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Authors: W. Michael Gear

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Native American & Aboriginal

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BOOK: People of the Longhouse
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Gonda flapped his arms against his sides. “Then I say we backtrack him. If we can find where the girl was killed, it may answer just as many of our questions.”
Koracoo didn’t respond, and he knew what she must be thinking. At this very moment their clan elders would be salvaging what they could from the charred remains of Yellowtail Village, burying the dead, and trying to decide what to take with them. Though the elders had sanctioned their search for the missing children, they expected Koracoo and Gonda to be home soon, to help defend the survivors as they marched to Bur Oak Village, a Standing Stone village five days away.
“What do you think we should do?” he asked. “We haven’t much time.”
Her gaze drifted over the crimson-hued forest before she said, “We backtrack him. If the trail goes cold, or it becomes clear it has nothing to do with our lost children, we will go home.”
“Agreed.”
Koracoo headed down the midden trail, and Gonda turned to look at the False Face pendant. He walked over, picked it up, and tucked it into his belt pouch.
As he trotted to catch up with Koracoo, melting ice began to drip out of the trees and shower the forest floor. Gonda flipped up the hood of his buckskin cape and shivered.
The morning was warming up, releasing the brittle scents of autumn, and he wanted to enjoy it for as long as he could. He had known Koracoo his entire life. While they could not track in the darkness, for the next few days there would be no real rest. From dawn until dusk, they would be searching the ground and brush. They would eat and drink on the run. At night, they would take turns sleeping. One of them would always be standing guard.
The faces of Tutelo and Odion smiled at him from his memories, and he had to fight back the cry that rose in his throat.
Deep inside him, a voice kept repeating,
My fault. All my fault.
He focused his eyes on Koracoo’s back and tried to think only of her.
G
onda had not had a sip of water all day. Since dawn he had been moving, walking up and down the twisting mountain trails, searching for any sign that a man carrying a girl had passed this way. Now, in late afternoon, he was desperately thirsty. But it did not matter. Off and on all day, they had found sign: a broken branch along the trail, a fragment of white doehide caught on brush, partial tracks, drag marks. This
was
the trail of the man who had carried the girl to the midden. The problem was that they still did not know if this trail had anything to do with the missing Yellowtail Village children. For all they knew, they could be wasting their time while Odion, Tutelo, and Wrass were being sold from one Trader to another. It would not be long until the children’s trail went stone cold.
Gonda studied the trees. The damp chestnut limbs stood starkly against the sunlight. Here and there fallen nuts dotted the ground. He reached down, picked up several, and tucked them into his belt pouch, for later when …
A strange sound whispered through the forest.
Almost … eerie. He heard Koracoo coming up the trail and held up a hand to stop her. She went deathly silent, listening, as he was.
The sound came again. Leaves rustled, but not with the wind.
Gonda pulled an arrow from the quiver on his back and nocked it in his bow; then he used it to point in the direction of the sound.
A soft hiss told Gonda that Koracoo, too, had nocked an arrow in her bow. After another five heartbeats, Koracoo eased up beside him. Her dark eyes were intent, focused on the source of the sound in the forest ahead.
They stood in silence, both studying the lay of the land, searching for hidden foes. He led the way, warily heading toward the sound.
In another thirty paces, they walked into a small clearing fringed by gigantic oaks. Gonda’s eyes narrowed. Someone had been here, recently. The deep autumn leaves that blanketed the grass had been scooped into odd shapes, as though many people had shoved them aside to sit down, perhaps to build fires.
“What is this?” Koracoo whispered.
He shook his head uncertainly.
Sunset painted the forest, glittering from the tallest pines like a fine paint made of ground amber. A luminous wall of Cloud People crowded the sky to the north.
“Smell anything?” he asked.
Koracoo flared her nostrils and shook her head. “No.”
Gonda nodded. There was no smell of smoke. If someone had camped here, he would have built a fire to warm himself and cook his food. As warriors, they’d raided and burned enough villages to know how long it took for the stench to fade.
A tingle climbed Gonda’s spine. None of this made sense. He needed a few moments to think, and motioned for Koracoo to take cover. She stepped behind a tree trunk two paces away.
Gonda hid behind one of the many lichen-covered boulders that thrust up across the mountains.
Sunset had just begun to purple the western horizon, and the eagle shadows that played in the trees had a vaguely lavender hue. Otherwise, the only movement was the faint breeze through the branches.
The sound … leaves moving.
His gut knotted.
Blessed gods, what is that?
Anxious, almost to the point of carelessness, Gonda clenched his bow so hard his fingertips went white. He forced himself to think. They’d been tracking the man all day and had seen none of the refuse that inevitably marked the trails of warriors. It was as though the
man had simply grabbed the dead girl and headed toward the shell midden without stopping. Why would anyone do that? Had he known the girl? A relative would have taken her home and buried her properly, so that her afterlife soul could find its way to the Land of the Dead. Or … had he been afraid to take her home? Would his village have punished him?
Koracoo hissed to get his attention and used her nocked arrow to point at something beneath a fallen log.
His gaze searched the area until he saw what appeared to be part of a child’s toy, a cornhusk doll.
“Koracoo, you circle north; I’ll veer south.”
She nodded and slipped into the forest shadows.
Gonda carefully stepped off the trail and started moving through the deep leaves. His moccasins crackled softly. Every two steps he halted to listen. As Cloud People drifted across the face of Elder Brother Sun, shadows darkened the trees, then vanished as the amber gleam again flooded the forest.
He swerved around a small outcrop of granite boulders … heard again a whisper of leaves moving … and forced himself to look at the clearing. To
see
. If there was someone out there, he should be able to make out an odd color, or shape, perhaps a glimpse of clothing. He saw nothing but strange dips and humps in the leafbed.
Across the meadow, Koracoo’s shadow slipped through the trees, cautiously approaching the clearing from the north.
Gonda let his gaze drift around the forest. Were there warriors hiding out there, just waiting for someone, anyone, to come to the sound? Was this a clever trap?
Koracoo signaled for him to stop.
He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand while he waited. He hadn’t heard whatever it was that had spooked her.
Koracoo took two more steps through the trees on the north end of the clearing. Then she said, “Gonda? Come here. This may be where the girl died.”
Gonda trotted to meet her. For a time, they did not speak; they just looked at the blood that soaked the oak trunk.
“How old do you think that blood is?”
Koracoo slung her bow and knelt. “Two days. Three, maybe. You can see where the mice have been chewing at the soaked bark.”
She began slowly pulling away the leaves at the base of the tree.
When she neared the ground level, the leaves were stuck together with old blood. She gently lifted the clumps and set them aside, looking for more.
“A sandal track.” She tapped it with her finger.
Gonda moved forward and bent to examine it. “A big man. Heavy. Or perhaps he’d already lifted the girl into his arms when this track was made.”
“Yes.” Koracoo’s dark brows pinched over her small nose. She scowled at the track for several moments. “Don’t you think it’s odd that he’s wearing sandals? It’s late autumn. He should be wearing moccasins.”
“Maybe he’s an idiot?”
“Or maybe sandals are all he has, but …”
Koracoo tilted her head, and Gonda saw that she was listening again—listening as though their lives depended upon it. He held his breath.
In a clipped voice, Koracoo said, “Do you hear it?”
A few paces away, the leaves whispered.
Gonda braced himself. “Yes.”
Hope swelled fit to burst his chest. They both straightened, and their eyes focused on the leaves. They fluttered. “You go,” he said. “I’ll cover you with my bow.”
Koracoo moved forward on cat feet. The leaves continued to flutter as if from shallow rhythmic puffs of air. Breathing? His heart tightened.
Koracoo crouched down, brushed away leaves, then stopped. In an agonized voice, she said, “Oh, no,” and reached both hands deep into the leaves to pull out a tightly wrapped bundle.
“What is it?” Gonda rushed forward.
“It’s a baby.” Koracoo slumped to the ground and cradled the child in her left arm while she frantically pulled the blanket from its face with her right hand.
Gonda kept glancing up at the forest, his bow still drawn. When he looked down again, a small pale face, framed with black hair, shone within the blanket. The child’s dark eyes were slitted, the lids fluttering as though it was just barely alive. “It’s a miracle that child didn’t freeze to death. The Forest Spirits must have protected it.”
“If we don’t act quickly, the Forest Spirits’ efforts will have been for naught.”
Koracoo rested the baby in her lap, jerked her cape over her head,
and pulled open the laces of her war shirt. For a brief moment, he glimpsed her breasts, and it comforted him.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Warming her.” Koracoo peeled off the child’s soiled sack—revealing that it was a girl—and tossed the sack into the leaves; then she tucked the baby down the front of her war shirt. “Blessed gods, she’s freezing.”
“Koracoo … we can’t take her with us. You know that, don’t you?”
“If I stand up, can you slip my cape over my head and tie it beneath the baby?”
Gonda slung his bow and picked up Koracoo’s cape. “Yes, but—”
“I’m aware of the problem, Gonda.” Carefully holding the child against her, she got to her feet.
Gonda slipped her cape over her head and then pulled the ends up and tied them around Koracoo’s waist to form a kind of sling for the baby inside her brown shirt.
“Tighter,” Koracoo said. “If I have to fight, I want to be able to use my hands to swing my club.”
Gonda complied, retying the ends as tightly as he could. “If you understand the problem, why are you—?”
“We have to find the nearest village. Fast. This child needs food and shelter. Her afterlife soul is already out wandering the forest.”
Gonda peered at the soiled sack. “The red-and-black spirals mark her as one of the People of the Hills, probably Hawk Clan. If that doesn’t slap some sense into you, I don’t know what will.”
“The nearest Hills village is Atotarho Village.”
Among the Hills People, when a chief died, his clan matron, in consultation with the other women of the clan, selected the new chief, and he was given the name of the deceased man. The new chief was then “raised up” and the dead chief, thereby, “resuscitated.” If the new chief proved unworthy of his position, he could be “dehorned,” and his name taken away. Villages always took the name of their chief, and Chief Atotarho was no friend of theirs.
Gonda said, “Atotarho is an evil sorcerer. We can’t go there. None of us, including the baby, will survive.”
The Hills People were their sworn enemies. In fact—though he couldn’t be sure—there may have been Atotarho warriors with the Mountain warriors who had attacked Yellowtail Village. The Hills and Mountain Peoples were allies and often combined forces to assault Standing Stone villages.
“We don’t have a choice, Gonda.”
“Of course we have a choice. She’s not one of our people. We can leave her here.”
The expression on Koracoo’s face went straight to his heart. Granted, she had just lost her children in a raid and didn’t know if they were alive or dead, but the way she clutched the baby against her made no sense. They could
not
take it with them.
“I can’t leave her to die,” she said sternly. “Let’s go.”
Koracoo started to walk past him, and he grabbed her arm in a hard grip. “No! If you and I are captured or killed,
our
children may be lost forever. Leave the baby here!”
Koracoo shook off his grip and glared at him, but he saw bone-deep pain in her eyes. “Very well. We’ll split up. You keep following this trail. As soon as I’ve found a safe place where the baby will be cared for, I’ll catch up with you.”
He shook his head as though he hadn’t heard right. “I’m not going to let you walk into a Hills village alone. If they kill you on sight, I’ll never forgive myself.” He held out his arms. “Give me the child. I’ll take it away and you won’t even have to watch.”
The baby mewed, barely audible, and Koracoo’s expression turned to stone. “Gonda, you can either keep following this trail, or come with me. Either way, we’re losing the light.”
Gonda exhaled hard. Arguing more would be futile. He threw up his hands in frustration, and said, “I’ll go with you, but you’re insane.”
“Fine. You lead.”
He checked the sunlight, nocked his bow again, and headed west. The deep leaves made it impossible to walk quietly. Even though wet, they shished and crackled beneath his moccasins. Behind him, he could hear Koracoo speaking gently to the child, telling it not to be afraid, that everything was going to be all right—which he seriously doubted.
BOOK: People of the Longhouse
10.86Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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