Dance on the Wind (19 page)

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.