Eye of the Raven

by Eliot Pattison

  Chapter Ten

  IMPOSSIBLE!” RIDEAUX SPAT. “They will roast you alive!”

  “Then I will shout out my questions from the stake,” Duncan shot back. “One way or the other I will see the family of Skanawati.” He had been waiting at the Frenchman’s gate at dawn, seeking a guide. “The west branch, thirty miles upriver.” A weary Rideaux, looking haggard, had gestured him inside for a cup of birch tea.

  “What use could they possibly be to you?”

  “I must know what Skanawati has been doing these past weeks. I must know why his adopted sister and her new husband were sent to the western boundary tree. I must know why Skanawati sent men out to investigate old markings on the Warriors Path. I must know what he thought he would learn from the ghosts there.”

  Duncan dared not reveal the most important reason of all. He had sat for another hour by the river the night before, watching the shadows where Conawago had disappeared, considering how the Indians in the silent canoe had all been from Skanawati’s village, then considering again each piece of the puzzle. Finally he had understood that the Iroquois had been thrust into the violence because Skanawati’s mother had a dream.

  “I will paddle myself,” Duncan vowed, “if I cannot find help.”

  “Not by yourself,” came a voice from the shadows. Van Grut sat up from his pallet.

  “Fools!” Rideaux snapped. “Any man who consents to guide you will earn the enmity of Skanawati’s clan. You understand nothing about them, nothing about the trials they have endured. No one could guarantee your safety.”

  “Yesterday you asked what you could do to help.”

  Rideaux buried his head in his hands for a moment. “Word about bounties spreads like wildfire, McCallum,” he said when he looked up. “Thirty pounds is a princely sum. The word came in last night with a trader from Lancaster. Stay anywhere near Shamokin and if the killers don’t finish you the bounty hunters will take you for certain. Thirty pounds would solve most of the problems of Skanawati’s village,” he warned.

  “You asked what you could do,” Duncan repeated.

  “Your stubbornness will get you killed,” Rideaux sighed. “I will give you supplies, and a canoe. I already have men looking for Red Hand. He went south.”

  “On the river?”

  “On the trail toward the settlements. Tulpehocken. Reading. He stole a horse. He was going fast.”

  “What is past Reading?”

  “The road to Philadelphia,” Rideaux said with foreboding.

  Van Grut began stuffing his belongings back into his pack.

  “It is too dangerous,” Duncan said to the Dutchman.

  “If you don’t tell them I’m a surveyor,” Van Grut said with a tentative grin, “I won’t tell them there’s a bounty on your head.”

  Duncan offered a grim smile and gestured to the other sleeping forms, flanked by the dog and orphaned bear, which was snuggled against the girl. “Tell Hadley and Mokie to wait for us here,” he told the Frenchman.

  As they carried their canoe into the water a tall figure emerged from a path through the alders. “If you go,” Moses warned, “what you see will visit your nightmares for years.”

  Van Grut hesitated, growing pale as he gazed at the Moravian Indian. There was something wilder, less civilized about Moses. The day before he had been another mission Indian, but today he seemed more the warrior crusader.

  “I will not allow Skanawati to be hanged,” Duncan said as he followed the Dutchman into the canoe. “There are secrets only his family knows, secrets that might save him yet.”

  “That village,” Moses sighed as he stepped toward their vessel, “is worn out. Soon it will be no more.”

  It was, Duncan realized, all the explanation the Indian would give. Without another word Moses shoved the canoe from the bank and climbed in behind them.

  As the sun rose toward the zenith they pulled hard against the current of the narrowing river, paddled fiercely, into the rugged lands the tribes called the endless mountains. It was early afternoon when Moses began to turn the canoe toward the north bank. Duncan could see no sign of habitation but with relief spied a cluster of beached vessels that included the large one Conawago had left in the night before.

  They had progressed only fifty paces up the worn trail that rose along a shallow creek when Moses halted. He seemed to sense something that his companions could not. His face sagged. “It is what I feared most. This is not the day to be here. We need to leave, make camp until tomorrow.”

  “Is his family here or not?” Duncan demanded. In the distance he now heard the sound that had stopped the Moravian Indian, the soft, steady throbbing of a drum.

  Moses gave a melancholy nod. “There are too many dead here today.”

  Van Grut’s face darkened, and he retreated several feet down the trail before seeing Duncan’s determined expression. He grimaced, checked the priming of his gun, and pushed past Moses to follow Duncan up the trail.

  They emerged at the edge of a large field that lay below a cluster of five longhouses surrounded by a decrepit stockade fence. The village appeared to be empty except for a ragged dog that barked once and fled. Duncan walked slowly toward the buildings, searching in vain for any other sign of life. Van Grut nervously lifted his gun as they passed through a gate of rotting logs. A smoldering fire sent up a wisp of smoke from the front of one of the longhouses. The only living creature to be seen now was a solitary raven on a log watchtower.

  Duncan paused at the entrance to each of the longhouses. Two, with gaping holes in their elm bark roofs, appeared to have been abandoned. The others held the meager belongings of an impoverished people, arranged along the hearths reserved for each family. Tattered clothing hung from pegs on roof posts. Rattles of dried, folded bark lay beside a rotting water drum. Dried apples hung in strings from rafters beside haunches of venison. Birch buckets with bark lids were caked with the drippings of the maple syrup the Iroquois prized. In the dirt lay a tattered doll made of cornhusks that had been cleverly bound and knotted. In the largest structure of the ghost village most of the belongings appeared to have been wrapped in blankets and tied with leather straps as though for travel. In the distance, beyond the second gate, the low drum sounded like a heartbeat.

  A shadow on the wall caused Duncan to spin around, his gun raised. Moses lifted a hand as if to restrain him. “The village has had great pain this past year, lost many children and old ones. The fields are no longer fertile. They begin moving soon to a new village, but first they must say their farewells.”

  Still not comprehending, Duncan stepped slowly to the far gate, pausing to look up at the silent raven, which seemed to be intently studying him. In a flat below the village he at last saw its inhabitants, no more than fifty men, women, and children. They seemed to be engaged in some sort of rhythmic motion, bending, lifting, digging as one of the few young men beat on an immense hollow log.

  “It is the ancient way,” Moses explained. “Many of the Iroquois have stopped the practice, but Skanawati was adamant that they do it this year. It is easier when platforms are used, but that is not the way of these clans. They have been waiting for his return, but they know they can wait no longer if crops are to be planted at the new site.”

  Van Grut shaded his eyes with his hand, trying to see the villagers better. “Christ in heaven!” he moaned as he finally understood what they looked at. The Indians were digging up their dead.

  “There is a solemn feast,” Moses continued. “The names of the dead are revived. The bones will be cleaned and lovingly wrapped for a new group grave. Gifts will be offered to the dead. Final leavetaking must be made, for the dead will no longer be near the calls of the women and the laughter of the children. Skanawati helped dig the new grave before he left, helped trap furs all winter to line it.”

  “How do you know these things?” Duncan whispered.

  “My brother married a woman of this village.”

  “He is here?”

  “He w
as killed fighting with the British at Fort Niagara.”

  No words of greeting met Duncan as he advanced, his gun and pack left at the gate. As he approached he realized he knew the drummer. Johantty, covered with soot, frowned as he saw Duncan. The oldest of the women, clearly in charge, shot up from where she sat and began shouting at him, the words unintelligible but her gestures unmistakable. Every villager straightened, eyes on Duncan. One man lifted his iron shovel like a weapon, another raised the sharpened stick he was using to pry at the earth. Then an energetic voice called out, and Duncan’s would-be assailants hesitated as Johantty left his drum and ran to the woman’s side, pointing at Duncan, speaking in low, hurried tones. The woman scowled then uttered a few low syllables that sent the villagers back to their sober task.

  “Stone Blossom,” Moses explained at his shoulder. “She has been the undisputed head of this village for decades.”

  Duncan watched uneasily as Moses stepped forward and spoke in quiet, earnest appeal with the sturdy, aged woman. She frowned again but did not object when the Moravian began to help arrange the old bones in fur bundles. Though somber, the atmosphere was not altogether mournful, more like that of a reunion of friends who had suffered much since last meeting. The only ones looking disturbed at all were the women who worked with knives to clean lingering flesh from bones of the freshest graves. Duncan clenched his jaw and approached them, hand on the hilt of his own knife.

  “Tell them, Moses,” he said, “tell them that in my country I am considered a friend of the dead.”

  The women stepped back warily, surrendering their task to Duncan. It was no different than working with the cadavers in his Edinburgh college, he told himself as he put his blade to the first muscle.

  He watched as Van Grut inched away, poised to flee at any moment, and saw how the Indians watched the Dutchman with angry suspicion. Van Grut approached with a sideways motion when Duncan gestured for him, clearly repulsed by Duncan’s chore. Duncan rose and leaned into his ear.

  Van Grut sighed in exasperation as he heard Duncan’s suggestion. “Do it,” Duncan said, “or return to the canoe. This is no place for an onlooker.”

  “I haven’t enough paper,” Van Grut protested.

  “Make them small.”

  The Dutchman sighed, then reached into his pack.

  Ten minutes later Duncan lowered his knife and approached Stone Blossom, the matriarch. “Do you have English words?” he asked.

  “A little,” the woman said stiffly. “My son Skanawati teach me.”

  Duncan paused, then realized he should not be surprised that the woman who was clearly the matron of the village was also the mother of Skanawati. “The spirits have empowered my friend’s hands,” he said. “He wishes to help you leave something of yourself with your lost ones.”

  “We have readied gifts for them,” the woman said, confused. “Old prayers have been spoken over their new grave, since before dawn.”

  As Duncan looked back the Dutchman was approaching, tearing away a quarter of the sheet in his hand. The woman hesitantly accepted the paper, then cried out in fear as she saw her image sketched on it. She threw it down and began chanting words that had the sound of a curse.

  Moses was suddenly at Duncan’s shoulder, speaking reassuringly to her. Calmed, she bent and tentatively touched the drawing. A younger woman leaned over it, her eyes growing round before she snatched it up with an exclamation of awe.

  “There are witches in the tribes,” Moses said, “who sometimes are burned just as in old Europe. Stone Blossom said it was witchcraft, but I told her no, it was the spirits speaking through this stranger, who came from across the big water to honor the village of Skanawati. I said he was making a tattoo of her memory, to leave with loved ones.”

  Duncan offered a grateful nod. He had grown to greatly respect the Christian Indians, not just for their spiritual fortitude, which often exceeded that of Europeans, but for the adept way they navigated the ground between worlds.

  The work went speedily now, with more and more spirits lifted as Van Grut offered one and then another sketch of the villagers. Young girls returned to the village and carried down wooden planks laden with cornbread, smoked eels, and crocks of fresh water. As the others ate Duncan slipped up the trail toward the new communal grave, toward the scent of fresh tobacco burning with other herbs.

  Conawago sat cross-legged on a blanket, rocking back and forth, chanting prayers to sanctify the new grave. Duncan slipped onto a boulder in the shadows of a sassafras tree and watched, the Nipmuc seemingly oblivious to his presence. The gentle voice worked like a salve to his tired, aching body. He did not know how he would find the strength to continue down his treacherous path without Conawago at his side, but at least for now his friend was where he belonged, standing in for Skanawati, the father the village had lost.

  At last he retreated down the path, realizing he was famished. He ate heartily of the eel and cornbread, then helped the villagers finish wrapping the last of the bones in swathes of fur as Van Grut completed the last of his sketches.

  He heard a new pitch in the conversations, a new strain in several voices, and looked to see that the Indians were now addressing bundles of bones, saying farewell as the bones were covered for a last time, slipping the sketches done by the Dutchman into the bundles before tying them tight. Tears were flowing freely, and several women clutched small bundles to their breasts, whispering the last words of a mother to her child.

  Finally the slow procession began up the path to the grave overlooking the river.

  “I am grateful to you, McCallum,” came a quiet voice by his shoulder. Moses was solemnly watching the single file of mournful villagers. “Every European I have known who encountered this practice has been revolted by it, condemned it as barbaric. I have always thought it very civilized. I know Christians who bless new homes, but it has always seemed better to me to bless the homes of the old ones. If we do not respect those who have gone before, how can we respect ourselves?”

  Duncan, nodding in agreement, recalled another cemetery, that of his clan, which had been dug up and ravaged by English raiders. They had hung the corpse of an uncle branded as a traitor, then destroyed most of the markers. But his parents and grandparents had banished the horror by digging new graves and summoning the clan for a gathering—illegal under English law—to reconsecrate them.

  It was not the time to ask the questions he so wanted to ask the villagers. It would not be for hours.

  “Where will they go?” he asked Moses. “I mean, where is their new village?”

  The Moravian’s eyes narrowed in warning. “Do not ask them. There are hidden valleys, in uncharted land. Skanawati wants them far from English rum, far from English traders. He asked me to visit them, with some of Rideaux’s Delawares, to teach his people how to write sounds on paper. He wants his village to record all the old stories, the names of all the old spirits.”

  “Do you believe with Rideaux, that those of the tribes have uncorrupted hearts?”

  Moses considered the question a long time. “I believe many Europeans have lost the way of their hearts.”

  “They have lost their true skins.” The words left Duncan’s tongue unbidden.

  Moses nodded. “You have had a good teacher.”

  Duncan looked up the trail to the new grave, where Conawago still chanted. In that moment he wanted more than anything to steal away with the old Nipmuc to one of their mountain hideaways and leave the rest of the world behind.

  When he finally returned to the new grave, behind the slow, murmuring procession, Stone Blossom was seated beside Conawago. As each bundle was placed in the wide pit, lined with fur and moss, those carrying it spoke, raising the bundle toward the sky and calling out the name of the dead, sometimes twice, even three times before setting it down and arranging the gifts that would be buried with it.

  He saw the old woman reach for the bundle of white fur that had been used to wrap the first set of bones he had cleaned,
one with heavily tattooed skin. He found a place behind her and sat to listen as she lifted the bundle and spoke. Her words brought the sound of new lamentation among the villagers, many of whom offered their own short prayers. When she finished, ready to place the bones on a bear fur at the center of the mass grave, she raised them one last time and called to the sky.

  “Skanawati! Skanawati! Skanawati!”

  A chill ran down Duncan’s spine. He looked about, trying to understand. Skanawati was in the hands of the magistrates, waiting to be hanged. Skanawati had been in the Shamokin and lands north for the past six months, yet Red Hand had insisted he had been in the western lands, killing a surveyor. And now Skanawati was being buried, having died months earlier.

  As the village arranged the pots, blades, and combs that were the final gifts to the dead and began filling the grave with soil, Duncan turned to Moses. “I ask you, my friend. Explain to me how Skanawati can be in so many places.”

  “There has always been a Skanawati,” Moses said enigmatically. Then he saw the tormented way Duncan looked at the bundle of white fur as it disappeared under the soil. “Perhaps there is something you must learn about the high chiefs of the Grand Council. When a man is raised to a seat of the council he takes its ancient name.”

  Duncan considered the words for a moment. “You are saying the Skanawati held by the magistrate has only had the name for a few months?”

  “Less than a year. The old chief died of the pox, and the title was given to his nephew, who had trained to take on that burden for many years.”

  Duncan’s mind raced. The chief awaiting hanging could not have killed the first surveyor, Townsend, but the prior Skanawati could have. “What was he like, the last chief?”

  “A great and noble warrior, as was his duty. Stone Blossom says there is an essence that passes from one Skanawati to the next.”

  Duncan at last understood the most important question. “And who was the foe of this last warrior chief?”

  Moses did not reply, but looked to the old woman, who, Duncan now saw, had been following their conversation.