Dance on the Wind (33 page)

“G’won now and get yourself ready,” Zane instructed. “It ain’t far till we come to that stretch of shore where we’ll drop you off to do some hunting. That is, if the river ain’t et the bank away too bad since’t last summer.”

Even as slow as it moved, the relentless Mississippi had a way of doing that: gobbling up great bites of the riverbank from season to season. Come late spring, early summer, the river would lift twenty-five feet or more above its banks, cutting itself a new channel in the process, going here and there to alter last year’s course. As it did so, the Mississippi would destroy old islands and create new ones, uproot trees from both the banks and the far end of those new islands, depositing that timber on the upstream end of the next island met downriver. At high-water times of the year, tying up for the night could be a ticklish proposition: a good river captain understood that to secure his boat beneath a high bank or large timber just might mean the Mississippi would cause that bank to cave in on his broadhorn, or chew away enough of the shore, toppling one of the huge trees to come crashing down upon his sleeping crew.

Flowing anywhere from three to five miles per hour, the Mississippi ran thirty feet deep in most places, fifty feet in some spots as it seesawed back and forth, making itself remarkably crooked. Despite the river’s width, it still proved itself a real test not only of a river pilot’s abilities at
the rudder, but of the watchfulness of the rest of his crew as they kept eyes sweeping the roiling waters for all manner of dangers: sawyers and planters and submerged sandbars.

“You warm enough now?” Zane asked as he eased the flatboat out of the running current and headed for the eastern shore.

“I’ll be fine,” Bass replied, kneeling at the gunnel as Root lowered the skiff into the muddy water.

After Titus climbed into the tiny boat and he began paddling with Reuben, Ovatt played out a length of hawser lashed to the back of the skiff.

“Get on off afore we gotta push back into the running current,” Root advised.

The youngster heaved himself onto the bank just as Root waved across those yards of icy water, signaling Heman Ovatt to pull the skiff back to the flatboat.

“Cold as it is, Titus,” Reuben hollered over his shoulder as Heman began to drag him away from the shoreline, “lot better to be hunting now. Come the summer in these here parts, skeeters come pick you up and carry you off, you go hunting way you are in them woods!”

Such winged torment wasn’t the only disadvantage to hunting the riverbanks come the summer season. The heat and humidity both conspired against a man laboring through the thick, semitropical brush, weakening many with heat-fevers.

Root waved his final farewell, saying, “Skeeters down in this here country twice’t as big as the ones we grow up to Kentucky! Big as a goddamned sparrow!”

Waving in kind, Titus watched the skiff and flatboat move away, slipping back into the current, sensing a rush of emotions tumbling through him. Excitement and sheer anticipation had to be most prominent, as well as a good deal of pride, what with the trust the others placed in him to bring supper eventually to their evening fire.

Titus clawed his way up the bank, into the brush and trees, then stopped with that shadow-drenched cover and looked again at the flatboat one last time from hiding. Perhaps he should be a bit scared, he told himself. Left here on his own in country that was as foreign to him as a
desert. Maybe he ought to be frightened, Titus thought as his eyes slowly moved in a long sweep from left to right, listening with all his might to those sounds the woods brought to him.

But in a matter of moments he was scolding himself for ever thinking about fear, telling himself that the apprehension he felt was a natural part of the anticipation of the hunt.

What with the way those wolves were moving downriver along the bank, he decided he would have to work his way inland a bit. A pack like them surely had to be scattering game away from the riverbank itself. Chances would likely be far better if he did not hunt in the wake of those gaunt, four-legged predators flushing most everything before them.

Angling south by east, he struck out, plunging into the brushy timber, taking in this terrain and plant life so new to him. In less than a mile, and after something on the order of a half hour, he ran across a groove worn in the woodland floor. A game trail that arced off to his right toward the river, tracked and clawed with the prints of many animals. Titus rose and eagerly turned left, following the trail deeper into the timber. Within a few yards he came across a pile of deer droppings. As chilly as it was, with skiffs of sleety snow coating nearly every plant and gathered at the base of every tree, he didn’t expect to feel any warmth from the spoor as he took a handful into his palm. Nonetheless, the cold discovery quickened both his heartbeat and his step as he pushed deeper into the timber. It was good sign. Showed that the critters did use this trail.

The farther he went, the brush thickened around him. Titus slowed his pace, his eyes searching ahead of him so that he would not scare up the white-tailed deer he hoped to sight before it bolted off. Buck or doe—it did not matter, although he preferred the flesh of the doe for its tenderness and flavor, especially this time of the year after the males had gone and worked themselves into a hormone-driven frenzy during the rut.

It was a thought that made him chuckle quietly as he moved along through the cold shadows. Now that he had experienced the rut himself, it was damned easy to understand
how those bucks got themselves into such a ferocious state over the thought of climbing atop a female!

Something snagged his attention. A faint rustle of brush that hadn’t been there before. At least some sound that had failed to pierce his consciousness until now. Yes … there it was again … moving toward him. He backed up a few yards, out of that small clearing the trail crossed, then crouched within some brush and pulled the hammer on his grandpap’s rifle back from half cock. Waiting as his heart pounded and the sound of leaves rustling drew ever closer.

He swore he even heard the deer breathing before he saw the frost streaming from its glossy black nostrils, the chest heaving in fear, perhaps exhaustion too, as the doe bounded into the clearing and stopped, stiff-legged. In fright it twisted its head one way, then another, studying the open ground before it—then jerked its head over its shoulder to gaze along its backtrail with wide, frightened eyes Titus now watched above the front blade he nestled down in the narrow crescent of the backsight.

Just as it wrenched its head forward and twitched its tail—always a sure sign that the deer was about to set off once more—Titus squeezed back on the trigger.

In that next heartbeat it appeared he had missed, for the deer bounded off on all four legs. His greatest fear right then was that the doe had started away before he had touched off the shot. He peered through the brush and gray smoke, hearing his rifle shot swallowed by the timber and the cold, damp air.

But instead of the clatter of the deer’s hooves galloping off into the trees, the only sound that followed the fading gunshot was the silence that echoed back upon him. That, and the thrash of the deer’s legs as the animal struggled on the ground at the far side of the small clearing.

Immediately bolting from cover, Titus raced across the open ground, laid the rifle against some nearby brush, and knelt near the deer as the legs slowed their wild fight. A big brown eye stared up at him. He looked down at the ragged, bloody hole torn in the heaving, lower chest, then back to that eye. Already it was beginning to glaze. And then the legs moved no more.

Quickly he pulled out his big belt knife and slit the throat in order to drain off most of the blood from the carcass before he dragged the blade down the length of the body, from windpipe to rectum. Since this was a doe, which ran smaller than most bucks, he thought he might try carrying the carcass over his shoulder down to where he would find the boat crew having made camp for the night. By cutting off the head and gutting the animal, along with getting rid of the weight of the green hide, he could easily drape the rest of the kill over his shoulders and hurry it downriver.

He had never been the strongest youngster in Boone County, hardly the strongest right around the village of Rabbit Hash either. Truth was, Titus was mostly bone and sinew, with a few strap-leather-lean muscles knotted to his wiry frame. Because he was stronger in his legs than elsewhere on his body, Titus early on had learned he simply could not heft the weight other fellas his age could lift and carry, much less do what a full-grown man could. Standing just shy of six feet in his moccasins, but weighing less than 140 pounds by the wharfmaster’s scale at Louisville scant weeks before, Bass truly gave off the appearance of a much smaller man when he stood with his shoulders slightly rounded as he shrank back into himself, shy as he was. Because of his spare size and rail-thin frame, the youngster had learned to make do for the lack of muscle. No matter how much he ate in the last few years, no matter how much he demanded of his body, he never seemed to fill out and put on the pounds the way so many other Boone County boys had.

Didn’t matter anyhow, he reminded himself as he carried on with removing the internal organs and flinging them into a nearby gut-pile. Time would come, Titus knew, and he’d put on some weight, finally getting those muscles every man eventually earned.

Shadows lengthened across the cold ground while he worked, his breath beginning to frost before his face in his exertion. Yet his hands remained warm, working in the blood and the carcass as they did. He cut the last of the windpipe and lung free, then flung them onto the gutpile … when he froze.

Motionless. A new sound. Something that did not fit in with what he had been hearing from the surrounding forest as he labored over the doe.

Perhaps it was another deer, he convinced himself. Much the same sound too—moving through the brush and coming from the same direction as the doe had. Closer and closer. He might be lucky and get two of them, he convinced himself. Then he’d have to cut down a few saplings and make a crude sled he could use to drag both carcasses downriver to the boatmen’s camp.

Quickly he wiped most of the blood and gore from his hands in the frosty, icy leaves, then swept up his rifle before ducking back toward the brush where he had been hiding when the doe had made her appearance along the game trail.

What meat Zane’s men didn’t gorge themselves on that night, they could spend the evening slicing and drying by the fire. Maybe carry along the bigger hams with them on board, as long as they were out of the sun, tucked away under that oiled awning on the boat. Along with the dried strips of venison, those roasts would give them several meals across the coming days before Zane might have him again hunt for them.

Crouching there in the brush, he dragged the rifle up and pushed back the frizzen. Snugging his shooting pouch against his thigh, Titus pulled the stopper from the priming horn and sprinkled a dusting of powder into the pan—for the first time realizing he hadn’t reloaded after dropping the doe.

Damn!

Yet he had no more time to curse himself for his stupidity as the faint rustle came ever closer.

He grew angry with himself: if he didn’t get his rifle reloaded, he was going to miss his chance to drop a second deer. No matter that it might be a buck this time.

Quickly pouring powder into his palm, he found himself quaking slightly as he spilled the coarse black grains down the muzzle—then became still as a stone. His own eyes widened, his breath choked off in his chest as the creature stepped to the far edge of the clearing.

Instead of a four-legged buck moving beneath a set of
antlers, what made young Titus’s heart freeze in his chest was a two-legged Indian in smoked buckskin who slowly emerged from the brush in a crouch, then sank to his knee.

Now his heart began hammering so loudly, he was certain the Indian could hear it. Starting to sweat in the cold of those shadows, Titus found himself every bit as scared as he was mad that his gunshot had drawn the redskin to the clearing.

This way, then that, the Indian’s own dark, black-bead eyes searched the timber enclosing the clearing, before he inched forward a bit more, easing toward the deer. Kneeling over the gutted animal, the Indian put a bare hand down into the gut cavity.

He’s feeling how warm it is. How long ago I kill’t it.

All the while the Indian’s eyes kept moving across the glade, watchful and attentive. From the looks of the warrior, Titus figured the man could be anywhere between his age and his father’s. Hell, he thought—he never had been very good at guessing such things as a person’s age.

Swallowing hard, he suddenly realized this was the first real Indian he had laid eyes on. Not that he hadn’t seen some come wandering into the settlements back in Boone County. The sort what had taken to white man’s clothes and even wore hats. But never had he seen a red-skin like this: complete in fringed buckskins, with a deer-skin vest tied with thongs, the lower part of his leggings lashed tightly around his ankles and calves with long whangs.

Titus glanced down at his own smooth britches, figuring fringe would only snag in the thick underbrush. Nodding to himself, he decided that tying them up that way made for easier, quieter hunting too, as the Indian moved through the thick timber.

Quietly settling on the far side of the doe, the Indian laid his bow across his thighs, then dragged a big knife from the scabbard at his waist. Beginning at the long opening Titus had made from neck to anus, the Indian started working to free the green hide from the carcass on either side of the rib cage.

Why, this son of a bitch was fixing to take his meat! That damned hide didn’t matter—but it was the meat the
others were expecting him to show up with at camp shortly!

A goddamned red thief! All that grandpap told me ’bout Injuns is true—thievin’ sonsabitches!

Now his temples pounded more from anger than from fear. That was his meat.

Mine—what’s ’bout to get stole from me!