Fire Along the Sky (22 page)

Jennet had wrapped her arms around herself to contain her frustration and anger. “But she's not on her way back, Curiosity. She's headed away from us. Every day a little further away. I see it happening. I feel it happening.”

At that Curiosity had looked at her hard, the kind of piercing look that came over her when she was examining a child with fever or belly pain. After a moment she nodded. “All right, yes. I'll see what I can do.”

All week Jennet had been watching for Hannah, who must surely come down to the village but never did. She thought of going up to Lake in the Clouds to fetch her, but there was always more work than Curiosity could handle and Jennet would not leave her in such circumstances. Nor was there any reason to send someone else up the mountain, at least not any reason she could put into words.

On the twenty-fourth of the month, when it seemed that Richard could not last even a single day more, Jennet had begun to wonder if Hannah would ever come to the village or if she might spend the rest of her life hiding on Hidden Wolf.

Jennet was contemplating this possibility when she came up around the final bend to the house and Big let out a single sharp bark. Two shadows rose up from the porch and came running. The three dogs met in a rearing dance, tails wagging fiercely and jaws open wide in greeting. And why not, Jennet thought, they were litter brothers, after all. She herself felt a great rush of happiness and relief, because if Mac and Blue were here that meant people were here from Lake in the Clouds.

Jennet picked up her skirts and pace and the dogs trotted along beside her.

Chapter 14

It happened like this.

Harrison's troops, edgy with their victory, well rested, fed, and full of ale set to work in the abandoned village on the Wabash. First they stole what they wanted: kettles and blankets and baskets of wampum beads ready to be strung, and then they trampled what was left. When they tired of that, Harrison called for torches.

They burned the longhouses and council house and stores: corn and beans to feed five hundred through the winter, gone in mid-November. The smell of burnt corn would linger in the air like a taunt for days.

But before they left for good, fresh scalps swinging from the barrels of their rifles, they dug up every grave, old and new, and scattered the remains to rot in the sun.

The women and old men and the men not yet recovered from battle wounds came back while the dust and smoke still hung in the air. They came back to rebury their dead and build shelters among the ashes and ghosts.

They spoke of leaving. Before the white settlers came to finish what Harrison's men had started; before the snows. Before the real starving began.

It had been the Prophet's responsibility to keep the peace; now he sat aside, silent and disgraced, huddled under a bearskin and waiting for his brother to come home and see what he had wrought. Tecumseh was still somewhere in the south, recruiting warriors for the Ket-tip-pe-can-nunk that was no more.

The women prepared for leaving. At night, by their family fires, the eldest boys argued, but their words could not produce food where there was none. The warriors who healed left to find new battles, and some of the boys went with them. Walking-Woman's son, eight winters old, was too young. One thing to be thankful for.

They wandered away in small groups, women and children and the very old. Some went north to live among the English in Canada. The rest, Kickapoos, Dakotas, Sacs, Mingos, and the others, simply scattered with the winds.

Walking-Woman allied herself to Late-Harvest, a young Wyandot whose Mingo husband had been among the sixty-six killed by Harrison's men. Walking-Woman and her son would travel with Late-Harvest and her group and then, when the time was right, they would strike northeast for Mohawk lands. She would take the boy home to Lake in the Clouds. She would take him to her father and uncle, who would raise him to be the kind of man Strikes-the-Sky wanted him to be.

Makes-a-Fist disappeared in the night before they were to start. She found him sitting in a tree, his bow cradled in his arms. New snow made a cap on his dark head that flew around him when he shook it. He said,
I will not go,
and
my father would not want me to run
and
you are a coward
and
I do not want to live among your white people.
These were strong words, words like a shovel digging a grave; words to break bone. Every one of them true.

They were six women and thirteen children, the youngest still in cradleboards, the eldest twin boys on the brink of manhood. There were two old men, Little-Mouth and Red-Hoof, uncles of Late-Harvest's dead husband. They had a single precious sack of corn from the Kickapoos' hidden stores, a musket with no powder or balls, some knives, four bows, and enough arrows if they were cautious.

Makes-a-Fist would not tolerate his mother's voice or touch or nearness. Instead he attached himself to the twins, Light-Crow and Dark-Crow. The three hunting boys ranged ahead of the women. Grouse, squirrel, rabbits: never enough. The boy brought in his share, and more, and still it was never enough.

They walked hungry. They walked trails the white men had forgotten or never known about; fading back into the woods when they heard horses or people.

At the Ohio they found an old Shawnee with a raft. He was willing to take them over the river to the beginning of Miami territory for three skinny rabbits and the news they had to share.

He poled them through drifts of ice, singing under his breath. Then Red-Hoof lost his footing on the wet log, and the river took him away, his gray hair floating for a moment in an eddy of maple leaves the color of fire. It was too cold to stop and so they sang the story of his life as they walked.

For the first time in her adult life, Walking-Woman stopped thinking of herself as a healer. All her medicines, all her tools, the surgical instruments, all her journals and notes and the records she had kept so faithfully, everything was gone, burned or trampled or stolen. She had nothing to offer these people; she could not fill their stomachs or quiet their fears.

They died, as she knew they must, the oldest and youngest first. A four-month infant of a fever, the second old uncle in his sleep, the mother of the twin boys because her kidneys stopped doing their work. By the time they came to the rolling hills of the Shawnee territory they were five women and nine children.

Makes-a-Fist spoke of his father more with every day of walking. He told stories about Strikes-the-Sky in his mother's hearing, so that Walking-Woman could neither ignore his anger nor put aside her own memories. When her son's fury was hottest, she closed her eyes and saw Strikes-the-Sky dead in a hundred different ways: convulsed with fever, swollen with snake-bite, drowned in a fast river overhung with weeping trees. She imagined him on battlefields, or ambushed, or lying on a pallet among the Osage, unable to ask for water or tell them his name. She saw him shot in the heart, his throat cut, his spine severed, flayed so his skin could be carried away and tanned, an artery in his stomach pumping blood. She blinked, and saw her son beside her husband, dead on the battlefield.

Strikes-the-Sky spoke to her often. He stood just behind her, calmed by death and, it seemed to her, amused by it too. Sometimes he spoke to her of nothing important at all; he reminded her of things they had done, the day he had first seen her, the day they had started the long walk west to join his people. He always ended his visit with the same stern words.

Keep the boy safe.

Makes-a-Fist had been born with a caul. Walking-Woman had watched him appear between her thighs with eyes open wide behind the thin, pearly-white skin of the birth sack. A ghost of a child, she had thought and then he howled, a sound like a panther screaming, and she was so relieved that she might have swooned, if not for the strong hands that held her own: her sister-in-law, gone now too, killed by a soldier when she ran back to the village to get the cooking pot. Walking-Woman remembered the arc of the soldier's sword, so swift and somehow casual, like a man out for a walk, lopping the heads off nettles.

In the newborn's clenched fists they had found more of the birth sack, something that set the women to conjecturing among themselves.
This one will run into battle,
her uncle's wife had said with great pleasure and pride.
This one will be a great hunter.

Good fortune seemed to find them on the day they came to a lake that one tribe called Goose Neck and another, Hollow Waters. It sat among the wooded hills, ringed with a marsh like the stubble on a white man's chin and frozen solid, early and quick, in a series of deep and furious frosts. The weather was clear and the sky bright overhead, with a moon like a fat berry bumping along the horizon to cast pink shadows on the snow.

Late-Harvest found a cave she remembered from her girlhood and in it, waiting for them, a small bear in its winter sleep. Light-Crow killed it with an arrow through the eye and that night every one of them ate their fill. Makes-a-Fist ate until his belly rounded, but in his face his mother saw disappointment. He could not claim any part in the kill, and so the meat was not exactly to his taste.

The food and the warm shelter put them all in good spirits and for once the women spoke among themselves with more animation. Late-Harvest told stories of her girlhood here and of her village, just a few days' walk away. She spoke of her family, who sometimes made winter camp on the shores of this lake. From the mouth of the cave they could see it, glimmering under the moon. Here her father and uncles and brothers and cousins had played bagattaway, as many as fifty of them at a time. Here they hunted and fished and celebrated midwinter.

That night Walking-Woman dreamed of a village put to the torch, the air filled with the reek of burning flesh. She woke with a start to find that her son had put his pallet down next to her for the first time since they had left Ket-tip-pe-can-nunk. His hair had fallen over his face and fluttered with every breath. Walking-Woman touched his skin to feel its warmth. She put her face next to his and slept.

They spent a second day in the cave, rendering bear fat and cooking: food enough to take them to Late-Harvest's village and to offer as a gift to the sachem. The twins went out and brought back more game: two turkeys, a brace of rabbits, a porcupine. Almost more than the women could manage, but they were so pleased and the hunting boys so proud that nothing was said to discourage them.

Walking-Woman woke the next morning with the first scream of the blizzard. She was warm and her belly was full and the snow could not find its way into the cave, and still. She sat up in the near dark and looked hard into the coals in the fire pit, irregular red hearts pulsing and pulsing, close to death now and needing to be fed.

She made herself turn her head, knowing what she would see: the boy's pallet was empty. His bow and quiver were gone and his knife and a small axe; he had taken one of the four pairs of snowshoes they had among them.

Gone to prove the words spoken over him at his birth: this one will be a great hunter.

She would have started out after him but they held her back while the blizzard screamed, all through the day. Walking-Woman did the work they put in her hands, cut strips of meat and turned them on the fire, poured fat into lengths of knotted intestine, took a little girl into her lap and rubbed snow on sore gums where a new tooth was coming. Through all of that she was casting her thoughts out into the world. She spoke to Strikes-the-Sky and he did not answer her.

Too busy looking for the boy,
she thought and then:
now he will turn away from me too. Now they are both angry at me.

The storm died late in the afternoon, but the wind stayed behind. It blew hard, moving snow across the lake in gusts and then back again, sending eddies swirling up into the trees. The sun showed itself, cold and serene, and played on the ice that weighed down branches, scattering rainbows for the wind to hurry away.

They went out to find her boy, the twins and two of the other women and Walking-Woman, who first searched all around the hillside looking for places where he might have taken shelter.

Then she heard the twins calling her, and in that moment something caught up in her throat. Something as hard as a bullet, something with the wet-penny taste of blood. She walked toward the sound of their voices, opened her mouth to call back and found she could not.

They were standing on the lake in the last of the light, two brown faces as alike as chestnuts. They had cleared away a dimpled spot in the new snow that blanketed the lake to find, first, a single snowshoe, then the axe and finally the truth.

Makes-a-First had chopped a hole in the ice in the shape of a moon not quite full. Just big enough to drop a fishing net; big enough to swallow a young boy blinded by a snowstorm. It was frozen over again, the new ice thinner and clearer, and caught up in it, like a fly in a piece of amber: the heron feather that Makes-a-Fist plaited into his hair.

In the end they went on without her. Walking-Woman had some clothes and furs, and they left her what they could: enough meat and bear fat to last a few weeks, a bow and some arrows, a knife and axe and whetstone, a pair of snowshoes, a few flints, some string, a little salt. Late-Harvest promised to send one of her uncles or brothers back with more supplies.

Walking-Woman stood at the mouth of the cave and watched them disappear over the next hill.

In the day she walked the lake, stopping now and then to scrape away the snow, more than three feet deep in some places and nowhere less than two, and stare into the ice and talk to the spirit of the lake, who never answered her.

When the food was gone she made herself a slingshot and began to set snares. Sometimes she found herself without a fire because she had simply forgotten to gather wood and on those nights she went to sleep wondering if she would wake up again.

The Hunger Moon came and went and Walking-Woman learned the shape of the lake by heart. The cold dug in, the kind of cold she remembered from winters in the endless forests: cold leached of color, cold that would not allow snow to fall. And still she went out every day to walk the lake. The snow had grown a crust as hard as glass, but not so fragile: she used the axe to clear a spot when she wanted to study the ice.

Toward the end of the next moon Walking-Woman realized two things: there had been no snow for eight weeks, and her ribs had pushed out against her skin so that she could trace the shape of each of them with the tip of a finger.

It was then that Strikes-the-Sky came back and began to talk to her again as if he had never stopped. At first he only pointed out practical things that she had overlooked: fallen branches for the taking, a good place for a snare. Then, when she had been in the cave for three full moons and the cold had begun to loosen its grip, she found a doe at the mouth of the cave with crows sitting on its head. They looked at her with their sharp black eyes.

Behind her Strikes-the-Sky said,
Now you will eat.
Walking-Woman chased the crows away and that night she slept deeply with the taste of fat bright on her tongue.