The Eden Hunter (29 page)

“So you know your years as well?”

“Do now.”

McIntosh unraveled the turban in his hands until it was just a long blue scarf again. “Were you a warrior in Africa?” he asked.

“A hunter.”

“And your people—all of them were small, small like you?”

“Yes, they was all jus like me.”

For a second time McIntosh lowered his head and was quiet.

Kau watched him for a moment and then spoke. “Was you at Horseshoe Bend?” he asked.

McIntosh looked up at him. “I was.”

“Across the river? Blockin the retreat for that Jackson?”

“How do you know this?”

“I was caught by redsticks once. I heard them tell of it.”

“Well, then I hope they also told you that we killed them like dogs.”

Kau nodded. “Morning Star. You knew him?”

“One of their supposed prophets.” McIntosh pointed toward the fort. “A fraud just like your British general.” He stood. “Do you have anything else to ask me?”

Kau shook his head and McIntosh walked away. Once he was gone the three braves moved back in from the shadows with their war-clubs and longrifles, appearing so quickly that Kau thought that perhaps they had been listening the entire time. The braves checked his restraints, then two went off to sleep while the other sat and watched him.

 

IN THE MORNING came reports that the gunboats had sailed upriver with the bay winds. He overheard the braves talking. Clinch had marched his men south to meet with Loomis. The American sailors and soldiers were together now, camped just a few river bends below the fort. Soon.

 

THOUGH THEY FOUGHT on the side of the white men, like with most Indians there were ways in which these Lower Creeks reminded him of the Ota. What a white man might persecute an Indian might celebrate, and so as these braves waited for the assault to come they examined him the same as McIntosh had. They were fascinated by his size, his cut teeth. He heard them say that there was good sense in it—his smallness. A young brave shared a story from his grandfather, a story about how at one time their own people had not been much larger, that it was only when the white men came that the ancestors had begun to grow.

Kau considered this and thought on the surviving bands of Ota that might still roam the forest. He wondered whether the very same thing could be happening right then in Africa—an entire tribe of people, growing.

 

THE SUN BORE down on the pinewoods as they waited. He stared out across cutover at the fort. On occasion careless soldiers would appear atop the bastions, and the braves who believed themselves marksmen would ask McIntosh for a chance at them. The chief refused, and it became clear to Kau that the role McIntosh was to play in this battle was not altogether different than the function he had served at Horseshoe Bend—stay close but let the American soldiers lead the fight.

 

THAT NIGHT THERE was hardly a moon. The eyes of Benjamin’s laughing man were hidden, and Kau wondered what they now watched from the shadows. He pulled his ripped and bloodied shirt up over his nose to protect his face and neck from the mosquitoes that swarmed around him. His hands were tucked into the waistband of his pants, his feet buried in a mound of pine needles. He heard some of the braves begin to play a courage game, taking turns rushing forward to splash their hands in the water of the moat. He listened as they went off in a hollering relay—a man leaving, a man returning, a man leaving, a man returning—daring the soldiers to fire upon them.

The three guards collected around the watch-fire, and Kau feigned sleep as they began to argue. Finally two of them ran off
yelping to join in the game, and the remaining brave sat with his back to him and sulked. Before long the fire began to die down, and Kau decided at last that he would run as well. He had a black night and a failing fire, a distracted guard and a means to cut himself free. To linger any longer would be foolish. He thought of the Ota parable. The story of the Kesa farmer who died demanding that the forest provide him with more than he ever truly needed.

He spit the blade into his tied hands. When forced, the thin metal could be made to fit between his filed front teeth. He wedged the blade into place, then tasted blood from torn gums as he lowered his head and began to chip quietly at the leather binding his wrists.

 

HIS GUARD WAS still focused on the gaming Indians, and so Kau kept on with the blade until the leather had been sawed down to a single stretched thread. He pulled the blade from his teeth just as one of the negro soldiers finally fired a frustrated shot into the darkness. Kau spotted the muzzle-flash in the bastion before he heard the powder blast. His guard charged a short ways out into the cutover and began to shake his war-club at the fort. For a moment Kau was alone. He jerked his wrists apart, and the bindings broke and then unraveled, releasing him from the tree.

The dome swamp, he decided. He would make for the shelter of the dome swamp. He dropped Garçon’s blade and stood, hurrying away from the fire and into the forest. The wiregrass was damp with dew and occasional palmettos stabbed at him. In a small clearing he stepped over a sleeping Indian. The man grunted but did not
wake, and then from the field edge came frantic screaming—the guard announcing his escape. The forest erupted and soon Indians were moving all about. Kau began to run, and twice he brushed against braves rushing past him in the night.

From the fort came the shoutings of the negro soldiers, and Kau realized that the clamoring of the Indians had Garçon’s men preparing for an attack. A volley of their musket balls slammed into the trees, but over all of this he could hear McIntosh, calling out the names of the braves who would go and hunt him. Kau stopped and saw pitch torches being lit. He turned and continued running but then collided with a pine and stumbled. He sniffed the air as he limped on, following the faint scent of decay that would lead him to the dome swamp.

 

FOUR LIT TORCHES came floating through the pines, and he stood against the high wall of greenbrier that separated him from the dome swamp, watching them approach. The braves were hunched over and cutting for sign. One called out, and at the sound the others collapsed in closer so that, pressed together, their torches seemed to form one giant ball of fire in the night. The braves looked up, faces aglow as all four stared in his direction. When they moved toward him they moved in synch, low and with their footfalls in rhythm—longrifles in their right hands, torches in their left.

The braves advanced and he dropped down to his knees. A rabbit trail led into the dome swamp. He wormed his way through the briers and then went crawling onto the mud. The black water was reflecting starlight and he lay back in it, filling his lungs
with air. He came to a float. He was suspended. The water seemed warmer than the air even. He stretched out his arms, and with slow steady strokes he began to ease himself deeper into the dome swamp.

The water flowed past his ears and he could hear nothing. His soaked osnaburgs pulled at him and so he slid his shirt over his head, then unbuckled Benjamin’s belt and struggled free from his pants. With the belt abandoned and sunk everything he had taken from the boy was gone now. He closed his eyes and let his hands guide his naked body through the maze of cypress and tupelo, careful not to leave any sign that the braves might spot with their torches—no bloomings of disturbed silt, no bent saplings or dampened trunks.

As he drifted he wished that he could stay like this for all time, a fetus in a womb, and he could feel the water washing him. A mosquito landed on his cheek and his eyes flickered open. A meteor streaked across the sky, and he tracked it through the hovering tangle of branches. He drifted on a little farther, then stood up slowly in the shallow water and listened to the loud collapse of briers. The four braves, coming for him. He hid within a cluster of young tupelos as they went sloshing past, their torches held high. They were chanting, and he tried to make out the words they were singing but could not.

Suddenly the chanting ceased. There was silence and then from the heart of the dome swamp came the sound of something heavy splashing down into the water. The sound, he realized, of the dead Choctaw’s enemies pushing him free from his platform forever.

 

HE STAYED HIDDEN within the tight circle of tupelos. For a long time he watched the torches of the braves travel back and forth until finally they burned to nothing and all was blackness. Crouched low in the water, his head plastered with lilies, he had the sensation not of being caged by the tupelos but of being housed, protected. He slid his tongue past his lips and tasted the water, slow-drinking the sour swamp like a lizard, like a snake. It was quiet and dark, but still he could sense the four braves nearby and listening, waiting for him to make some mistake of sound.

 

AT SUNRISE THE motionless braves were revealed, and with the light they separated and again began moving through the swamp, flipping dead logs and staring up into trees. Fatigue and frustration had made them hurried and careless, and several times they peered in among his tupelos but did not see him.

 

HOURS PASSED, THEN late in the morning the braves met as if to discuss the status of their hunt. The shortest of the four was punching at the water when the roll of drums sounded from somewhere in the pinewoods. The braves all went still, their heads cocked and listening—and then the drums grew louder and he watched as they turned toward them, filing off in a line like the called hogs of a farmer.

 

ONCE HE WAS certain that the braves had left him he emerged from the tupelos. The drums had quit and he felt himself calming. The dense saplings dwindled as he neared the center of the dome swamp,
and he waded in among the mature trees until at last he arrived at the Choctaw platform. The dead man was gone, but the air still stank of him and his crude scaffold remained. Kau circled beneath the platform three separate times before his foot collided with the tight cocoon of blanket and hide that held the warrior’s corpse.

And then his foot settled upon something smooth and solid. He ducked below the surface of the water and came up holding the bone club. It had found its way back to him, or he to it, and felt almost hot in his hands. He heard the whispered voice of the redstick prophet, then closed his eyes as the first vision came:

He sees an endless cotton field. Slaves move through the rows and the last of them is Pelayo. An overseer slaps at him with a whip and says, Hurry up now, nigger. Hurry up now.

He sees the American encampment. The soldiers are gone. Xavier’s body hangs from an oak branch, and the salted scalp of the sailor has been pushed deep into his mouth.

He sees Garçon made to stand before a line of American soldiers. They are holding muskets, and Clinch is pacing behind them. The General is blindfolded and his hands are tied. Clinch says, Fire, and Garçon’s chest is blown apart.

He sees a very old man on a beach. His father, alive many years beyond his African death. White men in dull gray uniforms are approaching him. His father is holding a bow, but when he makes to draw it the soldiers laugh and shoot him down.

 

HIS SKIN HAD cooled slightly and so he opened his eyes. The shadow of the platform now covered him, and he pinned the bone club
against his neck and climbed up onto it. He looked around. There was a gap in the canopy above and the sun bore down on him. All around him the swamp was glistening.

He set down the bone club and sprawled out naked in the sun, drying in the heat as he thought on his situation. If the braves came for him again he would hear them in the water and have time to hide himself. They had lost whatever advantage they had held over him. The dome swamp was his alone.

He began to ponder the visions that Morning Star had decided to share with him from the other side. So Xavier and Garçon would die badly, and Pelayo would be a slave again. But what to make of that glimpse of his father? A man he had already seen die once before? The strange bow his father had been holding fixed in his mind. The yew stave, he realized. He had not seen his father but he himself as an old man. He had seen his own death, and though it frightened him he now wanted to see more. So maybe he would survive this day and this dome swamp. But what of Beah? Samuel? What else might the prophet have to tell him? He touched the bone club to his cut chest and again closed his eyes:

It is a crisp autumn day. The sky is blue. A forest, aflame with color, stretches from horizon to horizon. In the center of all of this an enormous granite mountain, treeless and smooth, sits like a tooth. Thousands of Indians stand upon it. They are cheering a game between boys. Young braves not so much older than Benjamin scramble by the dozen over and across the surface of the mountain. They charge over fields of bare rock, splash through clear pools of rainwater. On either end of the mountain stands a high wooden
pole pinned between boulders. Atop each pole is mounted the skull of a buffalo. The boys all carry a pair of stout sticks affixed with webbed baskets. They are chasing a small deerskin ball. One of the boys towers over the others. That is me, says the voice. Morning Star. The young prophet is from a western village; his team represents the setting sun. Along a wide crack in the stone, yellow daisies are blooming. Morning Star bursts through the flowers and the air fills with pollen. He has the ball cradled in one of his sticks; he is being chased by the Rising Sun. They are almost upon him when he spins and flings the ball. It goes streaking across the sky. For a moment both the crowd and the players are silent, all of them watching the tiny ball make for the horned skull staring back down at them from atop the distant pole.

 

BUT HE LEARNED nothing of the fate of Samuel and Beah. After that final vision—one of the past, not of the future—his mind went dark, and so he set the bone club down. He was very tired, and he slept until late in the day. When he awoke he shimmied to the top of one of the tall cypress trees that supported the platform, and then he sat in the crook of a branch. The crane-cut had opened and blood ran down his chest. He could see the fort. Negro soldiers had congregated on the artillery bank, and they seemed to be looking out across the river. He followed their gaze. There were flashes of movement along the opposite bank—American soldiers taking positions behind trees and stumps and logs—and he remained in the cypress, watching soldiers watch soldiers until night fell and the world went dark.