Dance on the Wind (20 page)

He turned the squirrel over the flames, then probed at the browning flesh with a finger and sighed, his thoughts suddenly on Levi Gamble. How he wanted one day soon to be as sure a backwoodsman as Levi was already. Why, he knew he was nearly as good a shot, likely might even be better than Gamble soon enough. Still, he remembered
Levi’s words that there was more to the life Titus Bass hankered to lead than being a good shot.

As darkness dripped down from the leafless branches overhead, the wind came up. And with it the smell of rain. Gazing up at the sky, he could see no more than a small patch of stars off to the southeast. Chances were there’d be wet weather by morning. Just one more thing he’d have to learn to deal with if he was going to make it downriver as far as Louisville, where he figured a man might give himself a new stake in life.

Folks talked about the place. Said it was where a young man could make a go of things. The whole area was opening up. That sense of boom and bustle appealed to him more than most anything right there and then. Second only to the aroma wafting off that squirrel. Titus fed a limb into the fire now and then, and from time to time juices plopped into the flames, each drop sizzling, every sizzle causing his mouth to water all the more until he knew he couldn’t wait any longer.

Scrambling onto his knees, he pulled out his knife and sliced free a thin sliver along the backstrap. Stuffing it into his mouth, Titus half closed his eyes, savoring this taste of red meat. Licking his lips, he freed another sliver of meat, then washed it down with the cold water.

Before he realized, he was squatting beside nothing more than glowing embers, gnawing the last tiny morsels from the squirrel’s scrawny bones in the dim ruby light as his fire died. Sucking the final drops of grease from his fingers, he took one last drink and stood, moving off a few yards to find a place where he could sprinkle the forest floor in the cold and dark that were his only companions again this night.

Returning to his little camp, he fed the embers a few twigs until they caught, then laid on some thicker limbs for the first part of the night. That done, he scooted back onto his blanket and lay down, dragging his pouch and rifle in alongside him. After pulling half of the blanket over himself, Titus scooped leaves over his feet, then his legs, and finally covered his torso. Just as thick as he could burrow himself beneath.

For a long time Titus cradled the rifle in his arms, the
lock protected between his legs, watching the flames and listening to the forest around him, reminded of the sputter and crackle of a limekiln fire back home. How something so simple as a sound aroused his reverie. He wondered what Amy was about at that moment. Did she even know he had taken off? Was she missing him, or had she already made designs on some other young fellow?

And then he thought on his mam, remembering how the pumpkins grew untended among the tall stalks of corn. Licking his lips, Titus tried to remember the taste of his mother’s pumpkin butter and pumpkin molasses boiled down in the fall.

The first good cold snap like this every autumn brought on the hog killing, the menfolk butchering those animals fattened all year on cane roots and mast made of beechnuts, acorns, and chestnuts. Hogs were knocked in the head with a maul, their throats quickly slashed, and then hauled up on pulleys lashed to a strong tree limb for proper bleeding. Below the gently swinging creatures mam always caught as much of it as possible in cherrywood pails and churns to make the rich blood pudding she would stuff into a cleaned intestine and smoke over green hickory chips in the smokehouse. He was almost able to taste it—served under a thick white gravy with yellow hominy on the side. Memories laden with the remembrance of sausage strong with red pepper and sage, sousemeat or headcheese.

Yes, on the frontier October came to be known as killing weather.

But with, the remembrance he began for the first time to worry about her, sensing some remorse for the worry he was likely causing her. But no remorse for his loss of Amy. No, his only regret in not turning back was his mam, and all the anxious concern he must likely be causing her.

A beat of wings passed over his head with a startling rush as he closed his eyes, so weary. The great-headed owl, prowling the forest.

Titus wondered if his mam had stood there at the front of her porch across those past two days—just the
way she had when he was so much younger. Calling out his name.

Calling him home.

He came awake in the morning slowly, smelling the heady fragrance of damp, loamy earth strong in his nostrils.

A time or two before he opened his eyes for good, Titus heard the rain’s patter softly through the trees. A gentle, cold, soaking rain, most likely. At least he thought so from its soft cadence against the stiff parchment of the maple and gum leaves he had pulled in over himself, burrowing down like a deer mouse in its snug little hole.

Warm it was in here. A damned sight better than the night before, he said to himself as he decided to open his eyes for good and not drift off to sleep. The irregular concert of misty drops had tapered off, and the forest fell quiet. He shifted his hip, making it more comfortable on a new spot among the thick pallet of leaves, and curled his legs up within the blanket.

No need in rushing on his way. Warm as he was. Comfortable too. Almost as soft as his grass tick back at home. Except … it wasn’t home no more.

He opened his eyes, finding it still dark. It took a moment or two more for him to realize he had tucked his head back into the blanket like a turtle retreating into its shell. Slowly dragging a hand up from between his thighs where the rifle rested, he brushed it past his face and poked out with his fingers at the leaves. With a damp rustle he parted them slightly. The light was gray. His fire gone out—nothing more than a heap of blackened char and gray ash beaten down by the steady, gentle rain. Some of the squirrel bones lay at the far side of that ring of ash. A misty fog clung back among the trees all around him.

Not the sort of morning for a man to be rising bright and early.

Some time later he realized he had closed his eyes again, maybe even been sleeping—coming awake slowly, as he had earlier. This time the rain wasn’t pattering on his leafy burrow. Without a lick of wind the forest lay stonily
quiet about him. So quiet he could hear a low snuffling. If it didn’t sound like a dog.

Parting the leaves again, his heart beginning to hammer anxiously, he peered out through a tiny opening in his burrow and spotted the reddish fur. Moving more leaves, he could make out the hind end of the animal, the thick, bushy tail nearly as long as the creature itself, then ringed with black and tipped in pale hair. As it rooted around his fire with its nose and front paws, the fox turned slightly, its jaws crunching down on the leavings of last night’s supper.

So quiet was the forest that Titus could even hear the snap of the bones with every close of the fox’s jaws. He watched as it finished off the squirrel and sniffed at the small kettle before putting its nose along the damp ground, rooting for something more to eat. Had it been dry, the fox likely would never have approached his little camp. But the damp weather kept down the smell of man, burying it beneath all the other odors of a dank, musty forest.

Through the leaves he watched the fox turn in his direction, slowly sniffing its way toward his side of the fire, going this way a step to smell something, then darting a couple steps to the other side. Inching closer all the time until it was all but eye to eye with Titus’s burrow, about to stick its nose right into the youngster’s face.

“Haw!” he roared as he flung back the leaves, every bit as scared those last few seconds as the fox was. It leaped back, bared its teeth, and lowered its head, snarling and yipping.

“Get!”

He waved his arms as he burst out of the leaves, scattering them all about him in a wild flutter of color and motion as he emerged. With a throaty whimper the fox whirled about and disappeared into a patch of fog.

For some time he sat there in his bed of leaves, buried nearly up to his armpits, the blanket tangled around his waist. Waiting. Peering into the fog that had swallowed the fox whole.

As good as that scrawny squirrel had tasted last night, he realized his belly was empty once more. Already he could recognize the beginning torment of its complaint. He
would have to find more substantial fare today. No other choice but to hunt until he had some game. Even if it meant he wasn’t able to move as far downriver as he had vowed he would each day. Food had become his highest priority.

But for now he had to take care of something else first.

Kicking back his blanket and the thick layer of leaves, Titus emerged from his burrow at the base of the tree and looked about until he found a likely spot at a downed tree nearby. Backing up to it, he pushed the wooden buttons through their holes on the front of his britches, tugged them down around his ankles, then settled the backs of his thighs upon the cold, wet bark. As he emptied himself out and gathered a handful of wet leaves he used to clean himself off, Titus watched the patterns of frost that puffed before him with every breath.

Snugging his britches back into place, he plodded back across the sodden ground and went to his knees by his blanket, drawing his kettle over. From it he took the last long drink of creek seep mixed with rainwater, then wrapped the kettle up with the rest and lashed it into the long roll he flung over his shoulder as he got to his feet.

Draping his shooting pouch over the other shoulder, his rifle at the end of his left arm, Titus moved off, into the cold fog and his third day.

Both times he stopped to rest that gray morning that bled itself into a grayer afternoon, he chewed on a peeled twig he had cut from a gum tree. Something to quiet his roiling stomach as he sat looking at the river beneath a sky brushed the same endless color. In Boone County as elsewhere on the frontier, it was often the older child who taught younger ones what they could eat when off to the woods gathering herbs for a mother’s cook pots. Some children came to favor dogwood with its taste of quinine, spice-wood preferred by others, or the stomach-soothing taste of walink, commonly called walking leaf. But they learned never, never to chew poison vine, or buckeye, or a bright, shiny, tempting poison-oak berry.

Thinking back on how he had learned to feed himself from these woods as a child couldn’t help but aggravate that empty hole gnawing away at the pit of him, making
him madder at himself for his failure, chipping away at his resolve piece by piece. As he walked on and on, it wasn’t a matter of thirst that made him drink as much as he could hold of the creeks and streams and every last trickle he crossed that long, wet day. He only knew that if he kept his belly filled with as much water as he could stand, it didn’t complain quite as badly.

“Sun going down again,” he muttered aloud, then realized he had spoken out loud, looking left—then right—embarrassed.

“Who the hell you talking to?” he said, wagging his head. “Ain’t no one to listen anyways.”

Damn. Here he was, someplace he didn’t know of. Hadn’t eaten an honest meal in days, and he hadn’t scared up any real game to speak of.

“Good goddamned hunter you are,” he grumbled, bringing his legs under him and rising to his feet, fixing to press on through the hard, leaden plop of that cold October rain.

He didn’t know why—except that he was feeling the first twitches of fear. No longer merely disgusted with himself. No longer mad, the way he had been for most of that day. Instead, Titus was sensing the first self-doubts rattling within him like stones inside a dried gourd. And that made him afraid. Try as he might, he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why he was failing. Never before had he failed to bring down game, no matter what season he hunted. Why now? When it counted? When it meant the difference between surviving and starving? What had he done wrong?

Through those tiny cracks in his confidence seeped the growing fear that reared its ugly head, tangled up with no small measure of superstition. Long ago he had learned from hunters much older than he that if a man had himself a run of bad luck in hunting, chances were he had been enchanted. His heart hammered twice as fast, just to even think on it. Possessed of a spell or hex that he would have to break.

But there had to be a reason he had been hexed.

“Think,” he chided himself, squeezing his brain down on it the way he stood there in the rainy forest squeezing a
hand tightly around the leather straps that bound up his wool blanket.

Maybe it was a curse put on him because he’d wronged Amy Whistler, maybeso wronged even his pap. Then again, maybe it had only to do with him: what had been happening to him in the last three days was simply telling him he’d chosen wrong, taken the wrong path for his life. Maybe … he was being told he should turn back.

Titus stopped right there on the game trail, and for the first time in three days he looked back. Turned around and peered into the wet, soggy forest, back the way he had come. The tears were there before he could squeeze them off. A stifled sob was all that came out as he stared into the east. Upriver. Back to Boone County. As cold as his cheeks were, he could sense the track of every hot tear as it spilled from his eyes.

Looking down at himself—his pacs, those double-soled moccasins, and leather britches soaked clear to the knees, forcing the rain’s chill straight to his core—only made him cry harder. He had never been so alone.

“This is what you wanted, dammit!”

And he swiped at the tears with a trembling hand, still looking down at his miserable self. Then, suddenly, he began to chuckle.

Wagging his head, he murmured, “You … you surely are the sight, Titus Bass.”

That chuckle felt good. Like a warm, dry place right down in the center of him. So good did it feel that he started to laugh. He was unsure about really laughing at himself there at first, but then he picked up one moccasin and looked at it hanging soggy and floppy from where it was lashed about his ankle with a buckskin whang. He sat it down on the wet forest floor and picked up the other moccasin—in just as sad a shape. Now he was laughing for real. That good, great belly sort of laugh. What a damned poor sight he was! Some great woodsman!