Long Hunt (9781101559208) (6 page)

“So thirsty,” he whispered. “Hurting . . . and so
thirsty
!”

Despite the discomfort that groping for the knife had caused, he had managed to get it. He moved it into position against his chest, pressing the tip of it against his flesh until he could feel the pulsing of his heart vibrating the blade—then, hesitation.

Littleton was no praying man, but his eyes drifted skyward and he stared at the moon through tears. “I . . . I don't want to die, God,” he said. “But I hurt so bad . . . and if I don't do this, I'll die anyway, just longer and slower and hurting worse, and I can't bear it. Forgive me, Lord. Forgive me for what I've got to do.”

His leg throbbed worse than ever now, and he sobbed.

Pressing harder with the knife, he wondered how badly it would hurt when he pushed the metal into his heart; but as the blade broke skin, he discovered something unexpected. The pain of his smashed and torn leg was so intense that he hardly noticed the new pain caused by the knife beginning to enter his chest, a mere pinprick of discomfort by comparison to what already overwhelmed him.

Even so, he hesitated. The impulse to live was strong—but so also was the need to be free of his pain.

“Forgive me, God,” he said again, and pushed a little harder.

P
eople began gathering early in the morning, arriving in wagons and on horseback. Those on foot began to show up a while later. By noon the great valley meadow near Edohi Station was well populated, several tents pitched and even a few arborlike shelters in place, the materials for them mostly carried in by the families who made them.

Crawford Fain stood on the rifle platform inside the stockade wall of his fort and watched the crowd grow. The platform from which Abner Bledsoe would preach had been completed two days earlier, and during that time Bledsoe had hauled in, by wagon, a stout oaken pulpit lectern that would not have been out of place in an ornate chapel in England or one of the older New England cities, but which was incongruous indeed on this rustic frontier setting. Abner Bledsoe, it was said, insisted upon always having that lectern with him when he preached. There was a story behind it; something to do with Whitefield, the famed preacher, once having preached from behind it.

“Fain!”

The call came from somewhere among the scattered crowd of people below, and it took a moment for Fain to locate who had called to him. A waving hand finally caught his eye and he saw an old acquaintance, Zeb Cable, who was busy stoking a cook fire over which his wife, Mae, had hung a black kettle. With a keener sense of smell than most men—another legacy of his long hunter days—Fain could smell the simmering stew even across the distance.

“How fare you, Zeb?” Fain called.

“Quite fine, Edohi! You?”

“Well indeed! Come to the gate!”

He saw Cable speak to his wife and gesture toward the fort, then begin to advance in Fain's direction, a broad grin on his face. At the same time, Fain heard a bumping on the nearby ladder that led up to the rifle ledge. He looked around and saw that Langdon Potts, who had arrived at Fort Edohi the day before, was climbing up to join him. Potts stepped lithely to Fain's side, looked out, and saw the approaching man.

“Fellow looks familiar,” Potts said. “Somebody I should know?”

Fain shrugged. “Don't know if you've ever met him. His name's Cable, and last I knowed of him, he was living over on the Nolichucky. The fact that he's come farther west might indicate he's moved off from there, or maybe that he's such a follower of Abner Bledsoe's preaching that he just didn't want to miss the camp meeting.”

Potts noticed that Fain was watching Cable's approach with a look in his eye that didn't seem entirely a happy one, and commented upon it. Fain sighed. “Truth is, Potts, Cable is one of them singers that only knows one song. By which I mean he talks about the same thing all the time. Franklin and Carolina and the government and all such as that. Blast my soul! Why did I call him into the fort? I should have left him out there with his family around their stewpot.”

“He a Franklin man or does he favor Carolina government?”

“He's Franklin, unless he's changed since last I spoke with him.”

“I reckon that's good.”

“Do you?”

“Reckon so,” replied Potts, shrugging. “I don't pay a lot of heed to such things. I'm taking it that maybe you think t'other way?”

“I don't think on it at all, son, if I can avoid it. Let the folks over round Jonesborough and Greeneville fight that one out. They can just leave me be on the matter.”

Cable reached the gate and came through. With effort, Fain slapped a smile on his face and descended the ladder to greet him. Potts followed, and was introduced to the newcomer. They found a shady spot in a corner of the stockade, under a post oak, and sat on the ground.

It did not take long for the conversation to be led by Cable into a discussion of the governmental issues of the day. Potts listened without saying much. Fain pretended to be interested and Cable droned on like an undying mountain wind, never tiring of his subject.

 

Uninteresting as it might have been to Fain, the governance situation Cable loved to talk about was unusual indeed, and left many of the settlers in the so-called backcountry wilderness honestly unsure as to what government they owed allegiance.

At the close of the Revolutionary War, the region of North Carolina was vast, extending all the way from the Atlantic coast to the waterway the Algonquin called the “Great River,” or in their language, the “Misi-ziibi.”

Just west of the Unaka Mountains, along rivers with names such as Holston, Nolichucky, Watauga, and Clinch, were settlements populated by thousands. Beyond was a long stretch of wilderness, reaching to the Cumberland River and its Nashborough settlement, and other neighboring settlements. The Cumberland River settlements were particularly vulnerable to attacks from Indians who did not welcome the intrusion into what had been before rich hunting ground for the Cherokee and other natives, and for long hunters such as Casper Mansker, Alphus Colter, John Rains, Joseph Drake, and Crawford Fain.

As part of North Carolina, the backcountry people believed themselves due protection from their mother state—but therein lay a problem. Distance and the mountain barrier made it impractical for North Carolina to respond to troubles in the outlying settlements or offer them significant protection, so the settlers were for the most part left on their own.

The situation was diplomatically clumsy for North Carolina. At the close of the Revolutionary War a solution, or an attempt at a solution, was finally contrived. North Carolina opened its western lands to purchase and settlement, then made a gift of those lands to the government of the United States, effectively washing its hands of the responsibility to protect the far-flung settlements. But before it made the move, it first went through some legislative maneuvers that allowed Carolina leaders the chance to claim ownership for themselves of great tracts of backcountry lands. The move came to be known as the “Land Grab Act.” And in ceding the land to the federal government, the land grabbers set as one term of the cession that their North Carolina land grants would continue to be honored.

Cut off by their mother state and with little ground to believe the federals would do any better protecting them than had the Carolinian government, the resentful backcountry leaders came up with their own idea: an independent, separate state, one that they hoped would be approved and taken in by the Continental Congress. They named their proposed new state Frankland, meaning “land of the free,” though they eventually got around to changing the name to Franklin, in honor of America's most popular statesman.

The affair took another twist when North Carolina changed its mind and rescinded its cession of lands to federal control. The settlers who had begun the process of state-making now were under a strange double banner, their allegiance being asked by both North Carolina and the fledgling entity of Franklin. There were, at some times and places, two simultaneously acting sets of government leaders, one with Franklinian authority, the other acting for North Carolina.

Efforts to have Franklin recognized by the Continental Congress failed, the vote falling short of what was required by the Articles of Confederation. Those strongly in favor of the Franklin effort huffily proposed becoming an independent republic, while others favored the old North Carolinian association. Crawford Fain, for one, was persuaded that the heated feelings the issue stirred in some quarters would inevitably lead to flying rifle balls at some point, and prayed fervently for a resolution before matters took such a bad turn.

 

Fain wondered if he would ever be able to stop grinning. He'd forced a muted but agreeable smile onto his face in order to politely make it through the conversation with the boring, monotone Cable, and now he'd held it so long he wasn't sure he could relax his jaws. But he did, and found his will to be polite fading fast. He had to escape Cable and his unending Franklinite talk, even if it meant leaving poor Potts to sit there and endure it alone.

How was it possible for a man to live his life thinking of nothing but politics? Fain, unlike Cable, just didn't have it in him to do that. Fain loved to let his mind drift free, to think upon whatever it happened to find, like a man stumbling down an unexplored path. Fain knew from long experience that the unexplored paths often proved to be the ones that opened on the finest vistas.

Fain had not had much interest in observing the camp meeting commencing outside the walls of his stockade. He'd planned to watch a few minutes of it from the vantage point of the blockhouse on the southeast corner of the fort, then quietly drift back to his own cabin to turn in early for a long night's sleep.

If the choice ended up being between listening to old cross-eyed Bledsoe and political blabber Cable, Fain was inclined to choose the former. Cable was showing no sign of reaching the end of his Franklinian discourse.

Conveniently, singing voices arose from outside the stockade, distracting Cable from his talk and rendering him silent a few moments.

“Sounds like they're getting started,” Fain said, grabbing the opportunity. “Mr. Cable, I'm supposing your family awaits you out there.”

“Why . . . yes. They do. Perhaps I should go. Though there was more I wanted to say about—”

“Yes, perhaps it is time to rejoin them. We'll continue our conversation some other time. Now, I believe I'll retire to the blockhouse and listen to the preaching from there.”

For a moment Cable looked intrigued by that idea, and Fain wished he'd kept his last words to himself. If Cable climbed up into that blockhouse with him, Fain would remain his captive.

“You are a fortunate man to have so fine a family to enjoy such an evening with,” Fain said. “Though I do thank you for taking a few minutes away from them to visit me.”

Cable nodded and shook hands with Fain and Potts, and at last made his way out of the fort. Fain grinned at Potts. “Got your politics all figured out now, son?”

“If I don't I reckon I've got no excuse for it, having heard all that.”

Fain chuckled, and the pair headed toward the ladder leading up into the blockhouse, which was a square log structure, built on poles, rising above the top of the stockade palisades, with a wide rifle slot in the blockhouse wall at shoulder level. From inside the blockhouse a few riflemen could lay down a wide field of fire in almost total safety, protected by thick log walls.

Fain and Potts positioned themselves at the rifle slot, from where they had a panoramic view of the meadow and what was now a large crowd indeed, hundreds in number. Arbors, tents, parked wagons, and makeshift horse pens were scattered throughout the throng. Here and there a small clump of people were gathered around would-be preachers who stood on stumps or wagon beds, preaching their own unwanted sermons in a vain hope of winning over the crowd before Bledsoe could get rolling with his crafted British accent and crossed George Whitefield eyes. Bledsoe, at the moment seated on a bench at the back of the preaching platform, didn't worry about such usurpers. They showed up at every camp meeting, and never drew more than a handful of listeners. The crowd belonged to Bledsoe, and he knew how to play it.

At Bledsoe's side sat a gray-haired woman, locks wrapped up in a kerchief, a placid expression on her face. This, Fain knew, was the woman who would become the focus of attention when the Molly Reese narrative portion of the presentation began. Fain opened his mouth to make a comment to Potts, but just then a figure clambered up the ladder through the entrance hole in the blockhouse floor.

Fain frowned and started to say something to encourage Cable to go back where he'd come from; then he saw it was not Cable.

“Hello, Doctor,” Fain said to the new arrival. “Fine-looking rifle you got there.”

Peter Houser moved away from the entrance hole and approached Fain with arms outstretched, the rifle held horizontal in his upturned hands like a gift. For a moment Fain wondered if perhaps a gift was just what it was. He hoped so, for Houser was known as the finest gunsmith west of the mountains.

“Is that the one you've been working on?” Fain asked.

“It is,” Houser replied through his auburn whiskers. “Finished just yesterday. I spent the morning making bullets for it and polishing it so you would see it to greatest advantage.”

Fain took the rifle and admired it with a knowing eye from butt plate to sight. “It's a beauty, sir,” he said. “If you're as fine a physician as you are a gun maker, those of us privileged to be your neighbors will surely live forever.”