to the Far Blue Mountains (1976) (30 page)

"They no longer trust me, Sackett. I told them of the great water, and they shook their heads in doubt, then of the great stone cities you have, and of the many people who live without hunting ... they think me a liar, Sackett.

"My words are no longer heard in the village. When I speak they turn their backs upon me. They believe me a liar or that the whites have bewitched me.

"You see, they think you a small people, a weak people, even though your firearms make you great in battle. They say, 'Why do not they trap their own furs? Hunt their own game? If they do not, it is because they can not. Therefore they must be a weak people.' "

"I am sorry, Wa-ga-su. It might be the same with my people if I told them of the vast lands here, with so few people, of the great rivers, the tall trees ... they might not believe me, either."

"Yes, I think it is so, Sackett. We grow wise, you and I, but in wisdom there is often pain. No man of my people has traveled so far. None but me has crossed the great water, none but me has seen the great cities and the horses and carriages.

But if they will not believe what I have seen, if I am no longer great among my people-then I am an empty man, Sackett.

"Who is it for whom one becomes wise? Is it not for the people? For his people?

Do I become wise only for myself? I become wise to advise, to help ... but they do not believe and my voice is only an echo in an empty canyon. I speak for my ears only and the sound is hollow, Sackett."

"You have a place with us, Wa-ga-su, a place as long as you live."

"Ah? I thank you. But of course, it is not the same, is it?"

We walked on together and the great forest was green about us.

"They believe the horses, do they not?"

"Horses they have seen, or their fathers or grandfathers have seen. The Espanish men had horses. I have heard it there is a people beyond the mountains have horses, but only a few taken from the white men or left behind by them."

"What game lies beyond the mountains, Wa-ga-su?"

"The buffalo are there, the deer, the mountain cat, a still bigger deer, and there is the animal with the long nose and big white teeth."

"What?"

"It is true. I have not seen it myself. My grandfather told us of them. They were a large animal that men used to hunt. They had great teeth ... curving like so, and a long nose like an arm. They were very hairy."

The elephant? Here? It was not possible. There were elephants in Africa, and my father told me of the Carthaginians using them in war against the Romans, and the bones of still more ancient ones had been found in Europe. But here?

"You know of the great sea beyond the mountains?"

He shook his head. "There is a sea to the north, very far off. There is a sea to the south, also very far, but beyond the mountains there is no sea. There is only land."

No great western sea beyond which lay Cathay? No land of Cipango? Wa-ga-su must be mistaken. All the best minds said there was a sea beyond the mountains.

For days upon end we walked. We carried our burdens and we hunted for game, and somehow we lived, and somehow at last we came to the land of the Catawbas, after fording another great river. We moved into the foothills of the mountains, and Wa-ga-su led us to a small valley, its steep sides heavy with forest, and a stream that ran though the meadow at the bottom.

Abby came up beside me and stood, looking about. "We will stop here," I said, "and here we will build our home."

"Our home, Barnabas?"

"For a time, Abby. For a time ... there are still the mountains ... and the land beyond."

Chapter
25

Once again we were at work, felling trees, hewing them into timbers, building a series of cabins and the stockade that would surround them. Tom Watkins and Kane O'Hara went to the woods, a-hunting. Near the slope of yellow mountain, in an open meadow, they killed two buffalo. This meat we dried against the winter's coming.

Our skills were the greater for what we had built before, and the houses and stockade went up easier, despite our lesser numbers.

Kin had filled out amazingly, and was a laughing, energetic little fellow as befitted the first of our name to be born in the new lands. Abby was much with him, and Lila with them both.

Peter Fitch, who was the best of us all at timber work, having been a shipwright, paused in his work one day. "I think of Jonathan Delve," he said. "I did not like the man. There was a crossgrain of evil in him, but he was strong."

"He was that," I agreed.

"And dangerous," Peter added.

"Aye. He is well gone."

Fitch stooped to take up his broadaxe. "If he is," he said.

I had turned away, but at that I stopped. "You do not think he is?"

"If he finds not what he went after, he will think of you. He will know you had some money from furs and timbers, and he will come to believe the story of King John's treasure. He will also begin to wonder why you go west into an unknown land.

"He will not believe you are what you are. He believes all men are evil, that all will steal, connive, do whatever is necessary to obtain wealth. He will think you very shrewd. He will say to himself, 'He goes to the western sea, there to build a ship and sail away to the Indies or Cathay.' "

I shook my head. "The Indians know of no western sea, and when Hawkins' men marched up the country, they saw no western sea, nor heard of it. Some say they walked from Mexico to the French lands in the north, some say only from Florida, but they covered a deal of country."

"No matter. Let the Indians believe what they wish, and you as well, but Delve will believe what pleases him best. He hates you, Captain, as he hates us all.

Mark it down ... we have not seen the last of Jonathan Delve.

"He proposed to us once to leave you and join Bardle, or to open the gates to Bardle when he attacked."

Later, talking to Jeremy and Pim, I spoke of Fitch's words. "Aye," Jeremy agreed, "I have been thinking of the man. It is far to follow, but who knows?"

Yet there was little time to think of such things. When men live by hunting it is a constant task with all our mouths to feed, and usually the Indians who came visiting. The amounts of fresh meat they could put away was astonishing.

Often I went with Abby and Lila to the woods, gathering nuts, and whenever we went, Kin was along, carried by one of us.

We learned to make clothes of buckskin, and moccasins such as Indians wore, and we learned to know the roots and leaves that could be eaten, although with winter coming the leaves were few and no longer tender.

Barry Magill set up shop in a corner of the yard and went to work at his trade.

Barrels were needed for storing nuts and fruit. Yet the barrels were only one of the things he made, for he made several brooms, buckets for carrying water, two rakes for raking hay, and sap buckets for the gathering of sap from the sugar maples.

Black Tom came in one day with a smooth section of slate about four feet square.

"It's big," he said, "but I figure you might cut it up to make slates for the young un. I see some chalk rock down the valley a ways, too."

He rubbed his palms on the front of his pants. "No use him bein' without eddication. No tellin' what will come to pass in his time, and a body should know how to read, write, and do sums."

"Thank you, Tom," I said, and he went away vastly pleased.

Wa-ga-su was with us much of the time, and he went often to the woods with Sakim.

Soon the stockade was built and the cabins roofed, a larger stockade then before. Building with logs was a foreign thing to we of England, yet my father had seen it done by men from Sweden, as had Jeremy Ring. The timber was present, and land must be cleared for planting, so we were able to accomplish the two tasks at once. Yet never were we to feel secure.

The Catawbas were our friends, but they had warred against nearly all the tribes at one time or another, and as we were the friends of the Catawbas we were regarded as the enemies of others, although we had no such feeling or desire.

Most to be feared were the Cherokees from the south or southwest, and the Tuscaroras from the north.

There came a day when I had taken my rifle from the hooks above the door, and with Kane O'Hara and Pim Burke I went far into the mountains.

"Do not be afeered," I told Abby, "if we come not back this night. We must look about and find a way into the farthest mountains, as well as to scout the land.

We may lay out a night or even two."

"Well ... have a care," she said, and went to join Lila, who muttered something about "going gallivanting."

We went up the bottom of Muskrat Creek and crossed the southern tip of the Chunky Gal Mountain and over the bald peak known to the Indians as Yunwitsulenunyi, meaning "where the man stood." Wa-ga-su had told us the story that once a great flying reptile with beady eyes and furry wings had dived down suddenly from the sky and seized a child. This happened several times and the Indians cleared the mountaintops with fire and set up a watch to warn them of the flying beast. Then its den was found in an inaccessible place on the side of the peak and the Indians invoked their gods to strike the monster dead, and the gods responded with crashing thunder and vivid lightning and the monster was set aflame, writhing about in its agony.

The Indian on watch on that bald peak fled in terror and so for surrendering to his fear the gods turned him to stone, and there he remains to this day, the so-called Standing Indian.

We killed a brace of wild turkeys and camped that night against the rock face of a cliff in a corner away from the wind, and shielded by several ancient hickories. Our camp was on a river I thought to be the one called Nantahala, but we were high up and in a lonely place.

"It is far from London," Jeremy commented.

"Do you miss it?"

"Not I ... I was nothing there, a soldier without a cause, a sailor without a ship. This ... this is grand, beautiful! Had I not come here I should never have known it existed."

Dark bent the trees above us, flickering the flames and their shadows; the fire crackled, and a low wind moved through the trees, mourning for a summer gone. We huddled above our fire yet thought how beautiful was fire, how much a companion on the long marches and the lonely nights ... even the bright dawns, with meat cooking.

We slept that night with the stars seen through the branches, with the sound of things that move in the night, and the little sounds the mountains make, the faint creakings and groanings and rattles of changing temperature and wind.

Before first light Jeremy was gathering dry branches, and Pim had gone to the stream for fish.

On the morning of the third day we started back. I had brought with me several well-tanned deerskins, and upon these I made a map of the country so far as we had seen it. The route by which we returned was different from the outer route.

This was only partly because we wished to see new country, but it was never well to retrace a path where an enemy might lie in wait.

During the weeks that followed we made several such trips, and upon one of them Abby joined me. She was a good walker, and loved the country as much as I, and we brought Kin with us, carrying him Indian-style. Many of the mountain tops about were bare of trees, and this we could not understand although Pim Burke believed the Indians might have burned them off to offer a better view of the country around. Of this I was not too sure, for over much of it one saw only the tops of trees while enemies could move close under their cover.

Cold winds blew down from the north. We built our fires higher, and had no trouble finding the chinks in our log walls that had been left when we applied mud to the cracks. The cold wind blew through each of them and made us only too aware.

Meanwhile we gathered fuel, hunted a little, and cleared ground for spring planting, moving rocks into piles, cutting out the larger roots until we had several acres ready.

With the onset of colder weather we went into the higher mountains and set out traps.

"What of the furs?" Slater asked.

"We will go to the coast," I said. "Tilly will return with the fluyt, or other ships will come. We will go downstream by boat, sell our furs and what else we have, and then return here."

Often, I talked with Wa-ga-su about the lands beyond the mountains, and from his memory he dredged tales told by Catawba wanderers from other eras. Returning to the long-nosed animals, I learned again from him that no Catawba he had heard of had actually seen such an animal, but there were stories of them and he believed they might exist beyond the mountains.

Yet the stories, he agreed, might be very old, told of a time long ago.

We had climbed one day high up on Double Mountain, Wa-ga-su, Jeremy Ring, and Tim Glasco. Abby was with us, and we had stopped, enjoying the cold with its freshness and the smell of pines and cedar.

Suddenly Wa-ga-su said, "We go now. Indian come."

Experience had taught me to react quickly. I wasted no time in asking foolish questions. I said not what nor where, but catching Abby by the arm, started off the bald where we were and into the brush.