Over the Misty Mountains (8 page)

This new world consisted of trees that grew ever larger as he moved farther west. High overhead, he could hear birds calling out as squirrels scampered through the branches. A few times he caught sight of a shy Virginia deer, which he had stalked, once successfully, and feasted on the meat for several days. The absence of human voices was a pleasure to him, and for days he had not spoken with a single soul. Once he had seen a party of hunters and had turned his horse into a grove of magnificent first-growth firs simply to avoid their company. He had had enough of human relationships for a while, and despite the bitter coldness and hardships of the trail, he welcomed the challenge and the distraction the solitude brought him. The silence had sunk into his spirit like a soothing balm.

From the distance came the mournful cry of a timber wolf, and Josh held himself still, savoring the wildness of the sound. Somehow he felt a kinship to the big lobo, for he had come to love the wild and untamed forest that spread out like a large carpet over the land.

“I missed something,” he murmured. “All those years I stayed in town, I was in a prison—and didn’t have the sense to know it!”

The thought amused him, and he smiled stiffly, his lips numb from the breeze that bore tiny fragments of ice. Since moving from the world of men into the world of beasts, he had found himself more aware of the ironies of life. He’d always had a keen sense of humor, but it had not been kind—as humor often strikes at the weaknesses of others. But the months of solitude had caused him to look down deep into his own heart, and he had learned to smile at his own foibles as he did now.

Standing to his feet, he looked toward the creek. “Bit of fish might go down nice,” he said, and the sound of his voice seemed loud in the silence of the glade. Moving his pack he pulled out a small leather pouch no more than three inches square. He opened it and removed his fishing tackle, which consisted of a hook and thin strong line. Removing his gloves, he blew on his fingers, then threaded the line through the eye of the hook. Pulling a small chunk of bacon from his food sack, he made his way to the creek.

The narrow stream was no more than six feet wide, shrunken to its wintery dimensions, though in spring when the ice melted it would be much larger. Taking his hatchet, Hawke hacked away at the ice until he’d roughed out a ragged splintery hole, then baited his hook and dropped it into the frigid waters. The ice was too thick and opaque to see through, but an instant tug on the line brought a yell from the solitary fisherman.

“Got you!”

Quickly he pulled on the line, and when he got the fish out of the water, he carefully grabbed it by the lower jaw and ignored the flopping of the bass. “Well, I guess you’ll do just fine for breakfast!”

Making his way back to his campsite, he quickly cleaned the fish, throwing the head and entrails into the brush. His horse snorted and bucked, startled at the unexpected noise.

“Calm down, boy,” Josh said. “You wouldn’t begrudge a man a good breakfast, would you now?”

Raking back the snow, he cleared a small spot, then rose and moved into the brush. The weeds were dead and dry, rustling under his feet. He began to break off small stems, and when he had a double handful, he moved back and made a small pyramid of them. He made two more trips, each time bringing back larger twigs, until finally he had a pyramid nearly a foot in diameter. His hands were numb, and when he pulled out his powder horn, he could hardly feel the smoothness of the horn. Pouring a small amount of powder on the pile, he capped the powder horn carefully—very carefully. His life depended on his rifle, and if it had no powder, he was helpless.

His face was rapt and intent as he worked. When he pulled flint and steel from his possible bag and struck it, a spark fell on the powder, igniting it with a small puff of sound. “That’s it,” he muttered as he nursed the tiny blaze.

Carefully he fed small twigs onto the growing blaze, adding larger ones, then he sat back on his heels and stared at the orange and red tongues of fire with satisfaction. Holding his palms out, he felt the warmth slowly creep into his frozen hands, until finally he singed his left palm and jerked it back.

He impaled the fish on a sharp green stick that he had sharpened to a point, then held it over the fire. Soon the delicious smell of seared fish filled the air, and his stomach knotted. Pulling the fish back, he added a pinch of salt, then pulled off a piece of the flaky white flesh with his thumb and forefinger. He juggled it around until it cooled, then popped it into his mouth and savored the hot meal. He devoured all the fish, then said, “Should have caught another one—reckon I can cook me up another breakfast. Two breakfasts never hurt a man.” He moved to the creek, drank thirstily, then filled the small sauce pan with creek water.

Walking back to the fire, he dug into the leather sack that held the rest of the ingredients for his meal. He kneaded the dough on a clean slab of bark, wetted it with the river water, added a pinch of salt, and then rapidly and skillfully molded it into cakes. After setting them on a flat stone and moving the stone into the heat of the fire, he took a handful of dried meat from another pouch. Taking a long piece of curled bark, he laid the meat on it and poured water over the strips to soften them. When he had laid out half a dozen strips, he stretched them across the prongs of a forked stick. Hunched by the fire, he held the stick of meat over the coals. When the meat sizzled out its fat and curled crisp and brown to the edges, he pulled it off the stick, onto another piece of bark, and then began taking up the cakes, shifting them rapidly so he would not burn his fingers. Finally he picked up the iron pot, moved over, and sat down.

Hungrily he devoured the food, and then for a while he sat there thinking of where he was. He had a mind that could hold a piece of country in it, almost as if it were on the pages of a book. He had gone over it carefully, retracing the steps and the route he had taken since leaving Williamsburg, and he knew that he was now close to Holston country near the Watauga River. Soon he would be reaching the area Daniel Boone had told him about. There had been something about the man that had drawn Josh, and now he thought of the lean face and the light blue eyes with something almost mystical in them. He smiled as he thought of the time he asked Boone, “Were you ever lost, Daniel?”

“Lost? Well, not so’s you’d mention it. Of course”—the blue eyes had lit up with mild amusement—“I was a little bit
confused
once for about a week—but not so as you might say, lost.”

“Must be nice to be like that,” Josh said aloud. “Most of us stay lost all of our lives.” His quick shift from the physical to the spiritual was a habit of his. The lostness of a man in a woods was a simple and uncomplicated affair—unlike the kind of lostness that had fallen upon him when Faith had passed out of his life. The thoughts disturbed him, and he quickly arose, made up his pack, and after feeding the horse a bagful of oats, he swung into the saddle and made his way along the creek. Josh’s eyes moved from side to side, for he had already developed the habit of watching, as much as possible, for any movement that might signal danger.

He had a sudden memory of Saul Elliott, an old backwoodsman who had taught him, when he was just a boy, much of what he knew about his woodsmanship. “Don’t ever fix your eyes on an object, Josh,” Elliott had said. “Kind of shift ’em back and forth, from side to side, and as far ahead as possible. If you get to starin’ at somethin’, you can be trapped. Kind of freezes you, like.”

Moving briskly through the deep woods, his mind studied the trees and their various uses. Some of the ash trees grew a hundred feet high, and he knew they would be good for paddles and for oars and for leaching lye. It made good wood for a puncheon floor because it whitened under use. Then there was hickory, the best of all woods for an ax or a hatchet handle. He saw the stands of oaks, and already his mind was thinking of the cabin he would build somewhere. Once he saw a young elm bordering on a hazelnut thicket, and he thought,
I remember Ma saying that makes a good poultice for cuts and bad wounds
.

All day long he moved forward steadily, not pushing his animal, but simply soaking in the silence of the dense woods about him. He saw a few animals, but no bear.
They’ll be all holed up
. A humorous thought struck him.
I wish a man could do that. Just go hide out somewhere and sleep all winter long, and come out in the spring all fresh and ready for the world. Don’t reckon I’d miss too much if I did that
.

Once Josh saw a flash, a movement by a frozen stream, but by the time he had unlimbered his musket, the small animal was gone.
Must have been a fisher or a mink or maybe a rabbit
. . . .

Worry suddenly crept like a worm into his thinking. Even in the peace that had enveloped him like a warm cape since leaving Williamsburg and putting his life behind him, somehow arose the thought,
What am I going to do with myself? I can’t wander around the woods until I’m an old man
.

The thought nibbled at the edges of his consciousness, and he could not get rid of it. One part of him was imaginative, creative, but the other was analytical—his mother had once said to him with exasperation, “I do declare, Josh! You have to organize everything and put it into a compartment—like a woman storing her spices!”

Josh had never forgotten that statement, and now he tried desperately to throw off all thoughts of the future. Reaching down, he patted his horse on the shoulder, saying firmly, “I don’t want to have any more worries than you do, Rusty. As long as you got something to eat, you’re all right. I envy you that.”

Still, the little voice that served as a spokesman for the analytical side of his spirit said, “But a man’s not a horse. He can go back and relive the past. And even more, he can jump ahead in his mind and know that something lies out there ahead of him.”

Turning aside from the disturbing thoughts that gnawed at him, Josh deliberately forced himself to think on his immediate needs.
Need something for the pot tonight
, he thought and checked the priming in his rifle. Tying the horse out, he fed him some of the oats, noting that one more feed was all the bag held. He moved on into the deep thickets. Finally he found a trail with some tracks and stopped with his back up against a huge beech tree. He held the rifle loosely but firmly in his hands. That was another secret Elliott had given him. “When you’re huntin’, boy, just become a tree yourself. Animals see movement quicker than they smell things. So if you can just be still long enough, something’s gonna show its head.”

For thirty minutes Josh remained absolutely still. An itch developed on his lip, but he would not even reach up with his lower teeth and bite it. It was a test, and he knew that the Indians had the ability to hold such a position for hours. His legs grew cramped, and once he almost cried out with the pain of a knotty swelling in his calf, but he gritted his teeth together and thought,
If an Indian can do it, I can do it!

Finally he was rewarded for his patience. A tiny sound came, and he shifted his eyes slightly, catching a flash of movement. A buck stepped out of the thickness of the forest, his head held high, and his eyes looking constantly, searching the whiteness around him. Josh remained absolutely still. The rifle was cocked, and his finger was on the trigger. His left hand held the barrel, and though he had lost all feeling in that hand, he knew that he would have only one shot. He could not, for a moment, decide whether to slowly move the musket into position or to raise the rifle with one snap movement and get the shot off. He chose the latter, and even as the rifle rose he saw the buck whirl. Judging accurately the direction of the leap of the animal, he pulled the trigger. The shot knocked the deer down, but the animal jumped up at once and disappeared in the corridor of snow-covered trees.

Josh ran quickly and gave a sigh of relief when he saw the bright red trail of blood in the snow. “Hit hard,” he murmured, feeling his blood pumping through his veins and his heart beating faster. Josh began to move through the snow at a steady pace, trotting, and after half a mile his breathing had hardly increased.
Getting tougher
, he thought.
My legs are gettin’ stronger every day
.

He saw the body of the deer lying in a clump of cedars up ahead, and he smiled with satisfaction, advancing carefully. One of his friends had rushed in on a buck that had leaped to his feet in his dying throes and cut the man to pieces with his razor-sharp hooves and antlers. But this one was dead, so Josh quickly pulled out his skinning knife and began to butcher the animal. He was not as good at this part of hunting. Carefully he removed the skin, and then cut off a quarter. He kept the liver also, which was a favorite of his. He made his way back to where the horse was tied. “I’m gonna fix up a good supper, Rusty. You can’t enjoy a good steak, but I’ll feed you the rest of the oats.”

It was a feast, for there was nothing Josh liked better than deer liver. He made a stew and also put a huge chunk of the fresh meat on a forked stick. The savory smell as it sizzled above the fire made his stomach growl. Finally when it was done, he gorged on the meal. He tore off chunks of the steak with his strong teeth, and when he could hold no more, he leaned back against a tree and said, “Now all I want to do is lie down and sleep.”

The next morning he fried up another piece of the steak and moved ahead, glancing up at the sun. The sky overhead was blue, and there was no sign of snow. An hour later he sighted some small animals bouncing from tree to tree, and he thought,
Squirrels! I could do with a little squirrel stew
. He tied the horse, patted him on the rump, and said, “See if you can find some dried grass under that snow, Rusty.” Leaving the animal tethered, he moved underneath a canopy of towering evergreens. Overhead, the thick branches kept the snow from falling to the earth so that only an inch or two crunched beneath his feet. It was still bitter cold, and as he moved forward a sudden thought came to him, one that he had had before.
There might be Indians in this part of the woods
.