Bone Rattler (43 page)

Conawago’s face betrayed no emotion. “It remains to be seen whether that should be considered a favor.”

“Then you at least saved me from wearing a hat for the little time I have left to live.”

A flicker of a grin crossed the old Indian’s face. “There is a stream with a pool two miles north where I can clean my wounds. I was going there in any event. Farewell. If you truly know something of doctoring, you will know you will lose consciousness long before you could get there, so do not try to follow.” He swung the bag onto his shoulder, lifted his staff, and began walking down the narrow trail that led toward the high ridges. For the first time Duncan noticed on his belt a long, curving club, its ball-shaped top carved like the head of a bird, whose bill was a lethal iron spike.

Duncan rose, staggered a few steps, and collapsed. By the time his head cleared, Conawago was out of sight. As he sat there, summoning his strength, he realized for the first time that his medallion, Adam’s medallion, was gone.

He knelt, swaying on his knees, fighting not dizziness now but shooting pain from his head and ribs, and then forced himself to his feet. With his hand ax he cut a staff, then sliced a four-inch section from a small limb, inserted it between his teeth, and began walking. He stopped every two or three hundred paces, wiping away blood that dripped down his forehead and into his eyes, clutching his head, cutting a new plug of wood when he bit through the first. The trail branched with no sign of the old Indian’s path, and he halted, trying to understand the signs he knew the people of the woods
could instinctively read. There was a pool, Conawago had said. It would be the kind of place where animals would congregate. He chose the wider, more heavily used fork and kept walking.

When he finally reached the shaded, forty-foot-wide circle of water, Conawago was stripped to the waist, his back to Duncan, standing under a narrow flow of water that spilled into the pool from a ledge a few feet above his head. With a pang of shame Duncan saw the bruises and broken skin his attack had caused.

Conawago was muttering something unintelligible, catching the water that missed his head in a cupped hand and pouring it over his chest, looking up when he spoke, as if addressing the huge chestnut tree whose roots hung over the ledge above. Duncan collapsed at the bank, dropping his bag and lowering his head to the cool water, drinking it from his hand, then sluicing it over his own head.

“I have a spare shirt,” Duncan said to the Indian’s back. “I can make bandages.”

Conawago’s only response was to raise a palm toward him, to silence him. The old Indian continued speaking, sometimes to the water itself, but mostly facing upward, toward the ledge above. The old Indian had said he was coming to the pool in any event. He had come, Duncan realized, to pray to the massive tree.

He felt strangely embarrassed, wanted to turn away, but Duncan could not take his eyes from the old man. His grandfather had sometimes prayed like that, standing in an ebb tide under a full moon, refusing to come out when his mother had begged him to, laughing when their priest cursed him for a pagan.

After several minutes Conawago stopped speaking and backed a few inches away from the small waterfall. He caught more water in his hand and stared at the glistening drops. “I did not expect you,” he said in a voice like that used in a church. “Now that you are here, there are words you, too, must say.”

“I do not know your language,” Duncan said awkwardly. “I cannot remember the words you said.”

“I was apologizing for the spilled blood, and the foolishness of
men. No good thing ever comes out of violence. You must always cleanse it away.” He looked for the first time at Duncan, and stepped toward him, stopping eight feet away, knee deep in the water. “The words you must use are different. Say this,” Conawago instructed, and began reciting words in the tongue Sarah had used.

Slowly, clumsily Duncan repeated the sounds.

Conawago nodded, then continued, speaking a few syllables at a time. Duncan echoed each phrase without comprehension, recognizing only one word of the many spoken.
Ohskenonton.
Deer.

“What does it mean?” Duncan asked when they finished.

“A prayer to the forest spirits. Difficult to translate. First, you asked for forgiveness for being so ignorant as to enter the forest without trying to know it, without respecting it. You said you knew you will die soon, but you just want another day or two to be able to show homage to the spirits, to try to find your true skin. You said you were no better than a pile of moldy deer droppings, but sometimes you will remember to put a hand on a tree and give thanks. It is a prayer taught to children in case they get lost in the forest.” There was no amusement, no mocking on Conawago’s face. “Now take something you need and give it to the forest.”

A sharp retort leapt to Duncan’s tongue, but he kept silent, breaking Conawago’s harsh, penetrating stare to kneel and open his bag. He extracted the small, hard loaf Crispin had packed for him, then cast the bread toward the current that flowed along the far side of the pool and watched as it gradually floated down the stream, slowly sinking.

When he looked back, Conawago was holding a large river pebble under the waterfall, whispering to it. After a moment the old Indian turned, shouted out several words in his native tongue, and threw the stone high, so that it disappeared into the chestnut towering above.

Duncan bent to pick up his bag, realizing the sturdy old Indian truly did not need his help. “I thank you for your kindness, and I shall trouble you no—” The words fell away as Conawago turned to
squarely face him, for the first time allowing Duncan a view of his naked chest. The bag slipped from his hands and Duncan found himself in the water, an arm’s length from the Indian, staring at the intricate tattoo on Conawago’s chest. “The wolf clan of the Mohawk,” he declared in a cracking voice, then pointed to the pattern of rays that radiated from the Indian’s left shoulder. “The sign of the dawn chasers.”

Conawago’s hand went to the club that still hung from his belt. “Where did you steal such secrets?” he demanded, his voice suddenly sharp.

“The last time I saw that wolf, it was on a man’s chest. He wore his sign of the sun over his ear.”

The Indian surveyed Duncan, head to foot, as if he had never seen him before. “You are a friend of Jacob the Fish?”

Duncan shook his head uneasily. “I helped to clean his body with some who were his friends.”

Conawago leaned forward, intensely studying Duncan’s face as if looking for the truth in his words, then he seemed to sag. The old Indian released the club, stepped to a flat boulder at the side of the pool, and collapsed onto it. “When the black snake wind blows, it must be obeyed,” he said in a sorrowful tone.

“He was attacked near the Dutch inn after the Ramsey Company crossed the Hudson. They tried to scalp him.”

“As it happened to you,” Conawago said in a tight voice.

It was Duncan’s turn to settle onto the bank. Conawago was right. What had happened to Jacob had also happened to him. A drop of blood fell from his bent head onto his hand. He stared at it for a moment, then began explaining what he knew about Jacob’s death.

When he finished, the old Indian was silent a long time, withdrawn into himself.

“The wolf,” Duncan ventured. “You were of the same clan?”

“Not exactly,” Conawago said absently and looked up at Duncan. “He was Mahican. I am Nipmuc. He knew no one else left alive from his tribe. I know no one else of mine. But we always
believed we would find them. He thought if he just stayed on his ancestral lands, someday they would come back. My tribe’s land, in what you call Massachusetts, was taken so long ago, I look elsewhere. The last time I saw Jacob, he said he had had a dream in which we discovered that our peoples had been living together on an island in a lake that I had overlooked. He thought it was very funny. But,” the old Indian sighed, “like all of his dreams, he thought there was truth in it. He made me promise to find the island, then come for him so we could go live there together.”

Conawago fell silent again, looked at the old tree. “You should go back,” he declared. “You, too, will die from your wounds if you push too hard.”

Duncan looked over his shoulder toward the east. “There is no back for me. I am a fugitive, an escapee from the Ramsey prison company. I can only go forward. I am looking for a place called Stony Run, somewhere in the north.”

Conawago winced, then tossed a pebble into the water and watched its ripples until they had disappeared. “If you knew what lay north, you would beg me to finish the job those fools started.” The old Indian rose and put on his shirt. “You will not make it there. Return to the settlements. Stay here. Go north and die if that is your wish. You will snap like a twig in the hands of a Huron raider.”

“You saved me. I thought Indians believed that when they saved someone they are responsible for them thereafter.”

“I know not what you mean when you say Indians,” Conawago replied in a weary tone as he lifted the shoulder strap of his pouch around his neck. “There are Lenni Lenape, Mohawk, Seneca, Susquehannocks, Nanticokes, Oneidas, Onandagos, Tuscaroras, Cayugas, Huron, Abenaki, a handful of Wappingers left, and fifty other tribes I have known personally, the nations living here before the Europeans. Just as across the ocean there are tribes called English, Scottish, Irish, French, Dutch, Hessian, Catalan, Danish, Welsh, Italian, and, if you credit the tales in taverns, Hungarian.”
The old man glanced at Duncan and seemed to relent. “I was schooled by Jesuits at an early age,” he declared with a shrug. “They cured me of many of my early notions.”

“I don’t recollect many Jesuits making offerings to streams.”

“Jesuits,” Conawago said with a sigh, “don’t know everything.”

Duncan gazed at the darkening forest. He could not recall ever feeling so weary, so lost. He needed Conawago, just for the night. “An innocent man is being held for murder at Edentown. I can find answers at Stony Run that will save him.”

Conawago frowned again, then picked up another pebble, little more than a grain of sand, and tossed it into the pool. It barely made a ripple as it sank. “That is how much I care about the guilt or innocence of Europeans out in the broken land.”

“Jacob the Fish was an innocent man.”

“Lightning reaches down and takes you. If the spirits intend it, you will step around a tree into a swarm of hornets. It has nothing to do with innocence.”

“Some of us fight the spirits when we have to. Jacob did. He didn’t die because they wanted his scalp. He died because he had to deliver a message.”

When Conawago reached for the paper Duncan extended, Jacob’s blood-inked message, the old man’s hand trembled. After a moment his eyes took on a distant expression as if looking through the paper at something far away. “I will light a fire and make tea for you,” the old Indian said. “Then you will tell me everything.”

Conawago spoke no more for nearly an hour, except to say they would need shelter from the storm, though Duncan saw not a cloud in the sky. Quickly, with an economy of motion that astounded Duncan, Conawago assembled a lean-to of limbs against a large, flat-faced boulder, covering it with pine boughs and a piece of tattered sailcloth from his bag. Then he tossed Duncan a flint and steel to begin a fire as he collected moss for a bed, laying Duncan’s pack on it, and enough firewood to last for hours.

“I was in the Ramsey Company,” Duncan began as the last rays
of the sun hit them and the wood began to crackle in the flames.

“That is nothing, just what some other men did to you,” Conawago said. “I am asking about you. Where was your mother on the day you were born, near water or mountain? What animals did you play with as a child? Were you scared of the ocean at first, or did your parents perhaps set you in it before you could walk?”

“How did you know I lived by the ocean?” Duncan asked.

“You can take no truth from a man without knowing the truth of his life,” was Conawago’s only reply. From the forest floor he picked up a flat stone, twice the size of his palm, set it at Duncan’s side, then with two twigs lifted an ember from the fire and dropped it on the center of the stone. From his bag he produced a brown leaf and laid it on the ember. As the tobacco smoke rose in a small, slow spiral, he dispersed it with his hand around Duncan’s head. He dug further into his bag and produced a folded piece of deerskin, which he reverently opened, exposing an inch-wide belt of white wampum. “Now the spirits are listening,” the Indian declared somberly, as he laid the belt on Duncan’s wrist, nodding, “now we shall see about you.”

Thus began the most extraordinary conversation of Duncan’s life. The old Indian would not have him speak of Jacob or Ramsey or any event of the past year, but spent an hour asking about the Highlands, asking the Gaelic words for rainbow and oak tree, trying to understand how Duncan had been raised. He became quite excited to hear that Highland cattle resembled bears and that they roamed freely around the hills like the guardians of the ancient clans.

“What do these creatures do at first snow?” Conawago inquired as he composed a soup of roots and leaf buds in a small copper pot. He seemed skeptical that such animals could truly be called cattle, and asked whether Duncan had ever caught any listening at doors and windows, as American bears were known to do.

“If as a boy you cupped a butterfly in your hand, did you notice the wind change direction? In living by the ocean, did you ever see giant fish circle about and make one of the great whirlpools that draw stars into the ocean?”

“I knew an old woman who said she had seen children change into seals,” Duncan offered. The news brought an appreciative nod from his companion.

It seemed hours before Duncan reached the voyage of the
Anna Rose
and its prisoners, long after he had consumed Conawago’s fragrant concoction and let the old man help settle him onto the moss bed against the face of the rock, which had absorbed the heat of their fire.