The Eden Hunter (17 page)

He looked at her. “Now?”

Beah grabbed the sides of her dress and curtsied. “Yessuh.”

“Why he wanna see me again?”

“Cause you interestin to him.”

“What you mean?”

“Need me to fetch a mirror?”

Though he knew the way to Garçon’s tent, Beah insisted on escorting him there. He left his crutches lying on his camp bed and trailed after her. He favored his sore ankle but kept pace all the same. Outside, one of Garçon’s brindled hounds was bent double in the shade of a massive oak hogshead, licking itself. They walked on, and suddenly a pebble bounced off Beah’s head and then hit Kau in the neck. They both spun around. He thought he heard muffled laughter from atop a near bastion, but could not get a clear look at the face of the man who was taunting them.

 

GARÇON WAS WAITING for him inside the tent. A stained white cloth had been thrown over his square table, and the yellow-toothed skulls of the bear and the panther were gone now. In the center of the table was a green-glass jug of beer, and beside the jug were a pair of tall glasses, two chipped plates and a large covered platter. Garçon unbuttoned his redcoat and they sat. “Please,” he said. “Let us eat.”

Kau was hungry. He could smell the tang of cooked meat and his stomach rumbled. Garçon started to pour beer for him, but Kau declined and asked if he could maybe have water instead. A cook entered the tent, a freckled mulatto with the delicate features of a woman. Garçon spoke to the man in French, and he returned with a porcelain pitcher of water that he placed on the table. The cook then lifted the tarnished cover from the silver platter, and Garçon sighed. “
Pintade
,” he said. “
Oui, René, oui
.”

Kau saw that it was a bird of some sort. Not chicken or duck but guineahen. A young guineahen braised along with vegetables
from the fields—early onions and a few quartered sweet potatoes. The cook produced a large knife and a slotted spoon, then kept glancing over at him as he cut the guineahen in half, dividing the entire dish evenly.

They were served. The tender flesh of the guineahen carried the slight taste of bacon, and Kau began to eat with his hands, slowly at first but then much more quickly. Garçon nodded and seemed pleased. The cook placed a basket of biscuits on the table, and Kau took one of them.

“No crutches, I see.” Garçon pointed his fork at him. “Your ankle has healed?”

Kau swallowed a mouthful of warm biscuit. “Almost,” he said.

“I sense that I will wake one morning and you will be gone. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, am I right?”

“Could be. But I thank you for bringin me here.”

“And of course you are welcome.” Garçon brushed crumbs from the tablecloth with the back of his hand. “But perhaps you are wondering whether I did you a favor?”

“Not right now I don.”

Garçon chuckled. “Very good,” he said. “Very, very good.” He lifted his glass, shutting his eyes as he drank the beer down, then licked his lips and poured himself another. “I hear my fat Beah has let you see my pigeons.”

“Yes.”

“And what else did she tell you about me?”

“She talks morn I listen.”

Garçon smiled at him. “I am sure.” He folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. “In a few days I will be sending Xavier downriver. He has informed me that you might like to join him.”

“I would. Thas true.”

“And why is that?”

Kau was quiet. He was imagining the man Israel and his delta island. If there was one such island, then there might be others. A place where he could build a small hut and live alone and un-bothered. He would fish and hunt and forage—perhaps even serve as a lookout for his savior Garçon, send word to the pigeonkeeper should there be some sign of danger.

“You are thinking?” asked Garçon.

“Yes.”

“Xavier will be leaving in three days. You have my blessing if you would like to go along.”

“I think I would.”

“You have already decided?”

“I spose.”

“Fine. Then it is settled.”

Kau twisted a leg bone free from the guineahen and examined it. “Can I ask you somethin?”

“Go ahead.”

“I hear them sayin the Americans got soldiers not too far upriver.”

“That is correct. At the border.”

“You seen them?”

“I did.”

“Then was you right?”

“Right?”

“They gonna come down here?”

Garçon tilted his head back and began staring at the ceiling of his tent as if there was a picture painted there. “Oh, I’m sure,” he said finally. “And what a fight you will be missing,
mon ami
.” He waved his left arm slowly through the air, then lifted his right. His hands collided in the space above him, and he made a sound like the rush of wind. “We will have our revenge.” Garçon leaned forward. His hands came to rest on the table, and Kau thought of settling birds. “Understand?”

“I understand.”

The heart and liver and gizzard of the guineahen were all that remained on the platter. Garçon speared these one at a time onto the tines of his fork, then offered them to Kau from across the table. “Here,” he said. “The best parts are all for you.”

O
VER THE NEXT two days Kau tested his ankle by taking up his saddlebags and walking across the hundred yards of treeless and burnt cutover that lay between the fort and the pine forest to the east. At the far side of the cutover a path began—a trail that pushed through a short stretch of the pinewoods, then turned south to follow the edges of a dome swamp.

The dome swamp was a half dozen acres of flooded cypress and tupelo into which the surrounding uplands drained. Each morning he circled the entirety of the swamp, and then he would repeat this path throughout the day. He noted subtle changes upon each passing: the progress of a dung beetle in rolling a sun-dried deer turd, the soft prints of a gray fox that had left the swamp to hunt rabbits in the wiregrass savanna.

A thick crowning wall of greenbrier separated his walking path from the dome swamp, and beyond the brier thicket he could smell the dank of the standing water but could not see it. Sometimes when he closed his eyes and listened he would hear splashings—a jittery kingfisher diving for minnows perhaps, a moccasin worrying frogs.

On the second afternoon he knelt and peered down a narrow game trail that cut low through the briers. He was curious to see this swamp, and tomorrow he would be departing. Here was his final chance. He stashed his saddlebags in the briers, then dropped to his stomach and crawled forward.

The briers tore at his clothes like cat claws as through the tunnel he went, his knife gripped in his hand. After learning that his bone club had been taken, Garçon had offered him other weapons. Twice the General had presented him with a flintlock, but both times Kau had declined. If all went very well he would one day again inhabit a place where there was no powder and no shot. He had his knife and his sling, and that was enough. It was time to learn how to live quietly again, how not to depend upon the noisy tools of white men.

After ten yards the briers ended and the true swamp began. He gathered his feet under him and rose up. He was standing on a thin lip of black dirt that ran between the brier edge and a flooded stand of wrist-thick tupelos. The water was still and shined like a mirror. He could sense somehow that he was safe here. This was a forest within a forest. He sheathed his knife, then slowly peeled off his clothes.

He stepped into the dark water and let his foot sink. Powdery sediment pushed through his splayed toes until finally the bottom held firm. He eased forward, grabbing hold of saplings to help keep his balance. Rustling one he heard movement in the high branches, then a sunning snake slapped down onto the water and vanished.

He waded ahead, naked and weaponless, and the trees became larger the farther that he penetrated the swamp. Slender tupelos gave way to fire-blackened cypress, and then the trees were all enormous and well spaced and perfect.

The history of the dome swamp was written on these trees. Five or six years ago a lightning bolt had ignited a longleaf somewhere in the summer pinewoods and sent a great fire roaring through the dust-dry savanna. The birds would be the first to raise the alarm. Woodpecker and quail, songbird and turkey, start leaving in waves. The deer and the squirrels and the bobcats mark the exodus of the birds, then smell the smoke themselves. There is a panicked push for the river, and those animals too slow or too confused or too hampered by young to make the crossing are forced into the dome swamp while others burn dead. The briers catch fire in a uniform burst and form one great ring of solid flame around the swamp. When the blaze reaches the water it sizzles and hisses and the animals seeking refuge within crowd closer still—deer and panther, range stock and bear—they all watch together as burning leaves and needles come raining down. The fire kills the outer-edge tupelos but in the end dies out itself. After two days the forest cools and the exhausted and miserable and spared creatures emerge from the ash-crusted water,
scattering back out into the smoking gray hellscape of the pine forest to once more hunt and be hunted by the other.

 

IN THE CENTER of the dome swamp he found a platform of roughly cut saplings, a sturdy square scaffold cinched with vines to a cluster of tall cypress trees. He ventured closer, and when the foul stench of death struck him he realized that this was the work of Indians, that atop that platform they had placed the body of a man to rot.

If what Samuel and the boy had taught him about the strange ways of the various tribes was correct, the dead Indian was a Choctaw—and Kau wondered whether this man’s own people would forget him once the fort was attacked, if they would ever remember to return here and collect his bones. A breeze blew across the swamp, and he saw feathers drift down from the platform to then settle without a ripple. He watched them drift toward him and thought not of feathers but of butterflies, a flock of drinking butterflies.

He continued on until he was standing just beneath the platform. The water was at his waist, and he raised his hands high above his head, then curled his fingers around one of the cut saplings. He took a deep breath and lifted himself up out of the water.

Skins and pelts were piled across the platform, protecting the dead Choctaw from the buzzards that would want to pick and scatter him. And then Kau looked closer. His bone club had been placed atop the molting skin of an eagle—a gift, he realized, for this warrior to take with him into the afterlife. Kau thought to steal his club back, but in the end he left it behind. Somehow that seemed the wise and proper thing.

 

HE DRESSED HIMSELF, and then as he left the dome swamp he saw parakeets and was reminded of Africa. Of sleek green pigeons and noisy gray parrots. Of the beauty of its creatures. He was sliding along the game trail that ran beneath the brier thicket when the flock descended upon him. The adults were green as pickles to the neck, but had bright yellow heads that were browed with a scarlet mask. He rolled onto his back and watched the chattering birds skitter through the thicket, feeding on the cockleburs that grew up into the briers. It was late in the day and darkening quickly. If the parakeets noticed him hidden beneath them, they were fearless and did not show it.

A much larger flock of parakeets had appeared once in a creek bottom near Yellowhammer. He and the boy had spent the afternoon watching the birds, tracking them to where they roosted like bats in the hollow cores of a series of giant sycamores. Benjamin told his father about the flock and that had been a mistake. The next day the innkeeper and twenty soldiers from the fort spread themselves out among the sycamores and waited. At sunset the parakeets came into the grove in an undulating and unbroken swarm. The men began to fire their fowling pieces, and even after losing two or three dozen the veering flock would circle back and then return, the shooters reloading and firing again until finally it was dark and almost all of the parakeets were dead. That night Kau and Samuel lit torches and collected the fallen birds. A wagon was filled and taken to Milledgeville. Samuel told him that the parakeets would be sold to a milliner there—that those feathers were destined to decorate the hats of fancy women in far-off places.

He lay in the game trail, watching the birds move all around him in the briers. A feeding parakeet is constant motion. A spined bur is plucked from its stem by a short beak, then transferred to dusky claws. The pale and naked foot is reversed at the joint, and then beak attacks bur until the husk crackles open to reveal the seeds within. These seeds are removed peck by peck and then the empty shell is forgotten, dropped. The broken husks bounce down through the briers with a sound like falling rain.

Finally the thicket was stripped of its cockleburs, and the flock left him for the branches of a nearby oak. He emerged from the briers and collected his saddlebags. The brilliant heads of the parakeets in the oak shined yellow in the fading light, and he grunted. They looked so very much like candles to him, hundreds of flickering candles.

 

HE STEPPED OUT of the pine forest and began to pick through the dim cutover to the fort. Teams of oxen were working to wrench burnt stumps from the ground. The smoking bases of the dead pines came twisting from the earth like pulled teeth, their stretched roots so akin to torn nerves that it made him wince. He imagined this land would one day be a tilled field but for now it was just a forest dying. The cooked dirt was hot under his bare feet, and suffering it, he could almost believe in the hell that white men claimed lurked just beneath the crust of the earth, a fire kingdom orange and pulsing. The beating heart of the world.

Farther off the fields and pastures began, and he saw two farmers inspecting a milk cow. One of the men held its tail in his hand
while the other pushed at its hindquarters. Kau walked on and soon the farmers and the livestock and the stumps existed only as shadows. He crossed the small bridge over the stinking moat, and as he did the gate opened.