Bone Rattler (64 page)

When he finished, Ramsey fixed Duncan with a poisonous glare. “You’re still a Ramsey slave for seven years,” he spat. “By order of an English judge. There is naught anyone here can do to change that.”
Without another word, with no effort to bid good-bye to Jonathan and Virginia, who watched from the doorway, Ramsey mounted the coach and snapped orders to the driver.

“But Pike,” Duncan said to Woolford. “He and Cameron—”

“Four of Tashgua’s warriors left in two canoes before dawn,” Woolford said in a solemn voice. “With Pike and Cameron both trussed and gagged. His sergeant and I will report they both disappeared in an engagement with the Huron. They will be taken far west and sold as slaves to some unknown tribe.”

Duncan shuddered. It was, he had to admit, perfect justice for such men, and they could never be trusted to an official court without betraying secrets best left unspoken.

“Hawkins?” Duncan asked.

“Not a sign. There’s not a man, Indian or European, he will be safe with, not for hundreds of miles. Five of the surviving settlers have already left to track him, and they
will
find him, in some camp in some forest when he least expects it. They will know how to deal with him.” The ranger lifted his hand. “I’m leaving as well.” Duncan saw a cluster of men waiting at the forest’s edge—Woolford’s remaining rangers.

“You’re one of us, Duncan. You’d be welcome running at my side.”

Duncan took his hand and the men exchanged a long, sober stare. “You do me honor, Captain, and those are words I never expected to say to a British soldier.”

“American,” Woolford said, as if correcting him. “And not a soldier—a ranger.”

“No Shakespeare for our parting?”

Woolford grinned, and glanced at Crispin. “‘We few,’” he said, “‘we happy few, we band of brothers.’” He unhooked the shiny gorget from his neck, stuffed it into a pocket, and stepped away to his men.

The dust from the coach had barely settled when Sarah summoned the keepers and told them to begin dismantling the palisade, and to use the wood for new cow sheds. She declared that a large meal would be served at the end of the day, under the trees by the
house. Duncan joined Conawago and Lister as they worked at the palisade, prying out logs, chiseling new joints so the beams could be reassembled into long lean-tos.

When the men were washed and the meal finally served out in steaming bowls and chargers, the members of the Company hung back, staring at the U-shaped table arranged by Sarah by the garden. They had never eaten with the Ramsey family, knew better than to expect to sit at the same table. But Sarah bent to her brother and sister, then the three of them stepped into the throng, pulling hands, directing men to the benches. When Sarah finally sat, Jonathan pulled Duncan forward and put him beside him his older sister.

The men listened at the end of the meal as Sarah explained the changes in the Company. There would be no more keepers, only foremen, the chief of which would be Mr. Lister, henceforth to be known as Mr. McAllister, who would sleep in one of the rooms in the great house. There would be a new barn, but first the settlers’ cabins would be rebuilt, then some new cabins at Edentown, for Sarah was sending to Philadelphia for a score of women who wanted honest jobs as cooks, laundresses, and weavers. When she described the final change, the sharing out of the Company, few seemed to understand. Then the men who had served on whaling ships described how the proceeds of the work on board were shared out to every member of the crew. Jaws dropped, eyes went round.

“I thought they would rejoice in the news,” Sarah said as they cleared away the table. Most of the men had left with sober, contemplative expressions.

“Their eyes. Did you not see their eyes?” Duncan asked. “They were different men when they left, chewing on something they had not tasted for a long time. You have given them hope.” And he had learned well enough that here, in this strange new land, hope need not be the poison it had been on board their prison ship.

The rejoicing came soon enough. Men began trickling back to the now lantern-lit table, some with musical instruments. There was
singing and dancing and, for the first time at Edentown, the sound of grown men laughing.

Sarah brought out a blanket and she sat under one of the trees with Duncan, studying Professor Evering’s comet. Eventually Crispin and the young ones went inside, and as the men wandered back to their barracks, Sarah rolled the blanket over their legs and she put her head on Duncan’s shoulder.

 

 

He woke alone in the morning, the blanket empty beside him. Sarah was sitting on the kitchen steps, holding a slip of paper. “He’s gone,” Sarah said with a tone of surprise. “He left a note.”

Spirits do not die,
Conawago had written,
they just take on new shapes.
Duncan turned it over. There was nothing else.

“He was on the porch at dawn and asked if there was a scrap of paper that might be found,” Sarah explained. “I showed him an empty ledger in the library. He spent an hour in there, at the desk, then appeared with his pack and bow. Later, when I checked, he had taken only a page, from the back of the book.”

Duncan found the journal still on the desk, ran his finger along the edge where the page had been cut out. He held the book on edge at the window, seeing the faint indentations on the page underneath. Moments later he was rubbing a quill along the fresh soot in the fireplace. Soon the indentations took shape as he lightly ran the edge of the feather over the page. It was another map, showing rivers and ranges to the north and west. He studied it with an odd longing, trying to make sense of the dozen small circles Conawago had carefully drawn on the map, trying to reconcile them with his strange parting words. Then a glimmer of recognition rose as he examined the lowest circle, the nearest one, and its position between river and range.

Sarah was still on the steps when he returned. “I told him yesterday I had a room for him in the house, that he had a family at last.” Her voice had a strange quiver in it. “I hope you will take it now, Duncan.”

He looked at her without replying, then gazed out into the forest. They sat in silence for several minutes, then she rose and faced him, staring into his eyes. She offered another of her small, knowing smiles and stepped back into the kitchen.

Sarah returned ten minutes later, carrying his pack and rifle. “It seems I am always packing for you, Duncan McCallum,” she said, trying to push strength, even whimsy, into her voice. She tied a small pouch of food to the top of the pack. “You need to be with your brother, and who am I stop you?”

He looked in confusion from the pack to Sarah. “You know I am bound. Still a prisoner in the eyes of the law.”

“I cannot change what the law has decreed,” Sarah admitted. “But you are not an escaped prisoner unless you are reported as such. And the only one who can legally complain of your absence now is myself,” she explained, catching him again with her deep green eyes. She flushed and looked down. “My heart will complain,” she whispered toward her feet. “But that is a crime I choose not to share with the government.”

“They’re inside,” she said after a moment, and stepped toward the riverbank.

He needed but a stride into the kitchen to find all those he sought. Crispin, Lister, and the children sat at the kitchen table, eating bacon and bread. Lister gestured Duncan to sit beside him, then seemed to sense that something had changed. The old Scot glanced outside, saw the pack and rifle past the open door.

“Ah,” he sighed, and his face tightened for a moment, then he rose with a forced smile. “A clan chief has business in many parts.”

Duncan took his hand with a great knot in his throat, unable to speak for a moment.

“I owe you everything, Clan McCallum,” Lister said.

“Not so. It is I who owe you everything.”

“We still have a clan to build.”

“We still have a clan to build,” Duncan confirmed with a smile.

“I didn’t think this would come so soon,” Crispin said when Duncan turned to him.

“You know you’ll see me again,” Duncan promised, extending his hand. “It’s the way of particular friends.”

“I know.” There seemed to be no other words they could speak. The former slave covered Duncan’s hand with both his own, clasping it in silence for a long moment.

Duncan embraced each of the children. “You have a new teacher now, much wiser than me,” he told them. “His name is Crispin.”

Outside on the riverbank, he embraced Sarah tightly, for a long time. As he kissed the top of her head and they stepped apart, she entwined her fingers in his for a moment, as they had on the ship. His shoulder was still wet with her tears when he stepped out of the river, into the forest. He had traveled for several minutes downstream, in the direction Jamie had gone, before he halted, looking at a small flower growing out of a rock in a pool of dappled sunlight, finding himself on his knees as he gazed at it.

 

 

At the steady gait of a forest runner, it took him less than two hours to reach the broad chestnut above the pool he had visited after he had fled Edentown—the only mark he had recognized on the map made in the library that morning. The old Indian was praying beside the huge tree, his hand on a root, but surprise froze his tongue a moment as Duncan silently knelt beside him. A wise and kind grin rose on his wrinkled face. As Conawago resumed his prayer, Duncan produced several leaves of tobacco and began gathering wood for a fire, watching the sky as he worked, wondering how long it would be to first snow. It would take them at least a month if they were to visit all of the ancient trees Conawago had marked on his map.

During the late 1750s a peculiar complaint began arising from officers in the British forts north of Albany in the New York colony. They questioned the practice of allowing Iroquois allies to bivouac near their combat garrisons due to the unruly behavior that resulted when the Indians mingled with the Highland Scot troops—who seemed, by British army standards, little more than heathens themselves. The bonds between Scots and Iroquois that anchor the plot of this novel are indeed not a novelist’s fancy but rooted in historic fact: for a few years in the mid-eighteenth century these two extraordinary cultures briefly and sporadically overlapped. In retrospect the connection should come as no surprise to anyone who has studied the two peoples. The Highlanders and Iroquois were both steeped in warrior traditions, shared a rich heritage of storytelling, chafed against authority, and were each in their own way deeply spiritual. A particular headache for British officers—and a particular delight for those of us with Scottish blood who gaze back into history—was the tendency of certain Highlanders and Iroquois to perform war dances together before engagements.

Where such bonds formed between Scots and Iroquois, they may well have been nurtured by a mutual recognition that both their cultures were under siege by the same forces. They were living in turbulent times, years of unprecedented change that were altering their ways of life, and those of many others, forever. The period in which this book is set marked in a very real sense the beginning of the
modern era. Science and literature were blossoming. The proliferation of printing presses had begun to connect and empower people, politically and culturally, in ways never before known. The common man had begun to discover his own identity, with profound implications for society. The first conflict that can truly be called a world war had begun, ignited in the forests of Pennsylvania by a young officer who was later to play the leading role in the American Revolution. These years became the pintle upon which many events of the following centuries swung.

Yet the history of this period, like too many others, has been taught to us in flat, sterile terms. We learn it through maps, charts, and trend lines, almost never through the eyes of actual human participants, and as a result most of us have lost our connection with the remarkable people of this remarkable time. It is largely a forgotten period, eclipsed by the more dramatic upheaval that began in 1775, but for me it has always held great fascination. Pick up a text and you might read of the dilution of monarchy and religion that occurred during these years, but those were only the symptoms of much more important transformations under way in the hearts and minds of the immigrants—mostly Scots, German, Irish, and English—who set out across the Atlantic and entered the endless forest. Traveling to the American wilderness was like traveling to another planet. Nothing in their experience could prepare those immigrants for what they encountered, just as nothing could prepare the natives of the woodlands for the Europeans who began appearing on their trails.

The mysteries on these pages are not far removed from the broader mysteries that transformed these people. How did the Highland soldier feel when he charged into battle for the very king who had destroyed his way of life? What words hung in the air at deep forest campfires when Scots and Iroquois spoke in the night? What was at work in the heart of the Indian who stood at the edge of the forest and watched the plows that were burying his traditions? It wasn’t just the bloodthirsty fury reflected in Hollywood images of such natives, for these were intelligent, curious, and spiritual people.
The woodland tribes had a rich, vital culture with much to teach us—most of us are oblivious to the reasons our Founding Fathers incorporated aspects of the Iroquois confederation into our government. How is it that in these violent times the Moravians—well-educated Germans with a zeal for God and exploration—went among the tribes even in the midst of war, yet not one was ever killed? What irresistible force drove those families who, with full knowledge of the dangers, packed up their belongings and headed into the wilderness? What was the explanation given by the many European settlers captured by the woodland Indians who, when later given their freedom, chose to stay with the tribes?