The Eden Hunter (3 page)

 

AT DARK CAME the chitter of coons night-fishing the shallows. He crawled out from under the dugout and the startled coons fled. A shooting star streaked across the southern sky and burned into nothing. It was time to move on.

 

HE WAS ALL night on the water before he rounded an elbow bend and saw the blockade. Two wide flatboats sat anchored across the river, the pine barges illuminated by the false-dawn glow of torches. Soldiers leapt from boat to boat, and in the center of the flotilla he saw the slavecatcher, Lawson, a leashed hound in either hand. Kau watched him and thought of a thing that Samuel would sometimes say when a bad man slunk past Yellowhammer.

That fella there be the Devil’s own pirate.

Kau backpaddled against the current, straining to avoid the place where the dark ended and light began. A dog barked but then went quiet. Kau made for the western shore, and he was guiding the dugout through a field of bone-smooth cypress knees when something hard and fast and hot tore across the slope of his shoulder. A musket boomed, and beneath a shoreline shower of flint-sparks and smoke stood a moonfaced soldier. Kau rolled into the water and unsheathed his knife. A great black cloud of mosquitoes lifted, and he was splashing toward the shore when the soldier threw down his spent musket. The man turned and ran in
the direction of the downriver blockade. He was yelling in a high and winded voice, screaming, “Don’t shoot, it’s Jacob! He’s back there! He’s back there!”

There were constant hollers down the line as the soldier retreated. Kau grabbed the musket and saddlebags from the dugout, and a hunting horn sounded as he began moving away from the river.

 

HE WAS A quarter mile from the blockade when dawn burst and the hounds picked up his trail. He had already jettisoned the horse feed—the cooking pot as well—yet still they gained. He doubled back on a low ridge and inspected his shoulder. The musket ball had sliced a furrow through the caked clay, leaving a shallow red scrape but no real damage. He pressed clean green leaves against the cut and sat down with the musket. If they were trying to kill him then they must have found the body of the sentinel, maybe even the sunken boy. He lifted the frizzen to check the prime on the flashpan. The powder looked dry but he added a little more from the powderhorn. The hounds would be ariving soon. He laid the musket across the front of his breechcloth and he waited.

 

IN THE GRAY light he saw the blurred mass of the main pack pour into the draw beneath him. They continued on, then were followed in a short while by a bell-mouthed bitch—pregnant, her teats heavy with milk—carefully working the scent with an occasional bawl. The old slavehound was nosing through the dry leaves when she came to a stop. She sat on her haunches with her head tilted, and then Kau whistled low and she let loose a howling bay, long and
deep. He knelt on the ridge, cocking back the hammer of the musket as she came in a lumber. The bellowing hound was almost to him when he thrust the musket forward and pulled the trigger. The flashpan hissed before finally the muzzle load caught. There was an explosion and then a sharp, quick yelp. He opened his eyes and saw the hound sliding slowly down the hill, her frothing jaws clicking so that for a moment she looked like some enormous dying insect.

The main pack went silent at the shot, and he pulled the powderhorn from a saddlebag and began reloading the musket—a four-count measure of powder, a ball wrapped in a greased patch of cloth and fitted into the muzzle. He pushed the ramrod down the barrel and was priming the flashpan when the hounds started up again. They were moving west still, staying true to the trail he had laid, and this helped to settle him. He tucked the powderhorn through his belt and stood, shouldering his saddlebags as he started out in a straight southern jog.

The hunting horn sounded, but the hounds were overeager and refused to quit the hot trail. Twice more Lawson tried to call in his dogs to check their pursuit. Each time they ignored the slavecatcher’s horn. Kau pushed forward, running, and soon the river-bottom graywoods rose into green pinewoods as the whole of the morning sun emerged in the golden east.

 

IN A SKELETON forest of fire-scarred pine he stopped again. A lightning-struck longleaf had snapped near its base, and he crawled carefully atop that jagged and oozing pedestal. Behind him he could see quick streaks of hide as the hounds came like
monkeys moving through a canopy. He pinned his saddlebags between his feet and waited.

Before long five hounds had collected at the burnt and broken stump, clawing at pine bark as they tried to reach him. He shot a young male point-blank in the chest, then pulled patch and ball from a saddlebag and reloaded as quickly as he could manage. Another point-blank shot and Lawson began to scream. Kau could hear him clearly now. “Where the hell are you?” the slavecatcher hollered. “I’m a-coming, nigger.”

Kau fired again, and the surviving pair of hounds skulked off whimpering and ruined just as the slavecatcher appeared in his torn buckskins. He was tall and thin and bearded, had black hair veined with gray. Lawson saw the three dogs lying dead at the foot of the broken pine and hurried forward in a hunched trot. At thirty yards the exhausted man raised his longrifle, the black barrel cutting small circles as he tried to take aim. Kau finished seating another ball, then waved the ramrod in the air as he spoke out across the distance between them. “Lemme alone,” he said. “You miss and I’m gonna kill you.”

“So it talks,” said the slavecatcher.

Lawson rushed his shot and there came the hollow echo-knock of a lead ball burying itself into a faraway tree. Kau leapt from his pine stump and the slavecatcher turned to run. The two remaining hounds shied as Kau pursued their master. He primed the musket’s flashpan on the sprint, then let the powderhorn fall to the ground. At an arm’s length he shot Lawson low in the back, the barrel so close that for a moment the man’s greasy buckskins caught fire. The
slavecatcher collapsed, gutshot and smoking, and Kau came sliding down beside him.

Lawson’s pink stomach was split across the middle and showing cords of intestine. His mouth cracked open. Two of his front teeth were missing. “Well, you’ve gone and done it,” he whispered. “Done what the lobsterbacks never could.”

Kau ran his fingers over the stock of Lawson’s longrifle. There were stripes and curls in the amber wood. “I gave you a good choice in this,” he said.

“Turning tail from some rag-wearing nigger wasn’t no choice.”

“You done ran though.”

Lawson called for the two hounds but they stayed huddled together and frightened among the already dead. Kau watched them and thought of the calmed lions in one of Samuel’s Bible stories. Lawson cursed the dogs and then he cursed him. “You son of a bitch,” he said. The slavecatcher coughed and a trickle of blood escaped the corner of his scabbed mouth. He started to shiver. Sweat had pooled in the hairless hollow of his chin.

Kau touched him on the shoulder. “I can go and cut your throat if you want that.”

“Well,” said Lawson. “I don’t.”

“Be a long while fore they findin you.”

“I ain’t afraid.”

“You gonna be. At the end.”

Lawson spit blood at him but missed. “What I might fear ain’t no concern of yours.”

Kau nodded and the two of them sat there in silence, thinking. A fox squirrel chattered as he unsheathed his knife. He had realized something. “I should scalp you,” he said.

“Now why?”

“Them soldiers maybe go thinkin redsticks about.” Kau moved closer. “Lose they heart for chasin me.”

The slavecatcher sighed a scratched breath. “Play Indian with your possum teeth. I ain’t gonna die begging.”

“I’ll kill you fore I do it.”

“Well, thank the good Jesus for that.” Lawson sneered and then spit more bright blood. “You kill that boy?”

Kau looked up, searching the blackened forest for danger. “Not wantin to.”

The slavecatcher repeated the words, mocking the thickness of his accent. “Ain’t what I asked,” he said.

“You go and whip my friend?”

Lawson nodded and Kau smelled shit, piss. “I was a scout for Marion, spied with my own eyes that British bastard Tarleton making a Patriot widow dig up her dead husband.” The slavecatcher shook his head. “Least that was a war.”

“That means you ready?”

“Don’t mean that at all.”

“You won’t feel nothin.”

The slavecatcher laughed a high chopping laugh, and a red mist sprayed from his mouth. “Get on,” he said. “This has become an ugly world.”

Kau pressed the blade against the loose and wrinkled skin folded across Lawson’s throat. “I know that,” he said.

“Well, then you go on and live free in it awhile,” said the slavecatcher. “See if it treats you any better now.”

D
AYS OF WANDERING. He buried the slavecatcher’s scalp in a bobcat den and walked south, moving at night, following the stars to Florida. The clay that had once coated him dried into brick dust and fell away, and his skin was left stained red and itching. His breechcloth was now dyed the color of rust.

It was easy country to traverse and at times he grew angry with himself for not bolting long before. He crossed pine flatlands that in low spots dropped off into thin finger forests of virgin oak and elm—beech, sycamore and chestnut—shady hollows where clear springs flowed and he could escape the stunning heat of the day. The cut on his shoulder from the musket ball scabbed and then healed.

As a distraction from thoughts of Samuel and the boy, he collected arrowheads as he walked—chert bird-points and deer-points.
This was land forfeited by the Creeks to the Americans at the end of the Creek civil war, but still the Indians lingered. He could see their scattered sign and surely they his, and yet one did not cause harm upon the other. A peace persisted. Some understanding that he was only a traveler passing through. A visitor laying no claim. A small man who would leave no lasting mark of any consequence, no evidence that he had ever even existed. This was a wilderness.

 

HE HAD TRADED the dead sentinel’s musket and accessories for Lawson’s longrifle and hunting pouch and powderhorn. Kau brought the longrifle to his shoulder and his finger only barely reached the trigger. Though lighter than the musket, the flintlock was as long as he was from brass buttplate to muzzle. Still, he stared down the barrel and nodded, supposed that he could continue to kill at very close range and that maybe—one day and with practice—he would be able to shoot with the skill of the innkeeper, a man who could snipe a fish crow from the top branch of a cross-river cypress, tumble a running fox.

 

ON HIS WALK he saw many deer, sorrel in their spring coats, and though he needed to test himself with the longrifle he thought it even more important that he move in a whisper through this strange land. He foraged for his food at dawn and at dusk, collecting ripe berries and fat white grubs, stabbing pine snakes and woodrats with a three-pronged gig sharpened from a hickory stick. He was tracking a diamondback through sugar sand one morning when he encountered an old Indian woman sitting alone near the entrance
of a tortoise burrow. She was a Creek, he decided. Her lined face was the color of dark cedar, and she was wearing only moccasins and a faded British redcoat decorated with broken pieces of mirror. Though he made no effort to hide, she did not seem aware of his presence.

He spoke out to her in the faltering Creek he had learned during his years at Yellowhammer. “Grandmother,” he asked, “is this Florida?”

The woman gave a vague and toothless smile but said nothing in reply. Nearby a gopher tortoise—its scaly hind legs hobbled together by the end of a long rope—struggled across the sand, fighting to return to the burrow that it had been stolen from.

He stood watching the woman, and after a while another tortoise emerged. The woman rushed forward like a statue gone living and flipped the tortoise onto its back. She tied this second tortoise to the other end of the rope and then lifted them both up so that they hung like fish on a stringer. The rope was placed atop her balding head like a tumpline, and the kicking tortoises bounced against her small hips as she disappeared down a thin scratch path that meandered through the clumps of pale green wiregrass.

 

MOST NIGHTS IT was humid and hot like some darkened day and the snap of a broken stick would cut the stillness with a sound like a whipcrack. Other nights it would rain and this was in fact best because he could move through the forest trackless and without sound.

To sleep was to dream. And to dream was to see the dead boy.

Late afternoon. Upon rising for his tenth night of walking south he spotted a thickening thread of smoke in the near distance. He folded his horse blanket as he considered whether to keep on or investigate. Soon he would have the cover of darkness, and in the end he decided that perhaps in seeking out that fire he would come upon some clue as to whether finally, after so many nights of travel, he had at last crossed over into Florida.

 

THE NIGHT BREEZE was in his face and he could smell the wood smoke as he walked. Before long he came to a clearing in the pines where pioneers had cut a shallow potato field in the poor soil. Across the way stood a small barn, and beside it a cabin was burning down to its gray-rock chimney. In the glow of the orange fire an enormous Indian was pushing himself against a bent white woman. A smaller figure leaned against a toppled middlebreaker, watching, and a man lay dead and mutilated in the nearby dust with killed daughter and killed son and killed plow mule. The shock-struck wife made no real sound as the giant forced his way inside of her.

Kau hid himself and decided that these two Indians were Red Stick Creeks—the villains of all those Yellowhammer stories, the terrors of the federal road. The smaller Indian moved away from the middlebreaker, and Kau saw that she was a young woman. She called out to the giant and he quit with his raping long enough to slide the pioneer’s long dress free from her milky body. He threw the dress high into the air, and as it came ballooning down the redstick girl caught it. She laughed and then danced as she pulled the dress on over her head.