3stalwarts (15 page)

Blue Back got back to the swale a little before sunset and made a long examination of the weather. There was no wind, and there would be none till moonrise. Then it would draw from the southeast for an hour or two. But by then the buck would have come to bed, to graze a little before he lay down. At half an hour before dawn, the wind would rise from the southeast again; later it would probably turn to the west.

Blue Back took his post a half-dozen rods from the edge of the swale on a knoll where big hemlocks were standing. He lay down on the needles, with his head on a root and his musket by his hand, pulled the unspeakable hat over his wet face, and went to sleep.

He woke at dusk, looked out into the swale, but saw no sign of the buck. Grunting, he rolled back on the ground. He was a good Indian, so he said a prayer before he went to sleep again.

“Our Father God, I am hungry, I want a good buck, I have been a good man, I will sell the horns to Demooth for a drink of rum, but I will give Kirkland a piece off the shoulder. But if it has twelve points I will give Kirkland a piece off the leg and not take his tobacco for a week. I am a good man. For ever and ever, Amen.” A Christian prayer that was. Then just for safety he repeated in his mind, without moving his lips, a prayer he used to say.

He woke once more to hear the buck come through the woods from the northwest, against the wind, just as he had expected, and realized that the Lord was taking an interest. He put his hand under his cheek and slept without snoring.

A squirrel twitched its red tail on a stub of a branch twenty feet up the purple trunk of the hemlock. “Be still, little robber,” Blue Back said in his mind, and the squirrel cocked his head. He was still. But he went from tree to tree, forty feet above the forest floor, in the wake of the wet, greasy, crawling old Indian.

A kind of twilight, like a left-over of the day before, hung in the swale. The high gray-green grass was topped by mist. There was yet no sign of the sun, but flying birds were astir in the upper air. Their voices came down in double sweetness through the mist.

Blue Back lay down behind a fallen tree on the edge of the grass. With great caution he found a rest for his gun and pointed it to where the deer’s bed was. He himself was stretched out behind the butt of the musket so that Indian and gun made one brownness on the brown ground.

As soon as the mist began to rise, a slightly tenser quiet oversettled the quiet already in the old man. His eye came into the notch of the rear sight. It was beautiful to fit so well together— gun, sights, man’s eye, man’s finger on the trigger, God in Heaven and the birds in the mist. All that was lacking was the buck.

The buck rose and lifted its beautiful head. Twelve points anyway, thought Blue Back. By damn God, he was meat hungry now. He let his finger tighten as if the will of God were in it. A flat, belly-filling roar of the musket sent swirls through the mist after the round heavy ball. The birds above broke into a cacophonous twitter. The deer leaped straight up, snapped down its tail, leaped again, keeled over. The black powder smoke, rank as rot, came in a wreath over Blue Back’s broad brown face. It filtered off, showing the face wreathed in a wide grin. The old Indian, rather like a bear, was humping through the grass. He bent over the dead buck, cut the throat with his long knife, turned the deer over, slit the belly to the ribs, and plunged his arms, sleeves and all, into the vent. The hot steamy smell of the buck’s entrails was all about, seeming to blow his belly full of wind. He hauled the entrails out and then went to look at the deer’s head. Fourteen points. God was surely working.

He grinned; he hadn’t agreed with God about any fourteen-point buck. But maybe he would give Kirkland a rib or two at that.

With true Indian carelessness he had not bothered to reload the old musket. Now, in the silence that had succeeded the shot, he heard a couple of men coming out of the woods. He looked up in time to see them pointing rifles at him. There was nothing he could do but lift his hand in greeting, blood and knife and all.

The first man blew on a little silver whistle. The note was sharp, carrying, and peremptory. He was answered by a shout behind Blue Back.

“I’ve got his muskit, captain.”

The man with the whistle then lowered his own gun and advanced through the waist-deep grass.

“Hello, there.”

Blue Back went on with the business of cutting up the deer. He waited till the man was standing by his hand. The man was wearing moccasins. He had on Indian leggings, but his shirt was green, and had a kind of strap arrangement over it to hold his powder flask and shot pouch.

Blue Back looked up still further to meet the cool gray eyes above the thick nose and pursy mouth, and gave greeting.

“That’s quite a deer,” said the man in a friendly enough way.

Blue Back agreed.

“You alone?”

“Yes,” said Blue Back.

“Hunting alone?”

Blue Back ran his knife down just before the short ribs. He nodded.

“What are you? Oneida? Onondaga?”

“Oneida. Turtle Clan. My name’s Blue Back.”

The man with the whistle held out his hand. He said, “My name’s Caldwell.”

Blue Back gravely shook.

Several other men had come through the grass. Eight white men, he counted; they were dressed in moccasins and leggings like the first. But they weren’t trappers. Trappers, white men, couldn’t stand each other’s company. Then on the edge of the swale a couple of Indians stood out of the mist with the sudden quiet of ghosts.

Blue Back took one look at them with his glistening brown eyes and saw that they were Senecas. They had paint on. Vermilion stripes across the cheeks. One had a blue turtle on his chest. That was all right. He could claim clans even though the Seneca nation had been sending deputations to find out why the Oneidas hadn’t joined Guy Johnson and Butler at Niagara.

“Got one good fine buck,” he observed. “You want meat?”

“Thanks, Blue Back,” said the man named Caldwell. “We’ll take what you can’t carry.”

Blue Back put his arm around the deer, as a man might put his arm around the waist of a girl, just below the cut he had made. He braced his stocky body and heaved suddenly, breaking the backbone. Then he took his axe and cut off the horns.

He pointed to the front half of the carcass.

“Thanks,” said Caldwell, again.

“Now I go home,” said Blue Back.

“Where do you live?”

“Oriska.”

“Listen, Blue Back. Do you know where the Deerfield Settlement is?”

“Yes, at the big bend of the big road.”

“Yes. But where is it from here?”

“You going there?” Blue Back asked, raising his brown eyes.

“Yes. But we come by the north, and these Indians,” he pointed to the Senecas, “got mixed. Is that the Canada Creek over there?”

“Yes.”

“Is there any short cut?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s living there now?”

“Demooth, Reall, Weaver, and Martin. You want to see them?”

“Thought I’d like to see Mr. Demooth. Is he there now, hey?”

“Yes,” said Blue Back.

“Where’s this short cut?”

Blue Back got up slowly. He called to the Senecas. They were dark thin men. He talked to them in Indian. He explained the route. They nodded. It was quite clear. They would surely find the way now.

Blue Back smiled. He nodded, too. It was four miles longer than his own route would be.

“You’ll come and eat with us?” suggested Caldwell.

Blue Back would. He needed some food. He took up his half of the buck and went to their camp, half a mile back in the woods. On the way one of the Senecas told him that he had been making an early cast round the camp and had found Blue Back’s tracks. They had sent out a scout.

The camp was a fire in an opening on a knoll. There were three bark shanties set up. There were also four more Indians. All of them looked as if they had come a long way, for their moccasins were worn thin.

Blue Back listened while he sat with the Senecas and ate boiled stump-ground cornmeal. The party had run out of salt and their tempers were not good. They looked tired and a little feverish, some of them. When he had finished, he shouldered the hind quarters and took his musket in his hand. He thanked them. They were breaking camp when he left.

Blue Back went slowly at first, making a cast to the west. He stopped on the first ridge and waited for five minutes, till he was sure he wasn’t being tailed. He wouldn’t leave the deer meat yet. But he started a steady plodding trot to the southeast.

When he came to the top of Hazenclever hill, he hung the deer meat in a tree, wrapped in his shirt, the legs through the arms, and set off for Deerfield.

To Gilbert Martin, that began as a great day. When he woke up, he got straight out of bed and sprang across to the window. Lana watched him from the pillow. His brown hair needed cutting; it was tangled as a crow’s nest.

“What are you looking at, Gil?”

He turned from the window as if her voice had broken a spell. But his eyes still shone.

“Oh, just the land,” he said.

“The land?”

“Our place.” He came back to the bed and looked down at her.

“What’s happened to it?”

“My Jesus!” he said. “You ain’t forgot, have you? We’re rolling logs to-day.”

Lana felt immensely shamed.

“I guess I’m not all the way awake yet,” she said apologetically.

“I guess you aren’t.” He laughed, tousled her hair with both hands. “Get up, Lana. You’ll be busy cooking for those men.”

“I will, I will, Gil. I’m getting up now. Leave go my hair.”

He started putting on his clothes, saying half to himself, “We’ll roll towards the creek. The boys can begin burning on the far side.” He glanced at the window again. “That’s right. Wind’s southerly. It’ll be a fine day. And the wood’s dried out fine.”

There were ten acres to log and burn. Two days from now, his farm would look like a farm in fact. He would have to think about getting his own yoke of oxen.

He never considered the heat, and the dirt, and the labor. He would see the fashioning of his own place; the cutting he had worked a year on would be laid bare to the eye. His opinion would be deferred to; every minute of the day would be his own— both those he spent himself, and those of the other men.

“Hurry,” he said to Lana, and went down the loft ladder with a clatter.

By the time she got downstairs he was in with the milk. He had milked for her this morning. It made him grin. “I had to do something.” He looked down at the pail. “She surely is a fine cow to have bought off a minister.”

Everything pleased him.

At six-thirty, about an hour after sunrise, Gil, from the slashing, saw Demooth’s fine red oxen turning up from the road. The heavy-shouldered beasts with their great jointed knees, fashioned as if to hold still the earth, came slowly towards him.

“Hey, Clem!”

Clem Coppernol glanced at him with an unfavorable eye.

“Hello, Martin.”

His voice was dry, but Gil could take no heed of that.

“It surely is kind of Demooth to send his oxen over.”

“Well, maybe. I’d consider it was kind of him to throw me in. But it’s easy being kind when another man has got to work it out for you.”

He sat himself on a stump while the oxen stood with lowered heads and drowsy eyes.

Five minutes later, George Weaver appeared with his own yoke. They were smaller than Demooth’s good Johnson cattle. A black and a red-and- white, rough-coated, narrow-shouldered, they did not have the pulling power, but they were quicker on their feet, as well as twice as hard to handle. But taken together, the two yokes made an ideal combination to log a piece of land.

George Weaver said, “Sorry I’m late, Gil. The boys tried to sneak off and fish the spawn beds up above Reall’s. I had to get them back. They’ll be right along now, though.”

“That’s all right.”

“You going to wait for Reall?” Clem asked hopefully.

“No,” said Gil.

“Hain’t no sense in that,” agreed Weaver. “That man never got on time to anything except a drink. How do you want to start?”

In a few words, a little self-consciously, Gil outlined his idea. He felt relieved when both men nodded.

“We hadn’t ought to start the burning till we get that mass of boys. Emma’s coming up with them,” said George. “She’ll be handy helping Lana, or working out here.”

“It’ll burn fast,” said Clem.

He pricked his nigh ox with the goad and swung the yoke for the heavy beech logs, up against the woods, that Gil had not been able to fell into windrows. The beasts moved off at their lethargic tread, the hoofs spreading with deliberate consideration of their weight and power, the heavy chain, like an iron snake, weaving along the dirt behind them.

By the timber, Clem wheeled them. They moved like smooth, slow-going, well-greased wheels, presenting their rumps to the end of the log. The sour old Dutchman hooked the chain round a butt and spoke in Dutch, and the chins of the beasts lifted a little, their necks went out, the chain straightened its links, and the thirty-foot stick began to slide like taffy, inch by inch and foot by foot.

Before they had delivered it to Gil at the edge of the creek, Weaver had arrived with his smaller stick, and started back. But Gil had no eye for anything but Demooth’s fine yoke. Power like theirs was dignified by slowness.

He helped the Dutchman roll the log in place along the brush that crumpled under its weight. He had no thought of the fine tree that had drawn its life through that stick. He thought of the land the felling of its top had opened. Beech trees killed the soil. It made him glad to know there were so few on his place.

Weaver’s boys came sullenly. They stood in their unaccustomed boots, put on against the burning, and looked enviously at the nearly naked Realls. All the children but the sucking baby had accompanied their father, who walked behind them with the downcast look of an unsuccessful Sun-day-school teacher.

Gil felt a moment’s hesitation at putting them under Reall’s command. He thought that with a shiftless man like that the fire might get out of hand. But he himself wanted to attend to the burning of the big logs. It was important to burn them clean as could be.