The Light in the Forest (2 page)

“Now go like an Indian, True Son,” he said in a low, stern voice. “Give me no more shame.”

He left almost at once and the boy heard his
footsteps in the leaves. The rustling sound grew farther and farther away. When he sat up, his father was gone. But never before or since was the place his father was going back to so clear and beautiful in the boy’s mind. He could see the great oaks and shiver-bark hickories standing over the village in the autumn dusk, the smoke rising from the double row of cabins with the street between, and the shining, white reflection of the sky in the Tuscarawas beyond. Fallen red, brown and golden leaves lay over roofs and bushes, street and forest floor. Tramping through them could be made out the friendly forms of those he knew, warriors and hunters, squaws, and the boys, dogs and girls he had played with. Through the open door of his father’s cabin shone the warm red fire with his mother and sisters over it, for this was the beginning of the Month of the First Snow, November. Near the fire heavy bark had been strewn on the ground, and on it lay his familiar bed and the old worn half-grown bearskin he pulled over himself at night. Homesickness overwhelmed him, and he sat there and wept.

After a while he was conscious of eyes upon him. When he looked up, he saw the white guard they called Del, standing there in the dusk that to the
Indian is part of the day and part of the night. The white soldier was about twenty years old, with red hair and a hunting shirt of some coarse brownish cloth. The bosom stuck out like a pouch from his belongings carried in it. His belt was tied in the back and his cape fringed with threads that in the daylight were raveled scarlet and green. But what affronted the boy was that the white guard laughed at him.

Instantly True Son turned and lay on his face again. Inside of him hate rose like a poison.

“Once my hands are loose, I’ll get his knife,” he promised himself. “Then quickly I’ll kill him.”

W
HEN
Del Hardy had left Fort Pitt in October, he reckoned he was looking on the Allegheny River for the last time. It was his first stint with the army and his only one with Colonel Bouquet. Afterwards he was to serve under Generals Sullivan, Broadhead and Wayne, but Bouquet was the one he claimed he’d go through hell for the willingest. The Colonel was the peacefullest man, Del used to say, but mad as a wolverine. He marched
his men out of Fort Pitt that fall day like they were going to a celebration.

And what was the celebration? Why, they were setting out on a suicide march! They were heading more than a hundred miles into hostile Indian territory! Mind you, this was plumb wilderness, with no roads, and no forts or white settlements to fall back on. Every day the savages would be lying thick as copper snakes in the woods around them. The whites would be outnumbered two to one, maybe worse. And yet the peace-palavering Colonel swore he wouldn’t halt till he’d reach the Forks of the Muskingum, which only a few of his men had ever seen.

Del never expected to reach those Forks alive. Nor did a lot of older and more seasoned men. But the Colonel looked after them like they were his own sons. He marched them in matching lines to protect each other, with the pack horses and stock in the middle. He let no man on the march bandy words with his neighbor. All day he kept ordering Del and the others to be on guard against ambush. But his hardest order was that, unless attacked, they hadn’t dare lay hands on a savage.

“Mind you,” Del liked to tell later, “half of us
were volunteers. We had risked our hair with him for one reason. We’d lost kin captured or scalped, and our one idea was to get them back or get back at the Injuns. When we came to Injun sign or towns, our fingers itched like fire on our hatchets and triggers. We cursed the Colonel’s orders right and left. But that’s as far as we went. We never touched hair nor hide of those Injun hostages we had marchin’ beside us, though we knew the devils had scalped plenty of our people in their time.”

Del couldn’t believe it when they got there. But according to them that knew, this miserable spot in the wilderness was the wonderful, Indian-sacred Forks of the Muskingum. There from the northeast came the Tuscarawas. Yonder from the northwest the Waldhoning, or White Woman’s River, flowed into it. And now when they were so deep in Indian country it looked as if they’d never get out, the Colonel got doughtier and spunkier than ever. He sassed back the Indian messengers who came into camp. He said they could have no peace till they’d bring in their white prisoners.

“I told the Colonel they’d never give in on that,” Del said. “I’d lived with the Delawares my own self when I was little, and I told him if white prisoners
weren’t killed right off, they were adopted, mostly for some dead relative. They were made brother or sister or son or daughter or wife. It wasn’t any mock or make-believe business either. Those Injuns actually looked on their new white relations like full-blooded Injuns. And they’d never give them up any more than their own people.”

Del used to rub his chin.

“But I was plumb wrong. They hated to give them up all right. But they hated worse to see a white man’s town a settin’ there on the banks of their own river. They hated like poison the sight of our tents and redoubts. They couldn’t wait to clear out our axes from cuttin’ down their Injun woods and our cattle from eatin’ the grass on their river bottoms. They were scared we were takin’ over the country. So they started fetchin’ in their white relations.”

That was a sight Del Hardy never would forget. The Colonel himself rubbed his eyes to find savages, whose names were a terror on the frontier, crying like women as they gave up some white child or wife. They held to them, gave them presents to take along and begged the white captain to be good to them. But what many of the men
couldn’t get over was the ungratefulness of the captives. They didn’t want to have anything to do with the whites who had risked their lives to rescue them. They called out in Delaware to their Indian masters to take them back again to their Indian homes.

Of all the prisoners Del saw brought in, the fifteen-year-old boy from Pennsylvania was the wildest and most rebellious. He had to be tied up with strips of buffalo hide, and then he struggled like a panther kit trussed up on a pole. His name in Delaware, his father said, was True Son, but never had Del seen anybody so unwilling to go back to his true father and mother.

Del had gone up to the North Tuscarawas redoubt when he first saw the pair on the path. The boy wore a brand-new calico hunting shirt, probably made by his mother and sisters for the occasion to show they could dress him as well as the whites. It covered the boy’s upper parts and half way down his leggings. His hair was black and his face and arms brown as an Indian’s, but you couldn’t mistake the English cast of his features. He was plainly white, and yet when he came in sight of the white camp, he stopped dead, a wild expression flew in his face, and he fought like a
bobcat to get away. Squaws and Indian children who had come with other prisoners watched and stared. Their faces never moved a muscle, but you could tell they understood and felt for the prisoner.

When Del got back to duty at the council house, the boy lay flat on his face. After dark when the fires burned low, the guard caught him tearing with his teeth at the knots that bound him.

“If you know what’s good for you, you won’t try to get away!” he warned sharply in Delaware.

The boy turned on him.

“I spit on white people!” he told him.

“Don’t forget you’re white your own self,” Del retorted.

“I’m Indian!” the boy said and looked up at him straight in the eye. The guard didn’t laugh. There were times when Indian feelings still came up in him strong.

“Well, your father and mother were white anyway,” Del tried to reason with him.

“My father is Cuyloga. My mother, Quaquenga,” he said.

“Yes, lately. But you had another father and mother before them. The ones you were born to.”

“Nobody can help how he is born,” he informed with dignity.

“You can argue like an Injun all right,” Del agreed. “But your skin is still white.”

“You call this white?” He held out his arm.

“Let’s see the skin under that shirt.” But the boy hit savagely at the extended hand. He wouldn’t let the guard touch him.

“You’ve been away from us a long time,” Del soothed him. “When you’re back in our country a while, you’ll get used to us.”

“I’ll never go back to your country.”

“It’s your country, too.”

“This is my country!” he called out with such passion that Del shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

By daylight, True Son still lay on his face.

“You better get up and eat.” Del nudged him with the toe of his moccasin.

The boy shrank with loathing.

“
Palli aal!
Go away.”

“You got to eat. You can’t tramp back to Pennsylvania on air.”

“I’ll never go back to Pennsylvania.”

“Then where do you reckon you’re goin’?”

“A place where you can’t tramp me with your big foot.”

Now what did the young varmint mean by that, Del wondered. But the boy closed his mouth and would not say more.

T
HE THIRD
day a change came among the tents and log redoubts along the Tuscarawas. The camp quickened. You could close your eyes and feel the nervous bustle and excitation of the white man. Soldiers moved quick-step at their tasks. They called lively to each other and hummed strange-sounding ditties.

“Does it mean something?” True Son asked a captive who knew all the talk of the Yengwes.

“Tomorrow we leave for Pennsylvania,” she told him.

That day the boy lay with despair in his breast. His life had been short but now it must come to its end. Never would he go to this enemy land. How could he exist among a race of aliens with such slouching ways and undignified speech! How could he live and breathe and not be an Indian!

He would have to act now. He remembered his father’s friend, Make Daylight, who lived in the next village. Make Daylight had been forsaken, too. His squaw had gone to another Indian’s cabin to live. She had taken Make Daylight’s children with her. Make Daylight had stood his abandonment and disgrace a few days. Then he went in the forest and ate the root of the May apple. He had been brave in war. No one thought him a coward now. So no one would think True Son a coward when they found him lying silent and superior to the white man. They would say True Son had triumphed over his enemies. Never could they carry him off to Pennsylvania now. No, his body would stay in his beloved land along the Tuscarawas. Word would be sent to Cuyloga, his father. Through the village the mourning cry would pass, “He is no more!” His father and mother, his sisters,
his uncle and aunt and cousins would come to him. They would put logs and posts on the fresh earth against the wolves. Under the ground near his head they would set good Lenni Lenape food to feed him on his journey.

Three times that day the boy tried to get the root of the May apple. His white guard, Del, gave him no chance. When he went from the council house, the guard kept hold of him like a haltered beast. He would have to wait till he was on the march. Some time tomorrow they would pass through a wooded meadow. At the place of the May apple he would fall to the ground. When they lifted him up, he would have the death medicine in his hands.

It was a gray morning when they left the Forks of the Muskingum. For a while their way lay on the path by which the boy and his father had come. True Son’s heart rose. It was almost as if he were going home. When they came to the parting of the trails, something in him wanted to cry out. An ancient sycamore stood at the forks, one dead limb pointing to the gloomy trace to Pennsylvania. On the far side, a live branch indicated the path running bright and free toward home. The boy’s moccasins wanted to race on that path. He could feel
himself light as a deer leaping over roots and logs, through the deep woods, over the hills and by the narrows to the village on the bank of the Tuscarawas. Violently he struggled to escape, but the guard pushed him on.

Through the blackness in his heart, he heard a voice calling in Delaware.