On Trails (20 page)

His cousin was apparently planning to use the corn as deer bait, a practice Walker frowned upon. Walker preferred to give the deer a chance. “I like to do it fair and square,” he said. “If he can dodge that arrow at thirty yards, that's his business. But if not, I'm gonna put him in the freezer and eat his ass.” All year round, virtually the only meat Walker cooked was wild game. When he had a surplus, as he did most years, he gave it away to his elderly neighbors.

As we neared Moulton, the nearest city to where Walker lived, a coyote streaked brightly through the periphery of our headlights. Along the roadside, Walker pointed out some of the twenty-six historical markers that he had researched, written, and installed. He was at least the seventh generation of his family to live in this area—a legacy that, owing to a considerable quantum of Cherokee and Creek blood in his veins, almost certainly stretched beyond recorded history.

After Andrew Jackson chased most of the Cherokee and Creek people out of Alabama in the early nineteenth century, the state imposed fines for anyone caught trading with members of those tribes, so those who escaped the Removal tended to assimilate. Walker's ancestors, many of whom were mixed-race or full-blooded Cherokee, learned to call themselves “black Irish.” They were proud, independent folk who lived off the land, never made much money, and occasionally intermarried. Walker often joked that his family tree was more like “a family wreath,” because his great-great grandparents had the same grandparents, a fact that is (at least somewhat) less scandalous than it initially sounds: a brother and a sister married a brother and a sister, and then two of their children (first cousins) married each other. Walker said he was not personally opposed to marrying a first cousin, either, though the opportunity had never presented itself.

At the age of sixty-three, he had already quit his job as the director of the Lawrence County Schools' Indian education program to devote himself full-time to bow hunting and studying local history. He had published fourteen histories, eight of which were in print through a publisher out of Killen, Alabama, called Bluewater Publications. “I can talk your ear off about history,” he warned me. “I'm a history
nut
.”

His grasp of the local history was indeed profound, even overwhelming. He would often begin enumerating a single piece of information, such as the age of a courthouse, but then become lost amid the rhizomatic tangle of ancestry, language, and geography that makes up the Old South. (One afternoon, during a soliloquy on
Indian trails that had somehow veered into an account of the life of the hometown hero and Nazi-conquering Olympian Jesse Owens, Walker caught me dozing off in the passenger seat.) Never in my life had I met a white American who was as deeply rooted in one piece of land. He seemed to know the history of every brick in town. But if he were to drive seventy-five miles away, he would be on terra nova. “I don't know the history of anything else,” he said, “but I know the history of my little area.”

For him, the wide four-lane roads were overlaid with the onionskin of history. Instead of Highway 41, Walker saw the Old Jasper Road, a wagon trail that once ran from Tuscaloosa to Nashville. As we turned onto Byler Road, Walker said: “See, now this was called the Old Buffalo Trail. They say you could ride a horse at a full gallop along a buffalo trace and never worry about tree limbs or anything.”

Before they were decimated by the rifle and the railway, buffalo had once swarmed the continent from coast to coast, transforming it as they went. American bison (as they are properly known), rather like elephants, tend to walk in single file and can travel great distances. However, unlike elephants, they also sometimes move in oceanic herds; in 1871, Colonel R. I. Dodge encountered a single herd he estimated was twenty-five miles across and fifty miles long. In their endless search for grass, water, and minerals, buffalo created graded trails down hillsides and riverbanks, which became known as “buffalo landings.” Where they stopped to wallow, they dug dusty saucers and shallow ponds. They bashed through canebrakes and smashed down groves of Quaking Aspen. Some of their trails were faint, while others were so deep that their shoulders rubbed against the embankments. (A few of these trails, which are still visible in aerial photographs, are so deep that they have been mistaken by geologists for trenches carved out by glaciers.) The Old Buffalo Trail that Walker had pointed out once connected Moulton up to a massive salt deposit called Bledsoe's Lick, where, in 1769, a hunter named Isaac Bledsoe had stumbled
upon thousands of buffalo. Around the area's salt licks, the buffalo created radiating trail networks reminiscent of Parisian avenues.

As buffalo trails often do, this section of the Old Buffalo Trail lay on a dividing ridge between two rivers. Buffalo tended to clear trails along dividing ridges, where the walking was easy. Like elephants, they also found the lowest passes over the mountains. When Daniel Boone blazed the Wilderness Road, he followed the path of the Cherokee and Shawnee Indians, who in turn followed the bison, through the Cumberland Gap. In
Rising From the Plains
, John McPhee recounted learning from the geoscientist David Love how bison had discovered the so-called “gangplank,” a geological ramp that provided “the only place in the whole Rocky Mountain front where you can go from the Great Plains to the summit of the mountains without snaking your way up a mountain face or going through a tunnel.” The gangplank provided the ideal route for the Union Pacific Railroad, which would link the industrialized east to the Wild West.

The geographer A. B. Hulbert wrote that the buffalo “undoubtedly ‘blazed'—with his hoofs on the surface of the earth—the course of many of our roads, canals, and railways.” However, this neatly teleological account—from bison trails to roads and railways—­drastically underplays the role humans played in creating these networks. In many areas, buffalo trails ran in all directions, providing a wealth of options but little direction—historical reports are filled with accounts of pioneers becoming lost in a “maze” of buffalo paths. In other places, there were no buffalo trails at all. What now seems likely is that many of those travelers who marveled at the buffalo's “wonderful sagacity,” like Lewis and Clark, had Indian guides who knew which buffalo (or other game) trails to follow, knew which to ignore, and had already furnished paths for the areas where game had not.

The subsequent decline of the bison is well known. As demand grew for their hides, which were used as fur coats and factory belts, white hunters poured westward on the railways, often shooting the
buffalo directly from passing trains. Other times, the buffalo were killed by the trains themselves; the sound of an approaching locomotive sometimes prompted them to rush across the tracks in blind terror.

For the federal government, the destruction of the buffalo held a certain monstrously efficient logic: it removed one nuisance (cutting down on the pesky buffalo, which ate up valuable grass, muddied ponds, and derailed trains), while weakening another (depriving the Plains Indians of their staple food source and forcing them to end their roaming existence). President Ulysses S. Grant wrote in 1873 that he “would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western prairies,” as their extinction might increase native people's “sense of dependence upon the products of the soil and their own labors” (i.e., agriculture and capitalism). Millions of buffalo were killed in the 1870s, and by the 1880s they were already becoming scarce. Their bones piled up like snowdrifts, and then were shipped back east to be turned into fertilizer and fine bone china. More than a century later, their absence is felt primarily as a ghostly presence. They are gone, but their trails remain.

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It was dark by the time we pulled up to Walker's home—a huge, lovingly crafted two-story house, which he had built largely on his own. “I got seven bathrooms in this house,” he proudly announced when we walked in from the garage. “Did all the plumbing myself.”

He gave me a quick tour of the house's many rooms, flushing the unused toilets in each bathroom so the pipes wouldn't dry out. He was divorced (five times, in fact), and his kids were all grown up, so he lives there alone. On the second floor, he took out a laminated map of the surrounding area and unrolled it on the floor. The map was incredibly detailed; it spanned eight feet from the left edge to the right, but covered less than twenty-two miles. Each hill and hollow was named: Brushy Mountain, Cedar Mountain, Sugar Camp Hollow. “This was
my stomping grounds,” he said. “I've hiked every creek and hollow in this whole area. Never have been lost back there, that I know of.”

Walker had spent his entire life hunting and gathering in one way or another. He pointed out where he used to dig for ginseng, where he used to fish, where he used to probe for mud turtles. As a young boy he had prowled those woods with his tick hound, Blue John, hunting for possums, rabbits, and raccoons. He had set traps for mink and bobcat. Whatever meat he brought home—be it deer, groundhog, possum, raccoon, muskrat, beaver, skunk, squirrel, rabbit, quail, dove, wood cock, snipe, duck, goose, turkey, turtle, bullfrog, or any kind of fish or small bird—his grandmother would expertly cook it up on her wood-fired stove. Pork and chicken were reserved for special occasions.

When Walker was eight his great-grandfather—who was one-eighth Cherokee—had agreed to make him a traditional Cherokee bow and a set of arrows. In his memoir,
Celtic Indian Boy of Appalachia
, Walker describes the process with exacting detail: First, the old man and the boy set out in search of a straight-grained white oak tree that was about two feet in diameter. When they found it, they cut it down with a cross-cut saw, marked off eight feet, and sawed it again. Walker watched as his great-grandfather used a set of metal wedges and a sledgehammer to split the tree in half lengthwise, and then again into quarters. The brittle heartwood was removed and set aside, and the sapwood was split again to create “bolts.” His great-grandfather then used a drawknife and then a pocketknife to carve one of the bolts into a bow. (The other bolts were saved for future projects, like axe handles and walking canes.) The old man sanded the bow smooth, rubbed it with brown beeswax, and attached a bowstring made of hemp string, also rubbed with beeswax. Then he carved a set of arrows from slivers of the white oak, fletched them with turkey feathers, and attached steel arrowheads he had forged by hand.

Walker hunted with that bow all through his adolescence. After
hunting, he had a habit of storing his bow beneath the tin roof of his grandpa's barn, so that it wouldn't warp. One day, he came back to find that someone had taken it. He was in his twenties by that point, but he nevertheless cried over the loss.

Back downstairs, in the garage, Walker showed me his current bow collection, which hung from screws in the wall. First, he handed me a long wooden bow, which was unstrung. It was made of pale white oak; the grain ran north-south. “This is nearly exactly a replica of the bow my great-grandpa made me,” he said. A friend had made him the replica as a gift after his first bow had disappeared, but by that point Walker had already upgraded.

He told me to flex the bow against my thigh as if to string it, to see how “stout” it was. It was like trying to bend a two-by-four. Walker hung the replica back up on the wall. “Now, let me show you what I'm hunting with,” he said.

He opened the door of the truck and pulled out a black plastic case, like that of a musical instrument. Inside, nested in foam padding, was a state-of-the-art compound bow. It was muscular and crooked, like a pair of dragon's wings. Its limbs were made of some fancy composite metal and painted with a camouflage pattern. As opposed to a single bowstring, this one appeared to have three: the string was looped through two pulleys (called “cams”) at the top and bottom of the bow. Walker handed it to me and instructed me to draw the bowstring. It drew with great reluctance, until the cams began to turn, and then it eased until, near the end, it pulled as smoothly as warm taffy. I looked through the “peep sight,” a metal cheerio connected to the middle of the bowstring, to the neon three-pin sight that Walker used to adjust for distance. Normally, Walker wouldn't have been pulling the string back with his fingers; he used a “trigger release”—a device that looped around his wrist, ran along his palm, and hooked onto the bowstring—to ensure a smoother shot. I held the string at full draw for a few seconds, effortlessly, and felt a quivering poten
tiality of power. Instead of letting go (which Walker sternly advised me against), I awkwardly tried to ease it back to its resting position; the string yanked with surprising force, and the bow nearly leaped from my hands.

“It's like I tried to tell my son-in-law,” Walker said. “You need to make sure you get the best equipment, because killing should be humane and quick. Faulty equipment can cause a bad kill, and you can wound a lot of animals.”

Inside the plastic case was a quiver full of carbon fiber arrows with razor-sharp expandable broadheads. Walker tested each of the arrowheads against the side of his boot to make sure the expansion mechanism was working. They opened and closed like little silver birds, gliding and diving, gliding and diving.

One of them wasn't opening properly. Walker inspected it and found it was clotted with dried blood, so he rinsed it in the sink. He wiped it dry, and placed it, gleaming, back inside the case.

“I believe if our ancestors”—meaning the Cherokee—“woulda had those bows, things woulda turned out a little bit different,” he said. “I would hate to know that I would have to stand forty yards from me with that bow right there in my hand.”

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The next morning we woke before dawn. Walker cooked us a breakfast of venison sausage, biscuits, gravy, and wild muscadine jam. Out in the garage, he was upset to discover that he had forgotten to dry his camouflage overalls the last time he went hunting, and they had “gone sour.” The camouflage balaclavas—which would be pressed to our noses for much of the day—had soured, too. We put our kit on anyway, climbed in the truck, and drove to a piece of private land owned by Walker's friend. We parked the truck and climbed out as quietly as possible, being sure not to slam the doors. Walker led me through the woods, sweeping his flashlight left and right to point
out the various deer trails that intersected with the main path. He reached down and picked up a handful of empty acorn caps. “That's a good sign,” he whispered.