
—Yes. But those are free for the taking. Going to build a house of them?
I chuckle and bite at the loose edge of a hide and taste the skin. I think of the huge piles of bones heaped all over the bare ground. We crawled into a great ribcage and rattled it as best we could. We thought at first that they were the bones of giants. Brobdingnag, I said, for Gulliver. Seeing the long curved teeth, Stewart decided on elephants, saying he once saw a picture of one at a tavern. I have never seen an elephant, but they must have lived here once and gone there for the salt as all the animals do. Everything here seems to demand witnesses to its splendour. Even the dead want us to see their bones.
But I do not feel my dead here, I am free of them. I have not thought of them at all. I say:
—I might build myself an elephant. Take the little ones for rides.
Stewart’s laugh barks across the fire again. He says:
—I will as well. My little girl would like it. And Hannah would like one to go preaching on.
I chuckle thinking of Hannah, who has grown up severe, as if all the Quaker in our line has puddled down in her, the last-born. I say:
—Paint it scarlet for her.
Stewart laughs once more. When he is silent, a great moth bats the air overhead and near falls into our fire. I watch it veer off and vanish. I wonder where it goes in the dark.
We do not often talk of our wives. On some nights I miss Rebecca with sharp surprising digs in my chest as if her rough heels are drumming on it. I am sorry for it when I realize that I do not think of home more frequently. Now I can almost see her curled little mouth and hear her little laugh. I am struck with a fierce wish to give her something marvellous and surprising. An elephant would do. Rebecca, you would love Kentucky. Eventually you would. You will. So I think at this time.
Aloud I say:
—I do not suppose the women will object to being rich in any case. Even if they have only buckskin to wear for the rest of their days.
But Rebecca and the children seem half the world from this place. The wildness around us is black and huge, a great gullet enclosing us. I think of a mother wolf carrying her pup along in her jaws or in her womb. Safe inside a danger. I wonder whether this is how a pup feels or indeed whether it feels anything, whether the minds of wolves are empty but for the yellow hunger that shows through their eyes.