Dance on the Wind

10

As Titus stood atop some of the hogsheads of flour to get himself the best view of that spectacular, unpeopled country, Ebenezer Zane heaved against his rudder to slip the flatboat out from the mouth of the Ohio and into the great, wide Mississippi already beginning to spread itself a mile and more wide in its slow roll to the south.

“Yonder’s Cairo,” the pilot called out, pointing off toward the collection of shacks and log cabins built around a tiny wharf at the end of that peninsula formed by the joining of the two waters.

Kingsbury brought his oar out of the water and leaned back with a sigh. “Farther on up there, Titus—a man comes to St. Louie.”

“Like I said: time enough to get there, young as I am,” Titus said, his eyes widening as he took in the vast sweep of all that stretched before him on that far western horizon.

“Young as you is,” Root scoffed at his oar below Bass, “you can have you two or three big adventures afore you gotta figure out what it is you’re gonna do for the rest of your life.”

“Don’t pay him no heed, Titus,” Zane advised. “Reuben still ain’t sorted out what he’s gonna do when he gets growed up!”

While rolling hills and timbered bluffs dominated the Mississippi’s shoreline above the mouth of the Ohio, from there south one could watch the landscape begin to flatten. Eagles dotted the cold, clear sky overhead, sweeping across the great expanse of the river in search of a meal they could pluck from the muddied waters in huge claws. Wild turkeys squatted in autumn’s leafless trees along the riverbanks like stumpy, black-robed, wattle-necked old men, curiously watching the boatmen float past.

“Lookee there!” Heman Ovatt cried out, pointing to the eastern shore where loped a small pack of wolves, no more than a half dozen, slinking easily along the skirt of timber that frilled the riverbank.

“Hunting must be good in these parts,” Titus exclaimed, already sensing an undeniable itch to have the ground beneath his moccasins and the woods at his elbow once more.

Zane scratched at his hairy cheek and inquired, “You figure you could find us some game yonder?”

With an eager grin Bass turned to the steersman, saying, “If you spot wolves along the bank, I figure there’s a good chance I’d run onto something for us to eat over there too.”

“Damn right,” Kingsbury added. “Them wolves didn’t look like they’d missed a meal a’tall!”

“I’ll bet these fellas would appreciate you giving them a change in supper fare tonight, Titus,” Zane continued, then looked off to the west to measure the fall of the sun in that cold sky. “Not far down here, I know a place where we can put over and let you off with your rifle. We’ll ease on down a few miles and tie up for the night. Get us a fire going and wait for you to bring us in some victuals for supper. How’s that strike you?”

“It sounds fine to me!” Bass replied, starting to scramble down from atop the great oak kegs, eager to have a chance to hunt for the crew once again, just as he already had done on several occasions while they’d descended the lower Ohio.

“Here’s one man gets damned tired of eating pig all the time,” Kingsbury grumbled.

“Speak for yourself,” Root snapped. “A thick slab of salt pork allays better’n some gamy ol’ slice of buckskin.”

“Y’all got my hungers up already,” Ovatt cheered from the bow, where he had been working at expanding one of his most elaborate tattoos, scratching at his forearm with a needle, then marking the artistic wound with India ink. More than any of the others, Heman was nearly covered in the gaudy blue drawings of sea serpents and devil’s heads, water maidens and feathered Indians. He looked up from his work, saying, “Don’t you give Reuben no never mind, Titus. This belly of mine could do wrapping around something new tonight, Titus!”

“G’won now and get yourself ready,” Zane instructed. “It ain’t far till we come to that stretch of shore where we’ll drop you off to do some hunting. That is, if the river ain’t et the bank away too bad since’t last summer.”

Even as slow as it moved, the relentless Mississippi had a way of doing that: gobbling up great bites of the riverbank from season to season. Come late spring, early summer, the river would lift twenty-five feet or more above its banks, cutting itself a new channel in the process, going here and there to alter last year’s course. As it did so, the Mississippi would destroy old islands and create new ones, uproot trees from both the banks and the far end of those new islands, depositing that timber on the upstream end of the next island met downriver. At high-water times of the year, tying up for the night could be a ticklish proposition: a good river captain understood that to secure his boat beneath a high bank or large timber just might mean the Mississippi would cause that bank to cave in on his broadhorn, or chew away enough of the shore, toppling one of the huge trees to come crashing down upon his sleeping crew.

Flowing anywhere from three to five miles per hour, the Mississippi ran thirty feet deep in most places, fifty feet in some spots as it seesawed back and forth, making itself remarkably crooked. Despite the river’s width, it still proved itself a real test not only of a river pilot’s abilities at the rudder, but of the watchfulness of the rest of his crew as they kept eyes sweeping the roiling waters for all manner of dangers: sawyers and planters and submerged sandbars.

“You warm enough now?” Zane asked as he eased the flatboat out of the running current and headed for the eastern shore.

“I’ll be fine,” Bass replied, kneeling at the gunnel as Root lowered the skiff into the muddy water.

After Titus climbed into the tiny boat and he began paddling with Reuben, Ovatt played out a length of hawser lashed to the back of the skiff.

“Get on off afore we gotta push back into the running current,” Root advised.

The youngster heaved himself onto the bank just as Root waved across those yards of icy water, signaling Heman Ovatt to pull the skiff back to the flatboat.

“Cold as it is, Titus,” Reuben hollered over his shoulder as Heman began to drag him away from the shoreline, “lot better to be hunting now. Come the summer in these here parts, skeeters come pick you up and carry you off, you go hunting way you are in them woods!”

Such winged torment wasn’t the only disadvantage to hunting the riverbanks come the summer season. The heat and humidity both conspired against a man laboring through the thick, semitropical brush, weakening many with heat-fevers.

Root waved his final farewell, saying, “Skeeters down in this here country twice’t as big as the ones we grow up to Kentucky! Big as a goddamned sparrow!”

Waving in kind, Titus watched the skiff and flatboat move away, slipping back into the current, sensing a rush of emotions tumbling through him. Excitement and sheer anticipation had to be most prominent, as well as a good deal of pride, what with the trust the others placed in him to bring supper eventually to their evening fire.

Titus clawed his way up the bank, into the brush and trees, then stopped with that shadow-drenched cover and looked again at the flatboat one last time from hiding. Perhaps he should be a bit scared, he told himself. Left here on his own in country that was as foreign to him as a desert. Maybe he ought to be frightened, Titus thought as his eyes slowly moved in a long sweep from left to right, listening with all his might to those sounds the woods brought to him.

But in a matter of moments he was scolding himself for ever thinking about fear, telling himself that the apprehension he felt was a natural part of the anticipation of the hunt.

What with the way those wolves were moving downriver along the bank, he decided he would have to work his way inland a bit. A pack like them surely had to be scattering game away from the riverbank itself. Chances would likely be far better if he did not hunt in the wake of those gaunt, four-legged predators flushing most everything before them.

Angling south by east, he struck out, plunging into the brushy timber, taking in this terrain and plant life so new to him. In less than a mile, and after something on the order of a half hour, he ran across a groove worn in the woodland floor. A game trail that arced off to his right toward the river, tracked and clawed with the prints of many animals. Titus rose and eagerly turned left, following the trail deeper into the timber. Within a few yards he came across a pile of deer droppings. As chilly as it was, with skiffs of sleety snow coating nearly every plant and gathered at the base of every tree, he didn’t expect to feel any warmth from the spoor as he took a handful into his palm. Nonetheless, the cold discovery quickened both his heartbeat and his step as he pushed deeper into the timber. It was good sign. Showed that the critters did use this trail.

The farther he went, the brush thickened around him. Titus slowed his pace, his eyes searching ahead of him so that he would not scare up the white-tailed deer he hoped to sight before it bolted off. Buck or doe—it did not matter, although he preferred the flesh of the doe for its tenderness and flavor, especially this time of the year after the males had gone and worked themselves into a hormone-driven frenzy during the rut.

It was a thought that made him chuckle quietly as he moved along through the cold shadows. Now that he had experienced the rut himself, it was damned easy to understand how those bucks got themselves into such a ferocious state over the thought of climbing atop a female!

Something snagged his attention. A faint rustle of brush that hadn’t been there before. At least some sound that had failed to pierce his consciousness until now. Yes … there it was again … moving toward him. He backed up a few yards, out of that small clearing the trail crossed, then crouched within some brush and pulled the hammer on his grandpap’s rifle back from half cock. Waiting as his heart pounded and the sound of leaves rustling drew ever closer.

He swore he even heard the deer breathing before he saw the frost streaming from its glossy black nostrils, the chest heaving in fear, perhaps exhaustion too, as the doe bounded into the clearing and stopped, stiff-legged. In fright it twisted its head one way, then another, studying the open ground before it—then jerked its head over its shoulder to gaze along its backtrail with wide, frightened eyes Titus now watched above the front blade he nestled down in the narrow crescent of the backsight.

Just as it wrenched its head forward and twitched its tail—always a sure sign that the deer was about to set off once more—Titus squeezed back on the trigger.

In that next heartbeat it appeared he had missed, for the deer bounded off on all four legs. His greatest fear right then was that the doe had started away before he had touched off the shot. He peered through the brush and gray smoke, hearing his rifle shot swallowed by the timber and the cold, damp air.

But instead of the clatter of the deer’s hooves galloping off into the trees, the only sound that followed the fading gunshot was the silence that echoed back upon him. That, and the thrash of the deer’s legs as the animal struggled on the ground at the far side of the small clearing.

Immediately bolting from cover, Titus raced across the open ground, laid the rifle against some nearby brush, and knelt near the deer as the legs slowed their wild fight. A big brown eye stared up at him. He looked down at the ragged, bloody hole torn in the heaving, lower chest, then back to that eye. Already it was beginning to glaze. And then the legs moved no more.

Quickly he pulled out his big belt knife and slit the throat in order to drain off most of the blood from the carcass before he dragged the blade down the length of the body, from windpipe to rectum. Since this was a doe, which ran smaller than most bucks, he thought he might try carrying the carcass over his shoulder down to where he would find the boat crew having made camp for the night. By cutting off the head and gutting the animal, along with getting rid of the weight of the green hide, he could easily drape the rest of the kill over his shoulders and hurry it downriver.

He had never been the strongest youngster in Boone County, hardly the strongest right around the village of Rabbit Hash either. Truth was, Titus was mostly bone and sinew, with a few strap-leather-lean muscles knotted to his wiry frame. Because he was stronger in his legs than elsewhere on his body, Titus early on had learned he simply could not heft the weight other fellas his age could lift and carry, much less do what a full-grown man could. Standing just shy of six feet in his moccasins, but weighing less than 140 pounds by the wharfmaster’s scale at Louisville scant weeks before, Bass truly gave off the appearance of a much smaller man when he stood with his shoulders slightly rounded as he shrank back into himself, shy as he was. Because of his spare size and rail-thin frame, the youngster had learned to make do for the lack of muscle. No matter how much he ate in the last few years, no matter how much he demanded of his body, he never seemed to fill out and put on the pounds the way so many other Boone County boys had.

Didn’t matter anyhow, he reminded himself as he carried on with removing the internal organs and flinging them into a nearby gut-pile. Time would come, Titus knew, and he’d put on some weight, finally getting those muscles every man eventually earned.

Shadows lengthened across the cold ground while he worked, his breath beginning to frost before his face in his exertion. Yet his hands remained warm, working in the blood and the carcass as they did. He cut the last of the windpipe and lung free, then flung them onto the gutpile … when he froze.

Motionless. A new sound. Something that did not fit in with what he had been hearing from the surrounding forest as he labored over the doe.

Perhaps it was another deer, he convinced himself. Much the same sound too—moving through the brush and coming from the same direction as the doe had. Closer and closer. He might be lucky and get two of them, he convinced himself. Then he’d have to cut down a few saplings and make a crude sled he could use to drag both carcasses downriver to the boatmen’s camp.

Quickly he wiped most of the blood and gore from his hands in the frosty, icy leaves, then swept up his rifle before ducking back toward the brush where he had been hiding when the doe had made her appearance along the game trail.

What meat Zane’s men didn’t gorge themselves on that night, they could spend the evening slicing and drying by the fire. Maybe carry along the bigger hams with them on board, as long as they were out of the sun, tucked away under that oiled awning on the boat. Along with the dried strips of venison, those roasts would give them several meals across the coming days before Zane might have him again hunt for them.

Crouching there in the brush, he dragged the rifle up and pushed back the frizzen. Snugging his shooting pouch against his thigh, Titus pulled the stopper from the priming horn and sprinkled a dusting of powder into the pan—for the first time realizing he hadn’t reloaded after dropping the doe.

Damn!

Yet he had no more time to curse himself for his stupidity as the faint rustle came ever closer.

He grew angry with himself: if he didn’t get his rifle reloaded, he was going to miss his chance to drop a second deer. No matter that it might be a buck this time.

Quickly pouring powder into his palm, he found himself quaking slightly as he spilled the coarse black grains down the muzzle—then became still as a stone. His own eyes widened, his breath choked off in his chest as the creature stepped to the far edge of the clearing.

Instead of a four-legged buck moving beneath a set of antlers, what made young Titus’s heart freeze in his chest was a two-legged Indian in smoked buckskin who slowly emerged from the brush in a crouch, then sank to his knee.

Now his heart began hammering so loudly, he was certain the Indian could hear it. Starting to sweat in the cold of those shadows, Titus found himself every bit as scared as he was mad that his gunshot had drawn the redskin to the clearing.

This way, then that, the Indian’s own dark, black-bead eyes searched the timber enclosing the clearing, before he inched forward a bit more, easing toward the deer. Kneeling over the gutted animal, the Indian put a bare hand down into the gut cavity.

He’s feeling how warm it is. How long ago I kill’t it.

All the while the Indian’s eyes kept moving across the glade, watchful and attentive. From the looks of the warrior, Titus figured the man could be anywhere between his age and his father’s. Hell, he thought—he never had been very good at guessing such things as a person’s age.

Swallowing hard, he suddenly realized this was the first real Indian he had laid eyes on. Not that he hadn’t seen some come wandering into the settlements back in Boone County. The sort what had taken to white man’s clothes and even wore hats. But never had he seen a red-skin like this: complete in fringed buckskins, with a deer-skin vest tied with thongs, the lower part of his leggings lashed tightly around his ankles and calves with long whangs.

Titus glanced down at his own smooth britches, figuring fringe would only snag in the thick underbrush. Nodding to himself, he decided that tying them up that way made for easier, quieter hunting too, as the Indian moved through the thick timber.

Quietly settling on the far side of the doe, the Indian laid his bow across his thighs, then dragged a big knife from the scabbard at his waist. Beginning at the long opening Titus had made from neck to anus, the Indian started working to free the green hide from the carcass on either side of the rib cage.

Why, this son of a bitch was fixing to take his meat! That damned hide didn’t matter—but it was the meat the others were expecting him to show up with at camp shortly!

A goddamned red thief! All that grandpap told me ’bout Injuns is true—thievin’ sonsabitches!

Now his temples pounded more from anger than from fear. That was his meat.

Mine—what’s ’bout to get stole from me!

Clenching his teeth was the only thing that kept him from hollering out right then and there—to tell that Indian the doe was his. Instead, Titus struggled to fight down that impulse, his mind racing to sort out what to do with a problem he had never before confronted. A man could figure out an answer to everything, he reminded himself. If he just had enough time, and thought on it hard enough. It wasn’t like he was the smartest fella in school back there in Rabbit Hash. Not the quickest, but he could learn, once he put his mind to it. And this couldn’t be any different, he told himself.

Just maybe he could show himself and somehow work it so the Injun and he could split up the doe. At least he’d have half the meat that way … and a damned good story to tell the others when he finally showed up downriver a ways.

Yet just about the time he was convincing himself of the wisdom he would show by negotiating half the doe with the Indian and was finally ready to show himself, Bass snapped to a sudden stillness.

A chirping whistle floated from the nearby woods.

That’s a Injun. Damn, if there ain’t another’un out there.

As he crouched lower in his stand of brush, frozen and wide-eyed, Titus watched the would-be thief stop and listen, then eventually put a hand to his mouth, answering in the same chirping birdcall. Another whistle came from the forest, this time from a different direction than the first. This second call, too, was answered by the meat thief.

It was with the keenest curiosity that Titus stared at the four warriors who emerged from the woods to join the first. One of them carried what appeared to be an old smoothbore musket. For a few moments all five appeared to share some words, yet their talk was so quiet, he could hear nothing of it. From the far timber came another chirp, which one of the newcomers answered. They all turned to gaze toward the north.

Like them, Titus watched that fringe of the timber, when his wonder turned to nothing but cold, dry fear in his belly. Swallowing hard around the lump swelling in his throat, he counted six more of them emerging from the shadows—four carrying short bows, and another two with guns, what appeared to be a pair of old French fusils. Half of them already dragged some haunches of meat and green hides they had rolled up, all of it placed on improvised sleds they had constructed from saplings cut down and lashed together with ivy and grapevine. It would be easy enough to pull those sleds over the brush and what little icy snow slicked the ground.

They all came to the doe, talking a little louder now that there were so many to discuss what had been found by one of their number. Still, he could not make out much of the words at all, only fragments of sounds that meant nothing to him in the least. Except to realize that these were red men. Hunters and warriors. The sort his grandpap had fought back in the Shawnee War and two years later in the Cherokee War. These were the sort of Indian the white settlers were driving right up against the Mississippi, he figured. Not the sort of Indian to take kindly to a solitary white hunter caught alone and far from his own.

The breeze tousled their hair, some of which was left long. For others the hairstyle of choice was a roach greased so that it stood straight up from the forehead to taunt any would-be enemy into taking that war trophy. Yet none of them wore any paint. From his grandpap and the old men, Titus had heard so much about the hideous paint—looking now to study each of the faces of the eleven who continued to argue something with growing urgency.

One of them pointed—south. An older man wagged his head emphatically, pointing off in another direction. Back to the north.

A third stepped forward, gestured to the doe, then gestured to the south with his bow. Several of the group grunted their agreement with whatever he had declared, for they nodded as they inched up to stand behind him.

Honest-to-goodness Injun warriors! It sent a new shiver down his spine.

A heartbeat later it began to sink in. They were discussing him! Talking over who must have killed the doe. They had to realize the hunter was somewhere close—simply because the carcass was still warm when found. They had to figure the hunter couldn’t have got very far before the deer was discovered.

He wasn’t sure he breathed at all, afraid even to do that right then in his hiding place. With growing certainty Titus feared these warriors were sure to hear his heart hammering against his ribs if it continued to get any louder—what with the way the blood rushed up his neck cords and roared in his ears, thundering in his temples.

Some of them crouched to study the ground around the gut-pile and the carcass, then peered off into the forest, talking to one another, gesturing. There wasn’t any one thing he could put his finger on to tell him that they knew of him—maybe just the way they turned their heads to regard the woods around them, the way their voices got quiet, the way the eight of them strung their bows and the other three slowly brought up their long-barreled guns, those huge muzzles swinging out toward the timber surrounding the small glade like wide black eyes.

He could not remember ever finding himself on this end of a gun before—staring down the barrel of a weapon that might well be used against him.

With that moment came clarity of thought, the sharp-honed realization they were bound to discover him once they spread out and crossed those few rods between them and where he crouched in hiding, his legs beginning to cramp in pain. He had to act.

Simple, untarred fear was what compelled him to move at last. Nothing as complicated as the consideration of his options. To his uncluttered mind in this, his first confrontation with real Indians, Titus decided he had no options. It was run or die.

As he exploded from the brushy undergrowth, heading back toward the river at a sharp angle to the southwest, Titus heard them shout to one another behind him. Surprised, confused for the moment—perhaps even afraid there might be more than one. How he hoped their fear might delay them, if only for a moment or so to contemplate what they should do, how many they might be facing down, if there might be more enemies lying in wait for them to make a mistake. Oh, how he wanted them to be seized with some of the uncertainty, nay—the outright fear—that drove his cramped legs into frantic motion.

Leaping, dodging, sprinting, making for the far-off riverbank still at least a mile away. How far down the others had gone before they put to and tied up to await his delivery of their evening meal … he had no idea. Only a hope. Nothing he could call a real prayer—the way his folks prayed, or the prayers of that circuit man who came around to hold his Bible meetings, then went home with one family or the other, gone to dinner and a dry place to sleep before moving on to another village the following day.

No, what Titus did as he sprinted through the icy forest, trying his best to stay where the thin layer of wet snow did not blanket the ground near as deeply, was to try to will those four boatmen to sense the danger he was in. To call out to them with nothing more than his thumping heart, since he could not cry out with his throat grown raw from every gasp of the cold air he dragged into his lungs. So far away, they wouldn’t hear him anyway, he told himself.

But Titus could hear the hunting party coming: whooping, hollering, crying out in shrill voices. Those yelps, more than the crashing brush he heard whipping his pursuers, drove him onward. Wishing he had loaded the rifle as soon as he had shot the doe. At least he would then have one shot. One last shot before they came within reach of him. To drop one of his killers—a way to even things up, he thought.

But that didn’t matter either. He cursed his luck. Cursed his stupidity. None of it mattered because he hadn’t loaded his rifle. Never had to think about it before. Forests where he grew up, hunted, came of age as a woodsman—those wooded hills were no longer haunted by red men. His grandpap’s kind, and a few expeditionary army forces—they had pushed the Injuns farther west. Bass had simply never had to worry about bumping into redskins before.

He stumbled, spilling to one knee, the rifle skidding from his grasp in a skiff of snow iced across a patch of leafy brush. Lumbering to his feet, Titus told himself to forget the pain crying out from his knee. Scooping up the rifle and a handful of dead leaves, he pushed on through the woods, trying to forget the bare limbs and thorny branches that whipped at his face.

They thundered behind him, breaking through the underbrush, some exhorting the others with chants and war cries—he swore he could even hear the hard breathing of a few of the closest ones, grunting as they chased him.

Plunging into a thicket of bramble, he felt the thorns claw at his jerkin, catch at the cuff on his britches, slash the back of his hands to ribbons as he swept ahead—struggling to hack his way through to the far side of the briars. Now he had a good-sized gash on one eyelid, and it was beginning to ooze enough that it hindered his vision from that eye. As slow as he was in breaking through to the other side—Titus was certain with his every step that he would feel a bullet catch him, maybe an arrow driving deep into those thin, sinewy muscles of his back. By their growing shrieks he knew they were closing on him faster than he would have ever imagined possible.

But then he remembered this was their forest. Not his. And he became all the more frightened—figuring they knew where he was going much better than he. Something cold clutching his belly in a knot made him fear some of the fastest ones might even get somewhere ahead of him and be waiting for him.

The breathing, the grunts, the yelps he heard at his heels, all made him fear that his first run-in with real Indians was going to be his last. Something he simply would not live to tell his grandchildren of, the way his grandpap had sat the young’uns around his knee and told them the chilling, hair-raising stories of just what a dark and bloody ground that Ohio River canebrake country had been of a time not all that long ago.

An angry whine sailed past his ear, followed a heartbeat later by the roar of a musket behind him. He’d never been shot at. Now he felt as if he had become the fleeing game, the bounding, hard-pressed buck or doe, pursued by the hunters, chased through the thickets, driven across the snow as his heart pounded in his chest until he was sure it was going to burst with its next beat.

What a fool he had been to go so far inland to hunt!

His stupidity, along with the fear, the exhaustion, and the utter hopelessness of ever reaching the boatmen alive … it all came slipping in on him like separate fingers to claw the courage right out of him. At least a mile inland, and they must surely have gone much more than a mile downriver. That meant that no matter how he cut back to the river at an angle, he still had more than two miles—maybe even twice that—before he would reach the boatmen’s camp.

How he wished Ebenezer had been with him when the first Indian showed up. For sure he wouldn’t have frozen in fear, Titus thought. Not the way Abigail had told him of how Zane had waded right into the rivermen fixing to abuse a friend of his, Mathilda. The river pilot would do no less for Titus, would he, now? Any of them, maybe even Reuben, the sourest of the lot, would have helped him take care of that first Indian … and they could have slipped away before the others had happed onto the clearing.

His breathing came a little easier. Titus figured he was getting his second wind. Chest didn’t hurt so much now. And the soles of his feet inside that double pair of moccasins didn’t pain him near as much as they had there at first. Maybe they were simply numb. He couldn’t tell, really—not able to feel anything from the ankles down. Like something cold clinging from the end of his legs.

What a fool he was for going so far inland to hunt. A fool for seeking the aloneness with the woods and what game he might find … for now the boatmen could not hear his yells, even if he could have forced his dry mouth, his aching throat, to break free a yelp of warning. There were two things he realized had a crystal certainty at that moment: the Indians were still behind him, crashing through the brush in his wake; and the boatmen were still somewhere ahead of him, floating somewhere downriver before tying up for the night to await him and the game he was to bring in.

That almost made him laugh, and almost laughing made him want to cry. Instead of carrying in some haunches of fresh venison, he was bringing in some Indians right behind him. As the limbs and thorns whipped across his face, slashed at his eyes, Titus tried to focus on each of their faces, one at a time, to imagine how the four rivermen might look as he came down upon the camp they had made.

Sitting there circling their fire.

Fire!

He could almost smell it. Wanting so bad to stop long enough to get himself a good, long whiff of that fragrance on the cold wind. But he dared not stop for anything … hearing the Indians renew their yelps and cries close behind him. Perhaps they smelled that fire too. Maybe it wasn’t his imagination, after all.

Then he realized warriors would figure on redoubling their efforts to get to him before he got any closer to any sort of help.

It was his sensitive nose that led him across that last half mile of chest-heaving sprint. As an animal might catch the scent of danger on the wind, this time Titus followed the scent of man’s woodsmoke toward the east bank of the Mississippi.

Then in the murky light of that late afternoon as the air seemed to grow all the colder, he thought he spotted a distant twinkle of light. Almost like a faraway star flung against the dark shimmer of twilight coming down upon that river valley, a flicker of something against the dark, rolling band of the Mississippi itself. The light danced and rose, quivering from side to side. Their fire!

He tried to yell, but nothing came out—finding his tongue pasted to the floor of his mouth, unable to budge it free.

Then he saw movement cross in front of the light of that fire, remembering how he had happened upon the four of them early last autumn, back on the upper Ohio. Their black shadows momentarily cut off the light as they moved about the fire. He tried again to yell, his tongue freed a bit, and sensed his warning come out as a squeak escaping his parched throat.

One of the shadows ahead of him stopped, backlit by the fire. Then it seemed that they turned. He could hear the sound of voices suddenly raised in alarm ahead of him, no longer just those cries and yelps behind him. Then the four were all on their feet, looking at him.

Didn’t they know! Couldn’t they see!

Clumsily he tried to twist his upper body as he ran, pointing behind him with the empty hand. In doing so he nearly stumbled on the last clumps of some low brush just as he reached the muddy, sandy bank. The final thing he saw before he began to pitch forward was Ebenezer waving his arms and the other three breaking in different directions.

He felt the grit of the icy sand and snow bite the bloodied skin on his face, sensed it scoop into his mouth, rub raw against the cuts on the back of his hands as he got to all fours, crawling, scrambling to get back onto his feet at the same time he swiped a forearm across his eyes to clear them of sand and blood and stinging sweat.

And before he realized it, he was sprinting again.

Heman Ovatt was already on the flatboat, lunging from the awning to the gunnel, something in his hands. There he threw the long object to Kingsbury, a second to Root. While Ovatt turned back to that awning of oiled Russian sheeting, Titus knew those had to be longrifles, muskets, smoothbores, fusils—firearms! As Ovatt reappeared at the gunnel with two more, Titus watched Kingsbury and Root scurry in his direction, where they dropped to their knees and brought their weapons to their shoulders.

Zane swung about with a rifle in his own hands, bringing it to his shoulder as Ovatt leaped over the side of the boat. The steersman hollered something. Titus wasn’t sure what he said. The words sounded garbled at first.

“Hold your fire, boys!”

Then he understood, as Kingsbury rose from his knee, his rifle still at his cheek.

“C’mon, Titus Bass! C’mon—you can make it!”

Hames strode toward Bass confidently, the muzzle of his weapon pointing at whatever might be pressing down on Titus from behind.

“Get on in here, Titus!”

He lunged past Kingsbury as Root got up from his knee and began to move backward, a step at a time. Ovatt and Zane were there to catch Bass as he stumbled against them.

“Get him on board!” the pilot ordered Heman.

Ovatt turned, clutching Bass as they careened down the riverbank past the big, warming fire they had built. How he wanted to stop, to rest, to feel the fire’s warmth. He found himself stumbling.

“Get up!” Ovatt hollered.

Zane became frantic, shouting, “Get yourself in the boat!”

He did as he was told, scrambling over the gunnel as the first shot rang out.

Yet it wasn’t fired by any of the four boatmen. The shot had come from the brush, where he glanced to see a whiff of smoke, saw glimpses of the Indians converging, then moving apart at the edge of the timber.

“Ease back to the waterline, boys,” Zane ordered his crew. “Hold ’em so they don’t break on us.”

The three of them continued to back slowly, slowly toward the flatboat, training their rifles on the timber, holding the Indians at bay. Bass stuffed a hand down into his shooting pouch, dragging out at least a dozen round lead balls he then popped into his mouth.

“Heman—you got them hawsers?”

Ovatt turned from the last of two lines securing the flatboat for the night. “Done, Ebenezer. I’m getting on up so I can pole us off soon as the rest of you’re here.” Heman leaped against the side of the flatboat and kicked a leg over the gunnel, rolling himself aboard.

Pulling the plug from his powder horn, Titus spilled more of the coarse black grains onto the deck than he got into his palm. Trembling more now with the exquisite excitement of their predicament than with anything resembling fear, he turned that quaking hand over the muzzle and poured the powder down the long barrel. One of the lead balls he popped from his lips and dropped down the muzzle without a patch.

Without taking his eyes off the enemy still clinging to the shadows, Zane said, “You get on up first, Reuben!”

They were less than five yards from the boat now—just about the time the Indians were making a clear, stand-up show of themselves at the edge of the timber. Yelling, screeching, pounding their chests and taunting the boatmen, a few even pulled aside their breechclouts and exposed their manhood at the whites from the river.

As Root turned his back on the Indians and raised his arms to clamber over the gunnel, Bass and Ovatt both reached down to help him get on board.

Titus asked, “What’s that mean, them showing us their … their privates that way?”

“Just their way of telling you they think you ain’t much of a man like them,” Root grumbled as he turned and crouched atop a pair of large oak casks, pointing his rifle at the edge of the timber.

“You next, Hames!” Ebenezer ordered, only his eyes moving back and forth as the two of them backed right to the water’s edge. He eased back a few more steps, the water lapping at his knees before he came to a stop.

“We can both climb on at once’t, Ebenezer!” Kingsbury protested.

“No!” he growled. “That’d take two guns off them red devils at once’t. Get!”

His lips pursed in resignation, Kingsbury turned and splashed out to the flatboat as it drifted lazily away from its moorings. He slogged through water midway up his thighs before he could toss his rifle up to Ovatt, then held up his arms for help.

Bass did his best to sprinkle a dusting of priming powder down into the pan while he kept his eyes darting across the crescent of Indians pointing muskets and arrows at the boat and its white men.

Kingsbury shrieked, “C’mon, Ebenezer!”

“You all got your guns ready?” Zane asked, cocking his head slightly so he could snatch a quick glance at the flatboat.

“Gotta come now, Ebenezer!” Kingsbury shouted. “We’re loose and drifting off!”

Bass’s heart leaped into his throat as he felt the river jostle the boat to the side as they inched out into the channel where the Mississippi’s pull became increasingly stronger. They were easing away from the pilot.

“Zane!” Root cried.

Ebenezer waited no longer. Suddenly wheeling, the steersman lunged around into the water, struggling as the river bottom sank deeper, desperate to reach the side of the flatboat before it drifted out of reach.

“I’ll get the rudder an’ work us back to shore!” Kingsbury shouted, starting for the stern.

“No, goddammit!” Zane bellowed, the water up to his waist as he fought his way into deeper and deeper water. “Keep your gun on them!”

The first bullet smacked into the gunnel, just past the pilot’s head. Titus snapped up, wrenched from watching Zane’s struggle to find the Indians emerging onto the open beach where the white men had tied up for the night. The arrows began to arc silently into the twilight. Making no noise until they struck the thick yellow timbers, snapping at times like dried cane stalks underfoot in the ripe, moist bottomland every winter. A few sailed down through the oiled awning with a brief hiss as they ripped through the heavy fabric.

“Listen to ’em, will you?” Kingsbury called out. “That’s a Chickasaw war whoop if ’n I ever heard one!”

“Shuddup and shoot, goddammit!” Ebenezer called out.

As Titus pulled the hammer back to full cock, he watched Root reach down and snatch the rifle from Zane, who now stood up to his armpits in the river. Bass whirled away as the boat twisted slightly, starting to come broad-side against the current, throwing the blade down into that back buckhorn sight—not knowing where the hell to hold on those tall figures. Sure as anything, he knew game: where to hold his sights on a turkey or squirrel, deer or even a black bear. But … those were men! Red bastards to be sure, just what Zane had called them. And they would’ve likely killed him and raised his hair if he hadn’t run so fast, what with being so damned scared. Shooting a man?

He held squarely on the middle of one of the bodies—an Indian who stood reloading his rifle. And Titus squeezed, clenching both eyes shut.

When he dared open them in the echo of the gun’s blast, he watched the Indian spin like a string top, his rifle cartwheeling out of his grip. Ducking down on one knee to reload, he saw from the corner of his eye Zane kick one leg onto the top of the gunnel. Then heard the pilot grunt.

More and more arrows slapped the surface of the water, thwacked into the side of the boat with a hollow, leaden sound.

“Jesus God, Ebenezer!” Ovatt cried.

“He done caught one!” Root said, desperation in his voice.

“Get us the hell out of here!” Zane snapped as they dragged him over the gunnel and onto some crates. “Hear me, Kingsbury! Get to that rudder!”

All at once the men seemed to explode in different directions, every one of them hollering as the Indians came on down the sandy bank to the water’s edge, shooting their old muskets and loosing their arrows, screeching and crying out in frustrated disappointment.

“Goddamned Chickasaws,” Zane growled as he rolled onto his belly.

That’s when Titus glanced away to the beach—then immediately looked back at the pilot, his mind suddenly realizing what his eye had seen: the long shaft of an arrow, its fletching a’quiver with the muscle spasms in Ebenezer’s leg as the pilot struggled to make himself small among the crates.

“Titus—go help him!” Ovatt ordered from the bow where he had seized the gouger and was working it frantically back and forth to help Kingsbury speed the flatboat farther out into the current.

Stuffing the rifle between two of the kegs filled with iron nails, Bass scrambled toward Zane.

“Goddamned Chickasaws … goddamn, goddamn, goddamn,” the pilot muttered repeatedly.

“That what they are? Chicka … Chicka—”

“Saws. Goddamned Chickasaws,” Ebenezer grumbled as he twisted onto his side. “Take a look at the son of a bitch for me. See how bad she’s bleeding back there.”

“Damn right, they was Chickasaws,” Kingsbury bellowed from the stern rudder. “No other cry like a Chickasaw war whoop in the world—them runts hollering for blood the way they do.”

“Ain’t bleeding too bad,” Titus declared, wide-eyed, staring down at the back of the pilot’s leg.

“Cut it open,” Zane ordered.

“Y-your leg?”

He wagged his head, biting down on his lower lip, then said, “No. Cut open my britches, goddammit—so you can see for sure if I’m bleeding bad.”

Pulling his knife from his belt with one hand, the other gripping the thick canvas fabric of the pants, Titus pricked a long slice away from the arrow’s shaft.

“How it be?” Zane inquired, dolefully looking over his shoulder in the coming darkness. “Best get me in there.”

Titus watched the pilot nod to the open area beneath the awning, then lifted Ebenezer’s arm over his shoulder, dragging him off the crates, hopping one-legged under the edge of the cloth.

“Light a few of them wind lanterns. We’re bound to need some light,” Zane ordered. As Bass set about pulling some tow from a kindling box, the pilot turned to fling his voice at Kingsbury. “Hames—best you get us on downriver afore putting over.”

Kingsbury shook his head in protest. “I wanna look at that leg of yours first off, Eb—”

“The boy’s taking care of it for now,” Zane interrupted. “You just get us a few miles on downriver afore putting over to the west bank.” Rolling on his hip slightly, he turned to holler at Ovatt. “You hear that, Heman? Up to you on that bow to find us a place to put in for the rest of the night.”

Titus asked, “How many mile you figure we ought to put atween us and them?”

“Don’t matter how many, son. We’re gonna be on the other side of this big, wide ol’ river. They ain’t gonna cross the Messessap to get at us.”

Root poked his head under the awning. “You want me to help, Ebenezer?”

“Yeah. Get me a little of your tobacco. Gonna chew up a poultice.”

“Straightaway,” Root replied, crawling on under the awning to search for his own belongings.

“Hand me some of that tow, Titus Bass. Yeah, that you got there with the fire-making plunder.”

Bass’s hands were trembling as he gave it to the river pilot. “I should’ve known better than to—”

“Known better’n what?” Zane demanded.

“Going so far in from the river,” he tried to explain, unable to look at the steersman’s face, even in the coming of night as they slid on beneath a cold, starry, moonless sky.

“You’re the hunter, ain’t you?”

With a shrug Titus replied, “I s’pose I allays thought I was a hunter.”

“That’s what I brung you along for, Titus. You was to be our hunter. So you tell me: when you run onto those Injuns—was you doing anything different from what you do when you’re hunting?”

He struggled, thought, then shook his head. “Nothing different. Just following a game trail.”

“Then, goddammit—don’t go blaming yourself. Damn, but this hurts.”

“B-but I got you shot!”

“Ain’t nothing tore but a little meat,” he said just above a whisper, his face nonetheless etched with pain. “You boys’ll fix me up right proper—and I’ll be feeling fine in no time. Get back on my feet and take over that rudder—”

“No such a thing,” Kingsbury snapped. “I’m near good a steersman as you, Ebenezer. And, besides—this ain’t a tough river like the Ohio.”

“Still the damned winter’s low water!” Zane spat. “And the Messessap ain’t no lark of a ride in winter, Hames!”

“Shuddup and let them two fix on you,” the relief pilot ordered. “I’m kingfish of this here boat while you’re down—an’ you’ll learn to take orders just like any of the rest of the crew.”

Zane rolled back over onto his side, still gripping the arrow shaft as his leg trembled in pain. He looked up at Bass, grumbling, “You boys gonna get us some light to work with or not?”

“I’m fixing to get some char started on this tow—”

“Then get the goddamned candles lit so I can dig this son of a bitch outta my leg.”

“Here’s that tobacco you wanted, Eb,” Root said, handing the pilot enough of the pressed leaf to fill his palm.

Taking a big bite out of the carrot-sized twist, Zane stuffed the rest into a pocket of his britches and growled, “Punch through the bunghole of that keg of rye and tap it, Reuben. An’ be quick about it! I’m beginning to feel real puny, and this leg is starting to talk to me.”

After lighting the wick on the second candle lantern, Bass turned to the pilot, holding the burning tow and asking, “W-what more you w-want me to do, Ebenezer?”

“Your knife a sharp’un?”

He nodded, his Adam’s apple jumping like a great green grasshopper up the front of his neck. “Sharp ’nough to skin anything.”

“Good,” Zane snarled around the lump of tobacco puffing up the side of his cheek like a case of the mumps. “You get it out and slick it on that strop hanging yonder. I figure you’ll be the one what can do the cutting on me.”

“M-me?” His heart seemed to stop. Titus felt himself begin to quake, starting up right from the soles of his feet.

“Yeah, you, goddammit.” He spit to the side, the brown tobacco gob landing in the sand of the firebox, where it raised a small cloud of old ash. “Now get a fire started down there an’ heat us some water.”

“You want me to c-cut on you?”

“Damn right I do!” Zane said, then raised his eyes to the frightened youngster’s, his voice becoming softer. “Listen, boy—I figure you got the steadiest hand here in this here bunch of scurvy entrails.”

“I don’t think I could cut on ’nother man.”

“You damn well just killed a man!”

For a moment he stared at the pilot, perhaps not wanting to believe. Then he answered quietly, “I … I killed a man?”

Kingsbury said, “Damn sure did!”

Feeling the certainty of that course through him, Titus replied, “I done what I had to do—save you, Ebenezer.”

“That’s why you’re gonna cut on me now.”

Bass wagged his head. “I … don’t think I—”

“You hunt, don’t you?”

“Yeah, you know I do—”

“An’ ever since you was a sprout, you butchered out what you hunt?”

Titus only got to nod before Zane went on, pain written over his paste-colored face as he gritted on some of the words.

“Then you’re the one I want cutting on me. Likely you done more work on hide and meat than all the rest of these here bastards,” the pilot said, his eyes closing halfway, beads of perspiration standing out like diamonds on his forehead. “Besides, Titus Bass—there’s ’nother goddamned good reason you’re the one better do the cutting on me.”

He tried to swallow, gulping at the hot lump clogging the back of his throat before he answered, afraid his words would come out as a squeak. “W-what’s that, Ebenezer?”

“You’re gonna cut this arrow outta the back of my goddamned leg ’cause you’re the one I reckon got it put there in the first place.”