Dance on the Wind

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 with 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.

Those waters of the upper Ohio were littered with boulders and stones—a serpentine river, treacherous to the unwary and unskilled. Yet the water upriver was clear and clean—much more so than the lower Ohio—perhaps because of the lower river’s snaking route. River travelers had long commented on the overwhelming magnificence of the forested mountainsides that loomed right over the Ohio’s winding path as it flowed past Virginia and on to eastern Kentucky. “The Endless Mountains” was the term westerners used when speaking of those foothills of the Allegheny range.

A lush growth of grapevine, blue larkspur, and purple phlox covered both sides of the river, along with a profusion of tall grasses and the dark hardwood timber: beech, hickory, walnut, poplar, red maple, and at least three varieties of oaks. There were places where the winding path of the Ohio so narrowed beneath the verdant overhang that a trip down the river appeared to be a journey through a green and meandering tunnel.

Downriver from Pittsburgh lay Wheeling, Marietta, Gallipolis, Limestone, and finally Cincinnati—each new settlement outgrowing its own modest beginnings in but a few years as more and more emigrants flooded over the mountains in search of land, peace, and freedom. Through the past decade the population of Kentucky itself had more than doubled: folks looking for better ground to farm, there to put down their roots.

Between each of these larger towns lay the smaller villages, farms, and orchards—places named Vienna, Belpre, Belleville, near the mouth of Ohio’s Big Hockhocking River, and Point Pleasant at the mouth of the Great Kanawha River—many of which sprouted up around what had originally been forts or stockades erected for the common defense during Indian scares of recent wars. From western Pennsylvania all the way to where the Great Miami River met the North Bend of the Ohio at Cincinnati, census takers estimated as many as one hundred thousand folks lived along the river, bringing some small measure of civilization to what was nothing more than a forbidding and all but impenetrable wilderness a generation or so in the past.

Sitting across the Ohio from the mouth of Kentucky’s Licking River, Cincinnati was just then becoming known as the “Queen City of the West.” Land speculators had first laid out its streets in the 1790s, and folks came flocking to the territorial capital growing in the shadow of the new nation’s army garrison at nearby Fort Washington. By 1810 a thousand residents lived either “in the bottom,” or “on the hill,” all of them squeezed between thickly timbered heights and the Ohio itself as the settlement became a beehive of activity for boatmen moving downriver with produce, wood, iron, and hemp supplies, as well as settlers. In the town’s influential newspaper, Sentinel of the Northwest Territory, they even boasted to folks along the Atlantic coast of having two cemeteries: one for the Methodists and one, presumably, for everyone else.

Beyond Cincinnati a man afloat on the Ohio plunged into a region thinly settled with a few farms and even fewer infant villages the likes of Rabbit Hash. By the time he journeyed farther still, halfway between the great bend of the Ohio and Louisville, he left behind those tall slopes burred with thick forests, the land slowly gentling, giving way to more hills, the rolling landscape softening here and there where farmers settled to till the fertile bottomlands dotted with swamps and ringed by deep woods.

Titus awoke with a start.

The air had grown cool, and with the sun’s setting the slate shelf where he had drifted off to sleep was quickly losing its warmth. Wearily, yet with a sense of urgency, Titus clambered to his feet and swept up his shooting pouch and horn, then his blanket-wrapped possibles. Turning back into the timber, he once again vowed he would find game before nightfall. He had to: sleep had been the only way to relieve the painful gnawing of his empty belly.

Shadows lengthened and the wind picked up, rattling the bright, fiery colors of what leaves still clung to the branches like hailstones battering oiled canvas. The minutes ground past, and with them step after step through the cold timber, all without a single sign of game. No tracks, no droppings, not even a faint or narrow trail.

He cursed his luck. Then with a growl he cursed his rumbling belly. Sensing the sap running out of him, his strength failing after two days of nothing but a handful of soda biscuits to eat, Titus slowly sank to the ground and leaned against an old elm. How he wanted to cry out loud. For a moment he became convinced he had done wrong in fleeing home. Mayhaps, he told his miserable self, it wasn’t so bad a thing having his mother’s warm food in his belly and a roof over his head. Mayhaps the plodding certainty of a farmer’s life wasn’t all that bad, after all.

But go back?

Titus hefted that option as a man would weigh two objects, one in each of his hands. Back and forth he considered. And in the end his pride won out. Not to have to face the look in his father’s eyes if he limped back home with his tail between his legs. No, never, he decided. He simply couldn’t bring himself to turn about and return home.

Yes … eating crow, one foul-tasting bite after another to swallow, washing it down with a healthy draft of his battered, wounded pride, would surely be far, far worse than going one more night without real food. Without meat.

With that renewed resolve came the stinging realization that hunting because he enjoyed it, hunting for fun, was one thing. Whereas hunting when you had to feed a hungry belly was something altogether different.

Cradling the rifle across his lap, Titus stuffed his hands into his armpits for warmth as the wind swirled noisily through the branches overhead. A squirrel chirked in the high branches, protesting the cold, complaining about the wind, perhaps even snapping at the young hunter sprawled beneath the tree.

It came over him the way his mam might nudge him gently awake of a school morning. He put his teeth together, opening his lips slightly, and chirked. Like most farm boys on the frontier, Titus had grown quite good at imitating the sounds of forest animals.

There it was, by God! Close by. Near the fork of that gray limb.

Titus slowly stood, drawing the hammer back to half cock. He looked down at the pan to be certain of priming powder, then brought the frizzen down over the pan once more. Easing the hammer back to full cock, he chirked again. The squirrel snapped back at him angrily, bounding down the limb, then leaping out of sight momentarily. Yet he found the tree, spotting the squirrel in a big knobby maple less than five yards off.

Near its base he circled slowly, a step at a time as the animal inched out of sight. Titus studied each of the high branches, for he knew a squirrel liked to lie along them as it peered down on the forest floor. Mostly he regarded each and every fork, as that was where the savviest of the creatures hung back in hiding. At first he could not be sure, but he realized he had to freeze where he stood, motionless, peering up at the gnarled fork of a thick branch. In the fading light of autumn’s afternoon it was all but impossible to be absolutely certain. Then he saw the flicker of the squirrel’s tail. Perhaps only tousled on the wind as the sun continued its descent into the west.

Taking a few heartbeats more to study his shot, eyeing the path his bullet would take, Titus took one step backward as he slowly brought the rifle up to his shoulder. From there the round ball would have far less chance of striking the tiniest of branches that could deflect it just enough to miss his target. He let out half his breath, held it, and brought the front blade down on the dark and narrow fork in the branch where he had seen the tail flick in the wind.

No, he told himself. If he shot the critter from this direction, there wouldn’t be much meat left at all.

Gingerly stepping to the left as quietly as the dry leaves allowed him, Titus inched around the base of the trunk, keeping his eyes moving to the ground before he set each foot down, then to that fork in the branches. Finally he allowed himself to take another breath, and with it he came to a stop. There in the dimming light he thought he could make out the tail curving back on itself, saw where the tail root attached to the shadow of the body, and at the far end, some of the squirrel’s head.

If he could make a head shot, none of the best meat would be ruined. Sighting in on that part of the shadow, Titus squeezed off his shot before any more light drained from the sky.

For an instant the bright flare of the pan flash-blinded him. As the roar of the flintlock was swallowed by the deep woods, he blinked, inching forward, intent on the ground blanketed with fallen leaves. His attention was drawn by a rustle.

The squirrel thrashed among the dried leaves as he came up and knelt over it. He had missed its head, but by striking the limb it sat on, had stunned the animal out of its hiding place. Taking his knife from his belt, he held it by the blade and brought the antler handle down on the squirrel’s head with a crack.

As he picked up the plump squirrel, Titus glanced into the tree. Too dark to look for any bark knocked loose from the branch above him. It didn’t matter really, he thought. For certain it wasn’t good shooting that got him the squirrel this time. Perhaps the forest itself had given one of its own to feed him.

“Thankee,” he said softly, looking around him.

As good a place as any, he determined. Might as well make himself comfortable right here.

After clearing a spot beneath the tree and striking a fire, Titus pulled out his tiny kettle and retraced his steps back through the trees until he found the narrow trickle of water he had passed after leaving the adamantine ledge. He drank long and slow after dipping the kettle into the oozing flow. Then he waited while the kettle filled a second time before returning to his fire.

There he began skinning his supper, his mouth already beginning to water, anticipating the taste of meat. Cutting off head, tail, and paws, he slit the squirrel up the belly, opening it up to gut it. That done, he selected a long tree limb, as big around as two of his fingers, to skewer his supper. Shoving one end of the limb into the ground so that the squirrel could sizzle over the low flames, Titus turned to preparing his bed as the night wind hooted through the skeletal trees, making him feel all the colder.

Kicking over piles of leaves from some of the surrounding trees, he made himself quite a mound near his fire. Turning the squirrel once, he returned to collecting. With enough of them spread out to make for a soft and deep pallet, he flung down his thin blanket. Then Titus settled cross-legged at the fire and sighed. Cold as it might be tonight, he vowed he would not allow the sounds of the forest, the wind, even the cold itself to keep him from sleeping as they had last night. If he were going to make it downriver, even as far as Louisville, he was simply going to have to master what it took for a frontiersman to be at home in the forest.

He turned the squirrel over the flames, then probed at the browning flesh with a finger and sighed, his thoughts suddenly on Levi Gamble. How he wanted one day soon to be as sure a backwoodsman as Levi was already. Why, he knew he was nearly as good a shot, likely might even be better than Gamble soon enough. Still, he remembered Levi’s words that there was more to the life Titus Bass hankered to lead than being a good shot.

As darkness dripped down from the leafless branches overhead, the wind came up. And with it the smell of rain. Gazing up at the sky, he could see no more than a small patch of stars off to the southeast. Chances were there’d be wet weather by morning. Just one more thing he’d have to learn to deal with if he was going to make it downriver as far as Louisville, where he figured a man might give himself a new stake in life.

Folks talked about the place. Said it was where a young man could make a go of things. The whole area was opening up. That sense of boom and bustle appealed to him more than most anything right there and then. Second only to the aroma wafting off that squirrel. Titus fed a limb into the fire now and then, and from time to time juices plopped into the flames, each drop sizzling, every sizzle causing his mouth to water all the more until he knew he couldn’t wait any longer.

Scrambling onto his knees, he pulled out his knife and sliced free a thin sliver along the backstrap. Stuffing it into his mouth, Titus half closed his eyes, savoring this taste of red meat. Licking his lips, he freed another sliver of meat, then washed it down with the cold water.

Before he realized, he was squatting beside nothing more than glowing embers, gnawing the last tiny morsels from the squirrel’s scrawny bones in the dim ruby light as his fire died. Sucking the final drops of grease from his fingers, he took one last drink and stood, moving off a few yards to find a place where he could sprinkle the forest floor in the cold and dark that were his only companions again this night.

Returning to his little camp, he fed the embers a few twigs until they caught, then laid on some thicker limbs for the first part of the night. That done, he scooted back onto his blanket and lay down, dragging his pouch and rifle in alongside him. After pulling half of the blanket over himself, Titus scooped leaves over his feet, then his legs, and finally covered his torso. Just as thick as he could burrow himself beneath.

For a long time Titus cradled the rifle in his arms, the lock protected between his legs, watching the flames and listening to the forest around him, reminded of the sputter and crackle of a limekiln fire back home. How something so simple as a sound aroused his reverie. He wondered what Amy was about at that moment. Did she even know he had taken off? Was she missing him, or had she already made designs on some other young fellow?

And then he thought on his mam, remembering how the pumpkins grew untended among the tall stalks of corn. Licking his lips, Titus tried to remember the taste of his mother’s pumpkin butter and pumpkin molasses boiled down in the fall.

The first good cold snap like this every autumn brought on the hog killing, the menfolk butchering those animals fattened all year on cane roots and mast made of beechnuts, acorns, and chestnuts. Hogs were knocked in the head with a maul, their throats quickly slashed, and then hauled up on pulleys lashed to a strong tree limb for proper bleeding. Below the gently swinging creatures mam always caught as much of it as possible in cherrywood pails and churns to make the rich blood pudding she would stuff into a cleaned intestine and smoke over green hickory chips in the smokehouse. He was almost able to taste it—served under a thick white gravy with yellow hominy on the side. Memories laden with the remembrance of sausage strong with red pepper and sage, sousemeat or headcheese.

Yes, on the frontier October came to be known as killing weather.

But with, the remembrance he began for the first time to worry about her, sensing some remorse for the worry he was likely causing her. But no remorse for his loss of Amy. No, his only regret in not turning back was his mam, and all the anxious concern he must likely be causing her.

A beat of wings passed over his head with a startling rush as he closed his eyes, so weary. The great-headed owl, prowling the forest.

Titus wondered if his mam had stood there at the front of her porch across those past two days—just the way she had when he was so much younger. Calling out his name.

Calling him home.

He came awake in the morning slowly, smelling the heady fragrance of damp, loamy earth strong in his nostrils.

A time or two before he opened his eyes for good, Titus heard the rain’s patter softly through the trees. A gentle, cold, soaking rain, most likely. At least he thought so from its soft cadence against the stiff parchment of the maple and gum leaves he had pulled in over himself, burrowing down like a deer mouse in its snug little hole.

Warm it was in here. A damned sight better than the night before, he said to himself as he decided to open his eyes for good and not drift off to sleep. The irregular concert of misty drops had tapered off, and the forest fell quiet. He shifted his hip, making it more comfortable on a new spot among the thick pallet of leaves, and curled his legs up within the blanket.

No need in rushing on his way. Warm as he was. Comfortable too. Almost as soft as his grass tick back at home. Except … it wasn’t home no more.

He opened his eyes, finding it still dark. It took a moment or two more for him to realize he had tucked his head back into the blanket like a turtle retreating into its shell. Slowly dragging a hand up from between his thighs where the rifle rested, he brushed it past his face and poked out with his fingers at the leaves. With a damp rustle he parted them slightly. The light was gray. His fire gone out—nothing more than a heap of blackened char and gray ash beaten down by the steady, gentle rain. Some of the squirrel bones lay at the far side of that ring of ash. A misty fog clung back among the trees all around him.

Not the sort of morning for a man to be rising bright and early.

Some time later he realized he had closed his eyes again, maybe even been sleeping—coming awake slowly, as he had earlier. This time the rain wasn’t pattering on his leafy burrow. Without a lick of wind the forest lay stonily quiet about him. So quiet he could hear a low snuffling. If it didn’t sound like a dog.

Parting the leaves again, his heart beginning to hammer anxiously, he peered out through a tiny opening in his burrow and spotted the reddish fur. Moving more leaves, he could make out the hind end of the animal, the thick, bushy tail nearly as long as the creature itself, then ringed with black and tipped in pale hair. As it rooted around his fire with its nose and front paws, the fox turned slightly, its jaws crunching down on the leavings of last night’s supper.

So quiet was the forest that Titus could even hear the snap of the bones with every close of the fox’s jaws. He watched as it finished off the squirrel and sniffed at the small kettle before putting its nose along the damp ground, rooting for something more to eat. Had it been dry, the fox likely would never have approached his little camp. But the damp weather kept down the smell of man, burying it beneath all the other odors of a dank, musty forest.

Through the leaves he watched the fox turn in his direction, slowly sniffing its way toward his side of the fire, going this way a step to smell something, then darting a couple steps to the other side. Inching closer all the time until it was all but eye to eye with Titus’s burrow, about to stick its nose right into the youngster’s face.

“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 more. “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!”