People of the Longhouse (23 page)
Read People of the Longhouse Online
Authors: W. Michael Gear
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Native American & Aboriginal
Our guards chuckle. They are amused by hope. Perhaps because they’ve seen it die in the eyes of so many children.
I close my eyes and concentrate.
Beneath all the noise, I can hear Father’s voice as he jerks me from my bed: “Odion, take Tutelo. Run as far away as you can and hide. I’ll find you, no matter where you are.
I’ll find you
.”
I’ll find you
.”
Peace fills me. He’s coming.
Mother’s with him. They’ll be here before I wake in the morning. We’ll all go home together. We’ll help our clan build a new longhouse. We’ll be happy … .
A
s Gonda slogged through a swampy area on the east side of the pond, hopelessness taunted him. Every time they thought they were on the right path, it vanished. He felt weak and desperate. He didn’t know exactly when it had happened, but somewhere in the past few days, he’d lost himself. What remained sickened him—the husk of the man he’d once been. And he was weary enough, disheartened enough, that all he wanted to do was to crawl inside that husk and hide forever.
s Gonda slogged through a swampy area on the east side of the pond, hopelessness taunted him. Every time they thought they were on the right path, it vanished. He felt weak and desperate. He didn’t know exactly when it had happened, but somewhere in the past few days, he’d lost himself. What remained sickened him—the husk of the man he’d once been. And he was weary enough, disheartened enough, that all he wanted to do was to crawl inside that husk and hide forever.
Koracoo met him as he slogged out of the water and stepped onto dry land. She was less than six hands away, and he felt her nearness like a physical blow.
“Did you find any evidence that they marched through the pond?”
He shook his head. His drenched moccasins squished with his movements. “At first, I thought …” He turned to look back across the small pond to the place where he’d thought he’d seen a track. Steep rocky mountains rose on either side of the narrow valley. Towa and Sindak were still searching the trails that led to the pond. “I didn’t even find a bent reed. Did you find anything around the edges?”
Her face was drawn and pale, and the bones beneath her tanned skin were too sharp. Her unevenly chopped hair stuck out oddly from too much time in the wind. “No.”
He waited for instructions, but Koracoo just hung her head and closed her eyes, as though too tired to think straight.
“Are you all right?”
“Tired. That’s all.”
Gonda turned away and looked northward to where a wall of bruised clouds massed.
She had never asked him what had happened the night of the attack. She was a pragmatist. She’d found him, made sure he was all right, and led him back to the burning village to attend the emergency council meeting. The few surviving elders had all blamed Gonda for the debacle. Koracoo had carefully questioned them, heard their stories, and helped them plan what to do next. Immediately thereafter, she’d walked to the Bear Clan longhouse, pulled out what few belongings she could find that had belonged to him, and set them outside the door—divorcing him.
Less than one hand of time later, they were on the trail, searching for their children. The shame and grief were still unbearable.
“Gonda, I need your advice. What do you think we should do? I’m out of ideas.”
He felt a sudden lightness, as though all the horrors that lived inside him had suddenly dropped away. She needed him. He straightened to his full height. “What’s CorpseEye telling you?”
She pulled the club off her shoulder and held it in both hands. “He’s gone stone-cold.”
The two black spots that dotted the red cobble head of the war club seemed to be looking straight at him, as though to say,
Stop being foolish. You know the way.
Stop being foolish. You know the way.
“Perhaps because we’re on the right trail,” Gonda said.
Koracoo cocked her head doubtfully. “Maybe, but there’s so much I don’t understand.”
“Like what?”
“Why is it that we can track them across bare stone, but not across the ground?”
Softly, Gonda said, “We both know now, don’t we? We’re not tracking warriors with slaves. Warriors heading home wouldn’t take the time to hide their trail this way.”
She jerked a nod. “We both know.”
Hesitantly, he continued, “There’s something I’ve been thinking about.”
“What?”
The sudden arrival of a flock of crows made her look up. The black birds cawed as they playfully dove and soared, their ebony wings flashing in the sunlight.
“I have the feeling we’re tracking an orb weaver, Koracoo.”
“An orb weaver?” They were spiders that spun spiraling webs.
“Yes. Each night the spider’s old web is replaced by a new one, spun in complete darkness by touch alone.”
“You mean she travels at night?”
“I mean she’s a creature of darkness. She stands in her web at night, but retreats from it during the day. I suspect that all of her spiderlings do the same. She orders her warriors to meet in a certain place at nightfall, but at dawn—”
“They scatter.”
Tingling heat flushed his body at the look on her face. She stepped closer to stare him in the eyes. “During the day, they all take different paths to hide their numbers? That would explain some things. It is much easier to track a war party than a single man, especially a skilled warrior taking pains to hide his trail.”
“If that’s what they’re doing, we need a new strategy.”
The longer they stood staring at each other, the more powerfully he longed to touch her. Strands of black hair curled over her tanned cheeks, and there was something about the sternness of her expression—as though she were holding herself together by sheer willpower—that built a desperate need in his heart.
“What are you thinking?” Gonda asked.
“I’m wondering if Towa wasn’t right to begin with. We should spread out more. Work exactly the opposite of how we’ve been working. Instead of walking eastward, paralleling what we think is the trail, perhaps we should work perpendicular, cut across the forest from north to south looking for sign.”
Emotion rose up to choke him. She was right. Why hadn’t he thought of it himself? Gonda lifted a hand to touch her face, but halted, and let it hover awkwardly. If she would only take a step toward him. But she did not, and he clenched his hand into a fist and lowered it to his side.
“Let’s try it,” he said simply. “It’s a good idea.”
She held his gaze for far longer than she had since the attack. It was an instant of shared hope and pain, and he cherished it. He engraved her expression on his soul, so that he could pull it up again and again when he thought he could bear no more of the futility of the search.
“Koracoo, I wish that you and I …” Tears burned his eyes.
He clenched his jaw and looked away. She hated excessive emotion. She said it weakened everyone who witnessed it. He recalled once on a raid when a man had thrown himself over the body of his dead friend and begun wailing. The grief had spread like a contagion. Within ten heartbeats, every warrior was sobbing or sniffling. Koracoo’s response had been to walk straight to the man who’d started it and slap him senseless. Shocked, he’d looked up at her. She’d ordered, “Get up now or you’ll be joining your friend in the afterlife.”
Gonda blinked away his tears and shot a look at Towa and Sindak. They were carefully examining the bark on an oak tree, as though they’d found something. For the past hand of time, they’d been walking through gigantic oaks. A canopy of laced branches roofed the trails and cast brilliant geometric patterns across the acorn-covered ground.
“All right,” he said. “Here’s my advice: If we don’t find anything here, I think we should split up, send Towa and Sindak back to the place where we lost the trail, and let them cut for sign while you and I continue north and do the same thing.”
“When and where will we meet?”
“What about dusk south of Hawk Moth Village? You know the place where the main trail forks?”
They both watched Sindak. He’d climbed up into the oak and seemed to be examining the limbs. Below him, Towa was apparently asking questions—his mouth was moving.
“It’s risky. We’ll be on the border of Flint People lands. They might kill us just for daring to step into their country.”
“We were worried about the same thing with Atotarho. We survived.”
Wind blew her short hair around her face, spiking it up more than before. She faintly resembled a startled porcupine. In the old days, he would have told her that, and she’d have laughed. But there was no laughter between them now.
“All right. Let’s tell our allies the new plan.” Koracoo started back for Towa and Sindak.
Gonda followed her around the edge of the pond and back into the laced shadows cast by the heavy oak boughs. Even the small limbs were as wide across as his shoulders. These ancient giants must have seen hundreds of summers pass.
Sindak jumped down from the tree, and he and Towa watched their approach with narrowed eyes. Towa stood a head taller than Sindak. He’d braided and coiled his long hair into a bun, then pinned it at the back of his head with a rabbit-bone skewer. The style made his handsome oval face appear regal. Sindak, on the other hand, looked shaggy. His shoulder-length hair was disheveled and matted to his forehead by sweat. In the mottled light, his deeply sunken brown eyes resembled dark pits and his hooked nose cast a shadow.
“War Chief,” Sindak said. “We found something.”
Koracoo picked up her pace. “Show me.”
All four of them gathered around the base of the oak, and Sindak put his finger below a fresh scar on the bark. It was a lighter-colored patch, no bigger than a thumb.
Gonda examined it and said, “It might be a scar left by a buck. They sharpen and clean their antlers on the trees—but it’s small for an antler rub.”
“Or it could have been made by a flicker. They love to bury insects in cracks in the bark,” Koracoo added.
“That’s what we thought at first,” Sindak said. He shoved damp hair away from his homely face and continued, “But if you look at the rest of the tree, you’ll see more of them.”
Sindak climbed back up into the tree, and Gonda followed him. As they climbed higher, the rich fragrance of wet wood encircled them. Gonda breathed it in—a soothing scent that reminded him of his childhood, when he’d done a great deal of tree climbing.
Sindak stepped out onto the first major branch and bent down to show Gonda another bark scar. This one was even smaller than the first, but clearer. “If you climb higher, you’ll find these small scars on almost every branch.”
Gonda stared upward into the crooked sunlit limbs. A few old leaves and acorns clung to the highest branches. They swayed in the breeze. “Are the scars always right next to the trunk?”
“Yes.”
Sindak was looking at him expectantly, as though the truth should be obvious.
“So,” Gonda said, “you think someone climbed up here using the limbs as a ladder?”
Sindak pointed to the place twenty hands above them where the massive limbs of two trees met. “Right there, where the limbs overlap, it looks like the climber stepped from this tree to the next one.
And if you’ll look over there”—he pointed to a place where the limbs of the next tree overlapped with a tree farther north—“you’ll see that he could have moved to yet another tree.”
And if you’ll look over there”—he pointed to a place where the limbs of the next tree overlapped with a tree farther north—“you’ll see that he could have moved to yet another tree.”
Gonda let his gaze scan the oaks. With careful planning, a man could go a long way climbing from one tree to the next. And if he did it often, he could do it relatively quickly.
“They … they’re climbing through the trees? Is that why we keep losing the trail?”
Sindak nodded. “It might be. I have noticed that every time we lose it we are surrounded by giant hickories, or oaks, or other big trees with spreading limbs. That’s what made me start looking closely at the trunks. I wanted to see if I could spot scars left by feet.”
Hope flooded Gonda’s veins, and without thinking, he slapped Sindak on the shoulder approvingly. “You are a good tracker, Sindak. Just the way Towa said. Let’s tell the others.”
They climbed down.
Before they’d even jumped to the ground, Koracoo called, “Well? What did you find?”
Gonda said, “Sindak is right. There are scars all the way up the trunk. Someone has been using the trees, climbing through the branches, moving from tree to tree.”
“We can’t be certain, of course,” Sindak said, “that this is the trail we seek, but it’s a trail.”
Koracoo’s gaze shot upward and darted over the limbs, moving, as the climbers must have, from one heavy limb to another to another. It would have been even easier for children. They were lighter and could have used more of the forest canopy to travel. “This changes everything.”
“What do you mean?”
Gonda nodded at her, then said to Towa, “Earlier, Koracoo and I were talking. Koracoo said that instead of paralleling the trails, we should cut across them, moving from north to south, searching for sign. But now that we know they are using the trees—”
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