Long Hunt (9781101559208) (13 page)

The man with no hair stopped his work and caught his breath. “It'll be just the right length. I measured you, you remember.”

Littleton didn't want to laugh, but had to. “I meant, how long until you're finished?”

The other chuckled. “Oh. I see. Well, I've still got to do some smoothing inside the cup, and make sure those straps are fixed good and firm. Otherwise you might find it not as comfortable a fit, may bruise you some.”

“Don't want that. But I don't want to wait forevermore, either. I need to get away from these parts.”

“Why's that?”

“Don't ask questions. Just work on that peg leg.”

“Very well.” He redoubled his efforts, perspiration flying with the wood shavings.

“Is it all right to ask you, mister, how you lost the leg?” asked the carpenter.

“None of your affair, but I don't mind saying. I had to cut it off to get out of a rock pit I'd fell into over by Fort Edohi.”

“Lord! You cut it off yourself?”

“With my own knife. Hardly felt it. . . . Well, hardly felt it mixed in with all the hurting I was already doing. The bones were broke clean in two and poking through the meat. Nothing holding the bottom part of that leg on except for a few strips of bloody flesh. That's all I had to cut through to get the leg off so I could get out. Foot and anklebone and all were wedged too tight in the hole to pull out, you see.”

Simultaneously revolted and fascinated, the carpenter had slowed his work to listen. Littleton pointed out that fact gruffly, and the man went at it hard again.

“How long has it been?” the man asked.

“Well, a good deal longer than it is now, considering the bottom part of it is cut off.”

The carpenter puzzled over that a moment, then laughed. “I admire a man who can be jocular in such circumstances, sir,” he said. “ ‘Good deal longer than it is now.'
Ha!
”

“I'm supposing what you're really asking is how long since the leg was lost.”

“Yes.”

“Days. That's all. Just days.”

The carpenter stopped all motion for a moment, frowning. “Mister, you won't be able to wear this leg for a time, then. It would be like torture to put weight down on that stump with the wound not healed yet.”

“I know. But I want to get it now anyway to take it with me to wear when I
am
able to.”

“I see. I'll . . . I'll fix you up a crutch, too, so you can use that until you're able to wear the peg.”

“I 'preciate that. But I ain't willing to pay for a crutch. I got me a stout stick with a fork on the end where I rest my armpit, and that's serving me fine.”

“You don't need to pay, nor wait for me to make one. I had a crushed ankle two years ago and made a crutch for myself then, and I still got it, but have no use for it now. It's yours. You and me are about the same height, so it should fit you.”

“Kind of you, sir. I thank you.”

“My pleasure, Mr. Kirk. I try to do good by folks.”

Though they had cooked for him a very thin, bready gruel and passed a little of it through his lips, the old Indian looked as if death would come at any moment. Yet the thin chest kept rising and falling and the lips of the twisted mouth moved slightly from time to time. He managed to lick away the watery gruel and seemingly get it down, and with care Titus found he could successfully administer the old man a bit of water.

Occasionally the Indian would make whispering sounds, something between words and mere noise, but no meaning could be discerned. As best the men could tell, the old man probably did not understand much English, though he did react very slightly to words of kindness.

“He's mighty pallid for a Cherokee, don't you think?” Micah asked Titus.

“I'd had the same thought myself,” said Titus. “I'm wondering if he might have some white blood, or maybe even be a white man . . . maybe a trader who lived in the Upper Towns.”

“Well, if he was, he ought to understand English.”

Titus went to the old man, who was at the moment coming awake. The bleary eyes moved about and finally settled on Titus's face. Titus smiled at the fellow, and to his surprise the half-paralyzed face managed to make a smile of its own.

“Old Gentleman,” Titus said, using a name he'd contrived for the fellow because he couldn't know his real one, “are you Cherokee?
Tsalagi
? Or are you white . . .
unaka
?”

The old man seemed to want to answer, but made only vague sounds. Frustration filled his eyes.

“Your skin is light,” Titus said. “That's why I ask. I'm wondering if you might be a white man who lived among the Indians.”

Somehow the weak old fellow managed to give a small nod. Or so it appeared to Titus. “You understand what we say here, then.”

Another nod, this one even weaker and obviously requiring excruciating effort. The old man's eyes fluttered closed and it took nearly a minute for them to open again.

“You were a trader, maybe. Or maybe you just married a
Tsalagi
woman.”

Another tiny nod, and this time, to Titus's astonishment, a breathed-out sigh that could understand as an attempt to say the word yes.

Titus nodded and began to explore possibilities. “I'm going to make some guesses here, some suppositions. I don't know if I'll be right, but maybe you can let me know.”

No response from Old Gentleman.

Titus began. “I think your wife died not long ago. Left you alone in your old age. And you lost your interest in living. It just didn't matter anymore with her gone.”

The old man's eyes fixed on Titus more firmly than anytime before, and Titus knew his surmises, which were half deduction, half pure imagination, were close to the truth.

“You decided finally that life couldn't go on for you, and you picked a place to come and die. This place. But when you came, something happened to you. You were stricken—you could hardly move, and you couldn't really speak. You became
udalina
. Weak and feeble. You couldn't walk, of course, so you used the one side of your body that you still had power over and dragged yourself into this little cabin that some old hunter had built and left My father is a hunter, and in his younger days he built many shelters and huts on his hunting grounds.”

Then the most surprising thing yet. Old Gentleman looked squarely into Titus's face and said in words with little form to them, “Your father?”

“His name is Fain. He is called Edohi.”

Now the old face smiled clearly, and a more firm nod came. Titus was pleased to see that the old man's apoplexy apparently was not as severe as it first had appeared.

“Do you know Edohi?”

“Yes,” said the old man. “When young, he and I.”

“Friend or enemy?”

“Friend.” The old man raised a hand and indicated the structure around them. “Edohi,” he said softly.

“You mean . . . Are you saying that Edohi built this shelter?”

“Yes.
Uh
.” The affirmative spoken in both English and Cherokee.

“It ain't that unusual, you know,” said Micah's voice from behind. Titus glanced back at him. Micah came up and knelt beside the old man's resting place alongside Titus. “The talking, I mean. My grandfather was rendered apoplectic and couldn't speak a word, hardly even make a sound, for three days. Then, all at once, it was back, his ability to talk. Hardly any trace of the apoplexy left in his speaking. He never was able to walk normal again, but his speech was same as before.”

“What is your name?” Titus asked the old man.

“Sisalee.”

“Indian way of saying ‘Cecil,' ” Titus said to Micah.

“I know, I know,” Micah said. He was frequently annoyed by Titus's obvious assumptions that he was more knowledgeable about most things than he was.

“Cecil—I will call you by your English name because it is more natural for me—I am glad to see you starting to do better,” Titus said.

“Thank . . . you.” The words required effort, and were poorly formed. One side of Cecil's face drooped and his tongue moved visibly and sluggishly when he spoke.

“Do you think of yourself as white or
Tsalagi
?” Titus asked.

“I am . . .
Tsalagi
.”

“You are my honored friend, as you were to my father.”

Cecil smiled again, crookedly and excruciatingly, and closed his eyes a moment. He said a word Titus could not understand.

“What was that? Say again?”

He did, and Titus remained unable to decipher it. But Micah said, “I think he said ‘granddaughter.' ”

The old man nodded weakly, eyes still closed.

“You have a granddaughter?” Titus asked him.

“
Tla. Tla
,” he said in Cherokee, then in English: “No.” He waved toward the door. “Granddaughter.”

“He's asking for Mary,” Micah said. “I can fetch her. . . .”

“No,” Titus said quickly, remembering Mary's hateful words about the old man. With Sisalee taking a clear turn for the better, now was not the time to confront him with hostility from a child toward whom he perhaps held some tenderness.

“Is it Mary you ask for?” Titus said, smiling.

“Mary. Yes.”

“Titus, I'm going to go get her and bring—”

Titus again waved off Micah's plan. “Cecil, there's something you must know. Mary just lost her family to an attack by Cherokee. Probably a band of Dragging Canoe's followers come up from the Lower Towns. But it has put in her a hatred of Indians, and even though you are white by blood, you claim yourself as Indian and live as Indian, and I don't know how she'll act with you.”

Cecil pondered this, and seemed to sink farther into his resting place. After a minute or two it was obvious he was sleeping. Titus took Micah by the arm and they left the shelter.

“Who would have figured him for a white man?” Micah said. “I know the skin is light, but I've known other Indians who weren't dark. I had wondered if the paleness just came from him being ill.”

“Now that he's starting to show a little more strength, we've got to figure out what to do with him,” Titus said. “We can't just leave him here alone. And I got a feeling none of his people know he's here, since he came out here alone.”

“We'll make a drag-pole bed and take him with us,” Micah said. “That physician at Fort Edohi can take a look at him.”

“That's a mighty long way to go, bumping along on drag poles,” Titus said.

“You got a better idea? He can't sit a horse in the shape he's in. And we don't have an extra horse, anyway. One of us would be put afoot if he was riding.”

“Drag poles it is, I reckon.”

“I'll go now and find us some saplings with a good spring to them,” Micah said.

 

They said nothing of what they had learned to Mary. Though she had seemed to be growing brighter and less brooding, she now reverted abruptly and fell into a cold silence, not even willing to look her companions in the eye. Titus's intuition told him that asking her to at some level accept the old man in the hunter's shelter might be more than she could handle. And letting her know that the “Indian” was by birth a white man would be unlikely to make a difference. If anything, she might even find it more upsetting to realize that a white man could willingly embrace the people who had slaughtered her loved ones, and redefine himself as one of them.

So Titus kept quiet and told Micah to do the same. Mary continued her brooding, stayed away from the hunter's shelter, and had nothing to say about the apoplectic old man inside.

The effects of the apoplexy continued to diminish. Cecil's words remained muddied and hard to understand, but he spoke them more easily. He was able to eat more of the thin gruel, and seemed stronger for it. When Titus told him they planned to take him with them to find help from a physician at Fort Edohi, Cecil was pleased and agreeable, despite the prospect of uncomfortable travel slung between two drag poles.

In the middle of the night, Mary Deveraux rose in her sleep, retrieved Micah Tate's small flintlock pistol from where she'd hidden it, and entered the hunter's shelter. Still as asleep as if she had never risen at all, she moved silently to the place where the old man slumbered.

The sound and jolt of the firing pistol was what woke her up. The old man never awakened at all, the ball having entered his forehead and passed into his apoplexy-damaged brain.

Mary dropped the pistol at her feet and stared down at what she had done, though it was so dark she could barely make out the unmoving shape of the old man who was no more.