The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 75

They understood no English, but the big Indian made no attempt to stop him from examining the injured man. As soon as he groped beneath the tattered fur clothing it was apparent that the hunter had suffered a posterior dislocation of the right hip and was in agony. The sciatic nerve had been damaged, because his foot hung loose, and when Rob pulled off his skin shoe and p.r.i.c.ked him with a knife point, he was unable to move his toes. The guarding muscles had become as intractable as wood because of pain and the freezing cold, and there was no way to set the hip then and there.

To Rob J.'s annoyance, the large Indian mounted his horse and abandoned them, riding across the prairie toward the tree line, perhaps for help. Rob was wearing a moth-eaten sheepskin coat, won at poker from a lumberjack the previous winter, and he took it off and covered the patient, then opened his saddlebag and took out rag bandages that he used to tie the Indian's legs together to immobilize the unseated hip. Presently the large Indian returned dragging two trimmed tree limbs, stout but flexible poles. Tying them on each side of his horse as shafts, he connected them with some of his skin garments until he had a trailing litter. Onto this they lashed the injured man, who must have suffered terribly as he was trailed, though the snow gave him a smoother ride than if there had been bare ground.

A light sleet began to fall as Rob J. rode behind the travois. They traveled along the edge of the forest that bordered the river. Finally the Indian turned his horse into a break between the trees and they rode into the camp of the Sauks.

Conical skin tipis-there would prove to be seventeen when Rob J. had a chance to count-had been set up among the trees, where they were protected from the wind. The Sauks were warmly dressed. Everywhere was evidence of the reservation, for they wore the castoff clothing of whites as well as animal skins and furs, and old army ammunition boxes could be seen in several of the tents. They had plenty of dead wood for fires, and gray wisps rose from the smoke holes of the tipis. But the eagerness with which hands reached for the three skinny snowshoe hares wasn't lost on Rob. J., nor was the pinched look in all the faces he saw, for he had witnessed starving people before.

The injured man was carried into one of the tipis, and Rob followed along. "Does anyone speak English?"

"I have your language." The age was hard to determine, for the speaker wore the same shapeless bundle of fur garments as anyone else, with the head covered by a hood of sewn gray squirrel pelts, but the voice was a woman's.

"I know how to fix this fellow. I'm a doctor. Do you know what a doctor is?"

"I know." Her brown eyes regarded him calmly beneath the fur folds. She spoke briefly in their own language, and the others in the tent waited, watching him.

Rob J. took a few sticks from their woodpile and built up the fire. When he freed the man from his clothing, he saw that the hip was internally rotated. He raised the Indian's knees until they were fully flexed, and then, working through the woman, he made certain that strong hands firmly held the man pinned down. Crouching, he got his right shoulder just beneath the knee of the injured side. Then he drove up with all his might, and the snap was audible as the ball found its way back into the socket of the joint.

The Indian lay as though dead. Through it all, he had scarcely grunted, and Rob J. felt that a swallow of whiskey and laudanum was in order for him. But both medicinals were in his saddlebag, and before he could get them, the woman had poured water into a gourd and mixed it with powder from a small deerskin bag, and then had given it to the injured man, who drank it eagerly. She placed a hand on each of the man's hips and looked into his eyes and half-sang something in their tongue. Watching her and listening, Rob J. felt the hair lift on the back of his neck. He realized she was their doctor. Or maybe some kind of priest.

In that moment the sleepless night and the snow-struggle of the past twenty-four hours caught up with him, and in a fog of fatigue he moved out of the dimly lit tipi into the crowd of snow-dusted Sauks waiting outside. A rheumy-eyed old man touched him wonderingly. "Cawso wabeskiou!" he said, and others took it up: "Cawso wabeskiou, Cawso wabeskiou."

The doctor-priest left the tipi. As the hood swung away from her face, he saw she wasn't old. "What are they saying?"

"They call you a white shaman," she said.

The medicine woman told him that, for reasons that were at once obvious to him, the injured man's name was Waucau-che, Eagle Nose. The large Indian's name was Pyawanegawa, Comes Singing. As Rob J. traveled toward his own cabin, he met Comes Singing and two other Sauks, who must have ridden back to the horse carca.s.s as soon as Eagle Nose was brought in, in order to reach the meat before the wolves. They had cut up the dead pony and were bringing the meat back on two packhorses. They pa.s.sed him single file without seeming to glance at him once, as if they were riding past a tree.

After he arrived home, Rob J. wrote in his journal and attempted to draw a picture of the woman from memory, but try as he might, all that came was a kind of generic Indian face, s.e.xless and tight with hunger. He needed sleep, but he wasn't tempted by his straw mattress. He knew Gus Schroeder had extra dried ears to sell, and Alden had mentioned that Paul Grueber had a little extra grain put by for a cash crop. He rode Meg and led Monica, and that afternoon he went back to the Sauk camp and dropped off two sacks of corn and one of swedes and one of wheat.

The medicine woman didn't thank him. She just looked at the sacks of food and rapped out some orders, and eager hands hustled them inside the tipis, out of the cold and the wet. The wind flapped open her hood. She really was a redskin: her face was a ruddy, mordant rouge-brown. Her nose had a prominent b.u.mp on the bridge, and almost negroid nostrils. Her brown eyes were swimmingly large and her gaze was direct. When he asked her name, she said it was Makwa-ikwa.

"What does that mean in English?"

"The Bear Woman," she said.

13.

THROUGH THE COLD TIME.

The stubs of Gus Schroeder's amputated fingers healed without infection. Rob J. visited the farmer perhaps too often, for he was intrigued by the woman in the cabin on the Schroeder place. Alma Schroeder at first was closemouthed, but as soon as she was convinced that Rob J. wanted to help, she became maternally voluble about the younger woman. Twenty-two years old, Sarah was a widow, having come to Illinois from Virginia five years before with her young husband, Alexander Bledsoe. For two springs Bledsoe had broken the stubborn deep-rooted sod, struggling with a plow and a yoke of oxen to make his fields as large as possible before the summer prairie gra.s.s sent spears higher than the top of his head. In May of his second year in the west he came down with the Illinois mange, followed by the fever that killed him.

"That next spring she tries to plow and plant, all by herself," Alma said. "She gets in a kleine crop, breaks a little more sod, but she just can't do it. Just can't farm. That summer we come from Ohio, Gus and me. We make, what you call it? A rangement? She turns her fields over to Gustav, we keep her in cornmeal, garden sa.s.s. Wood for the fire."

"How old is the child?"

"Two year," Alma Schroeder said levelly. "She never said, but we think Will Mosby was the father. Will and Frank Mosby, brothers, used to live downriver. When we moved here, Will Mosby was spending lots of time with her. We were glad. Out here, a woman needs a man." Alma sighed with contempt. "Them brothers. No good, no good. Frank Mosby is hiding from the law. Will was killed in a saloon fight, just before the baby come. Couple months later, Sarah gets sick."

"She doesn't have much luck."

"No luck. She's bad sick, says she's dying of cancer. Gets pains in her stomach, hurts so bad she can't ... you know ... hold the water."

"Has she lost control of her bowels too?"

Alma Schroeder colored. Talk of a baby born out of wedlock was merely observation of life's vagaries, but she wasn't accustomed to discussing bodily functions with any man but Gus, not even a doctor.

"No. Just the water.... She wants me to take the boy when she goes. We're already feeding five ..." She looked at him fiercely. "You got medicine to give her for the hurting?"

Someone with cancer had a choice of whiskey or opium. There was nothing she could take and still look after her child. But when he left the Schroeders', he stopped by her cabin, closed up and lifeless-looking. "Mrs. Bledsoe," he called. He rapped on the door.

Nothing.

"Mrs. Bledsoe. I'm Rob J. Cole. I'm a doctor." He knocked again.

"Go way!"

"I said I'm a doctor. Maybe I can do something."

"Go way. Go way. Go away."

By the end of winter his own cabin took on a feeling of home. Wherever he went he acquired homely things-an iron pot, two tin drinking cups, a colored bottle, an earthen bowl, wooden spoons. Some he bought. Some he accepted in payment, like the pair of old but serviceable patchwork quilts; he hung one on the north wall to cut down the drafts and used the other to comfort the bed Alden Kimball made for him. Alden also made him a three-legged stool and a low bench for in front of the hearth, and just before the snows came Kimball had rolled into the cabin a three-foot section of sycamore tree and set it on its end. He nailed a few lengths of board to it and Rob spread an old wool blanket over the planks. At this table he sat kinglike on the best piece of furniture in the house, a chair with a seat of plaited hickory bark, taking his meals or reading his books and journals before bedtime by the uncertain light of a rag burning in a dish of melted lard. The fireplace made of river stones and clay kept the small cabin warm. Over it, his rifles rested on pegs, and from the rafters he had hung bunches of herbs, braids of onions and garlic, threads of dried apple slices, and a hard sausage and a smoke-blackened ham. In a corner he acc.u.mulated tools-a hoe, an ax, a grubber, a wooden fork, all made with differing degrees of workmanship.

Occasionally he played the viola da gamba. Most of the time he was too tired to make music all by himself. On March 2 a letter from Jay Geiger and a supply of sulfur came to the stage office in Rock Island. Geiger wrote that Rob J.'s description of the land in Holden's Crossing was more than he and his wife had hoped for. He had sent Nick Holden a draft of money to cover the deposit on the property and he would take over future payments to the government land office. Unfortunately, the Geigers didn't plan to come to Illinois for some time; Lillian was pregnant again, "an unexpected occurrence which, though it fills us with joy, will delay our departure from this place." They would wait until their second child was born and was old enough to survive the jolting ride over the prairie.

Rob J. read the letter with mixed feelings. He was delighted that Jay trusted his recommendation about the land and someday would be his neighbor. Yet he despaired because that day wasn't in sight. He would have given a lot to be able to sit with Jason and Lillian and make music that comforted him and transported his soul. The prairie was a huge, silent prison, and most of the time he was alone in it.

He told himself he should look for a likely dog.

By midwinter the Sauks were lean and hungry again. Gus Schroeder wondered aloud why Rob J. wanted to buy two more sacks of corn, but didn't press the matter when Rob offered no explanation. The Indians accepted the additional gift of corn from him silently and without visible emotion, as before. He brought Makwa-ikwa a pound of coffee and took to spending time by her fire. She eked out the coffee with so much parched wild root that it was different from any coffee he'd ever had. They drank it black; it wasn't good but it was hot and somehow Indian-tasting. Gradually they learned about one another. She had four years of schooling in a mission for Indian children near Fort Crawford. She could read a little and had heard of Scotland, but when he a.s.sumed she was a Christian, she set him right. Her people worshiped Se-wanna-their top G.o.d-and other manitous, and she told them how to do it, in the old ways. He saw she was as much a priestess as anything, which helped her be an effective healer. She knew all about the botanical medicines of that place, and bunches of dried herbs hung from her tent poles. Several times he watched her treat Sauks, beginning by squatting at the sick Indian's side and softly playing a drum made from a pottery jar filled two-thirds with water and with a thin cured skin stretched over its mouth. She rubbed the drumhead with a curved stick. The result was a low-pitched thunder that eventually had a soporific effect. After a while, she put both her hands on the body part that needed healing and talked to the sick person in their tongue. He saw her ease a young man's sprung back that way, and an old woman's tortured bones.

"How do your hands make the pain go away?"

But she shook her head. "I can't splain."

Rob J. took the old woman's hands in his. Despite the fact that her pain had been driven away he felt the ebbing of her forces. He told Makwa-ikwa the old woman had only a few days to live. When he returned to the Sauk camp five days later, she was dead.

"How did you know?" Makwa-ikwa asked.

"Death that's coming ... some people in my family can feel it. A kind of gift. I can't explain."

So each took the other on faith. He found her tremendously interesting, completely different from anyone he had known. Even then, physical awareness was a presence between them. Mostly they sat by her small fire in the tipi and drank coffee or talked. One day he tried to tell her what Scotland was like and was unable to determine how much she comprehended, but she listened and now and then asked a question about wild animals or crops. She explained to him the tribal structure of the Sauks, and now it was her turn to be patient, for he found it complicated. The Sauk Nation was divided into twelve groups similar to Scottish clans, only instead of McDonald and Bruce and Stewart they had these names: Namawuck, Sturgeon; Muc-kissou, Bald Eagle; Pucca-hummowuck, Ringed Perch; Macco Pennyack, Bear Potato; Kiche c.u.mme, Great Lake; Payshake-issewuck, Deer; Pesshe-peshewuck, Panther; Waymeco-uck, Thunder; Muck-wuck, Bear; Me-seco, Black Ba.s.s; Aha-wuck, Swan; and Muhwha-wuck, Wolf. The clans lived together with no compet.i.tion, but every Sauk male belonged to one of two highly compet.i.tive Halves, the Keeso-qui, Long Hairs, or the Osh-cush, Brave Men. Each first man-child was declared a member of his father's Half at birth; each second boy became a member of the other Half, and so forth, alternating so that the two Halves were represented more or less equally within each family and within each clan. They competed in games, in hunting, in making children, in counting coup and other deeds of bravery-in every aspect of their lives. The savage compet.i.tion kept the Sauks strong and courageous, but there were no blood feuds between Halves. It struck Rob J. that it was a more sensible system than the one with which he was familiar, more civilized, for thousands of Scots had died at the hands of rival clansmen during many centuries of savage internecine strife.

Because of the short rations and a queasiness toward trusting the Indians' food preparation, at first he avoided sharing Makwa-ikwa's meals. Then, on several occasions when the hunters were successful, he ate her cooking and found it palatable. He saw that they ate more stews than roasts and, given a choice, would take red meat or fowl over fish. She told him about dog feasts, religious meals because the manitous esteemed canine flesh. She explained that the more the dog was valued as a pet, the better the sacrifice at a dog feast and the stronger the medicine. He couldn't hide his revulsion. "You don't find it strange to eat a pet dog?"

"Not so strange as to eat blood and body of Christ."

He was a normal young man, and sometimes, even though they were bundled against the cold by many layers of clothing and furs, he became painfully h.o.r.n.y. If their fingers touched as she handed him coffee, he felt a glandular shock. Once he took her cold square hands in his and was shaken by the vitality he felt surging in her. He examined her short fingers, the roughened red-brown skin, the pink calluses in her palms. He asked if she would come sometime to his cabin, to visit. She looked at him silently and reclaimed her hands. She didn't say she wouldn't visit his cabin, but she never came.

During mud season Rob J. rode out to the Indian village, avoiding the sloughs that had sprung up everywhere as the spongelike prairie was unable to absorb all the bounty of the melted snows. He found the Sauks breaking their winter camp and followed them six miles to an open site where the Indians were replacing their snug winter tipis by building hedonoso-tes, longhouses of interwoven branches through which the mild breezes of summer would blow. There was a good reason for moving camps; the Sauks knew nothing about sanitation, and the winter camp stank of their s.h.i.t. Surviving the harsh winter and moving to the summer camp obviously had lifted the Indians' spirits, and everywhere Rob J. looked he saw young men wrestling, racing, or playing at ball-and-stick, a game he had never witnessed before. It utilized stout wooden staffs with leather webbed bags at one end, and a buckskin-covered wooden ball. While running at full speed, a player hurled the ball out of his netted stick and another player caught it deftly in his net. By pa.s.sing it to one another they moved the ball considerable distances. The play was fast and very rough. When a player carried the ball, the other players felt free to try to dislodge it from his net by lashing out with their sticks, often landing wicked blows on their opponents' bodies or limbs, with contenders tripping and crashing. Noting the fascination with which Rob was following the action, one of the four Indian players beckoned and handed over his stick.

The others grinned and quickly made him part of the game, which seemed to him to be more mayhem than sport. He was larger than most of the other players, more muscular. At first opportunity, the man with the ball flicked his wrist and sent the hard sphere hurtling toward Rob. He stabbed at it ineffectually and had to run to claim it, only to find himself in the midst of a wildcat fight, a clashing of long sticks that mostly seemed to land on his flesh. The long pa.s.sing baffled him. Full of rueful appreciation of skills he didn't possess, he soon handed the stick back to its owner.

While he ate stewed rabbit in Makwa-ikwa's longhouse, the medicine woman told him quietly that the Sauks wished him to do them a service. All through the hard winter they had taken pelts in their traps. Now they had two bales of prime mink, fox, beaver, and muskrat. They wanted to trade the furs for seed to plant their first summer's crop.

It surprised Rob J., because he hadn't thought of Indians as farmers.

"If we brought the furs to a white trader ourselves, we would be cheated," Makwa-ikwa told him. She said it without rancor, the way she would tell him any other fact.

So one morning he and Alden Kimball led two packhorses laden with fur pelts, and another horse without a pack, all the way to Rock Island. Rob J. traded hard with the storekeeper there and in exchange for the furs came away with five sacks of seed corn-a sack of small early corn, two sacks of a larger, flinty, hard-kerneled corn for hominy, and two sacks of a large-eared soft-kerneled meal corn-and three sacks each of bean, pumpkin, and squash seeds. In addition, he received three United States twenty-dollar gold pieces to give the Sauks a small emergency fund for other things they might need to buy from the whites. Alden was full of admiration for his employer's shrewdness, believing Rob J. had arranged the complicated trading deal for his own profit.

That night they stayed in Rock Island. In a saloon Rob nursed two gla.s.ses of ale and listened to the bragging reminiscences of old Indian fighters. "This whole place belonged to either the Sauk or the Fox," said the rheumy-eyed barkeep. "The Sauk called themselves the Osaukie and the Fox called themselves Mesquakies. Together they had everthin between the Mississippi on the west, Lake Michigan on the east, the Wisconsin on the north, and the Illinois River on the south-fifty million d.a.m.ned acres of the best farmland! Their biggest village was Sauk-e-nuk, a regular town with streets and a square. Eleven thousand Sauks lived there, farmin twenty-five hundred acres between the Rock River and the Mississippi. Well, it didn't take us very long to stampede them red b.a.s.t.a.r.ds and put that good land to use!"

The stories were anecdotes of b.l.o.o.d.y fights with Black Hawk and his warriors, in which the Indians always were demonic, the whites always brave and n.o.ble. They were tales related by veterans of the Great Crusades, mostly transparent lies, dreams of what might have been if those telling them had been better men. Rob J. recognized that most white men didn't see what he did when he looked at Indians. The others talked as if the Sauks were wild animals who had been righteously hunted down until they had fled, leaving the countryside safer for human folk. Rob had been searching all his life for the spiritual freedom he recognized in the Sauks. It was what he had been seeking when he wrote the handbill in Scotland, what he'd thought he had watched die when Andrew Gerould had been hanged. Now he had discovered it in a bunch of ragtag red-skinned exotics. He was not romanticizing; he recognized the squalor of the Sauk camp, the backwardness of their culture in a world that had pa.s.sed them by. But nursing his mug of drink, trying to pretend interest in the alcoholic stories of disembowelments, of scalpings, of looting and rapine, he knew that Makwa-ikwa and her Sauks were the best thing that had happened to him in this place.

14.

BALL-AND-STICK.

Rob J. came upon Sarah Bledsoe and her child the way one surprises wild creatures in rare moments of ease. He'd seen birds drowsing in the sun with just such rapt contentment after dusting themselves and preening. The woman and her son were sitting on the ground outside her cabin, their eyes closed. She'd done no preening. Her long blond hair was dull and snarled, and the wrinkled dress that covered her skinny body was filthy. Her skin was puffy and her drawn white face reflected her illness. The little boy, who was asleep, had fair hair like his mother's, equally matted.

When Sarah opened her blue eyes and looked into Rob's, everything rushed into her face-surprise, fear, dismay, and anger-and without a word she swept up her son and bounded into the house. He went up to the cabin entrance. He'd come to hate his periodic attempts to talk to her through this slab of wood.

"Mrs. Bledsoe, please. I want to help you," he called, but her only answer was a grunt of effort and the sound of the heavy bar falling across the door.

The Indians didn't bust the sod with plows, the way white homesteaders would. Instead, they looked for thin places in the gra.s.s cover and poked through to the soil, dropping seeds into the drills left by their sharpened planting sticks. They covered the toughest areas of gra.s.s with brush piles that would cause the sod to rot out in a year, so there would be more planting area in which to sow their seeds the following spring.

When Rob J. visited the Sauks' summer camp, the corn planting was done and celebration was in the air. Makwa-ikwa told him that after planting came the Crane Dance, their most joyous festival. Its first event was a great ball-and-stick game in which every male partic.i.p.ated. There was no need to recruit teams, it was Half against Half. The Long Hairs had half a dozen fewer men than the Brave Men. It was the big Indian called Comes Singing who brought about Rob's undoing, for while he stood and talked with Makwa-ikwa, Comes Singing came and spoke with her.

"He invites you to run at the ball-and-stick with the Long Hairs," she said in English, turning to Rob.

"Ah, well." He grinned at them foolishly. It was the last thing he wanted to do, recalling the Indians' skill and his own clumsiness. The words of refusal were on his tongue, but the man and woman watched him with a special interest, and he sensed that the invitation had significance he didn't understand. So instead of waving the summons off, which a sensible man would have done, he thanked them politely and told them he'd be pleased to run with the Long Hairs.

In her precise schoolgirl English-so curious to hear-she explained that the contest would start in the summer village. The winning Half would be the one that put the ball into a small cave in the opposite riverbank, about six miles downstream.

"Six miles!" He was further astonished to learn that there were no sidelines. Makwa-ikwa managed to convey to him that anyone who ran off to the side in order to avoid his opponents would not be highly regarded.

To Rob it was a foreign contest, an alien game, a manifestation of a savage culture. So why was he doing this? He asked himself the question dozens of times that night, for he slept in Comes Singing's hedonoso-te because the game would start soon after dawn. The longhouse was about fifty feet long and twenty feet wide, constructed of woven branches covered on the outside by sheets of elm bark. There were no windows, and the doorways at each end were hung with buffalo robes, but the loose construction provided plenty of air. It had eight compartments, four on either side of a central corridor. Comes Singing and his wife, Moon, slept in one, Moon's elderly parents slept in another, and another was occupied by their two children. The other compartments were storerooms, in one of which Rob J. spent a restless night, studying the stars through the smoke hole in the roof and listening to sighs, bad dreams, windbreaking and, on several occasions, what could only have been the sounds of vigorous and enthusiastic copulation, although his host never sang a note or even hummed.

In the morning, after breakfasting on boiled white-flint hominy in which he tasted lumps of ash and mercifully didn't recognize other things, Rob J. submitted to an unlikely honor. Not all the Long Hairs had long hair; the way the teams would be differentiated was in their paint. Long Hairs wore black paint, a mixture of animal grease and charcoal. Brave Men smeared themselves with a white clay. All over the camp, males dipped their fingers into the paint bowls and decorated their skins. Comes Singing applied black streaks to his own features, chest, and arms. Then he proffered the paint to Rob.

Why not? he asked himself giddily, scooping out the black dye with two fingers like a man eating pease porridge without a spoon. It felt gritty as he drew it on his forehead and across his cheeks. He dropped his shirt to the ground, a nervous male b.u.t.terfly shedding its chrysalis, and streaked his torso. Comes Singing stared at his heavy Scots brogues and disappeared, coming back with a pair of light deerskin shoes similar to those worn by all the Sauks, but though Rob tried on several pairs, he had a great foot, even larger than Comes Singing's. They laughed together at the size, and the big Indian abandoned the cause and left him shod in his heavy boots.

Comes Singing handed him a net-stick whose hickory handle was as stout as a cudgel, and motioned for him to follow. The competing forces a.s.sembled in an open square around which the longhouses were built. Makwa-ikwa made a p.r.o.nouncement in their tongue, doubtless a benediction, and then, before Rob J. knew what had happened, she drew back her hand and flung the ball, which swam toward the waiting warriors in a lazy parabola that ended in the savage clashing of sticks and wild cries and grunts of pain. To Rob's disappointment, the Brave Men gained the ball, which was carried off in the net of a long-legged breech-clad youth, hardly more than a boy, but with the muscular legs of an adult runner. He was quick off the mark, and the pack followed behind like dogs after a hare. It was clearly a time for the sprinters, for the ball was pa.s.sed several times on the dead run and soon was far ahead of Rob.

Comes Singing had remained by his side. Several times they gained on the swiftest men as combat was joined, slowing the forward movement. Comes Singing grunted in satisfaction as the ball was snared in the net of a Long Hair, but he didn't appear surprised when it was recaptured by the Brave Men a few minutes later. As the pack coursed along the tree line that followed the river, the big Indian gestured for Rob to follow him, and the two of them turned off from the route the others had taken and moved across the open prairie, their pounding feet sending the heavy dew flying from the young gra.s.s, so it looked as though a swarm of silver insects sought to eat their heels.

Where was he being led? And could he trust this Indian? It was too late to worry himself with such questions, for he had already invested his faith. He concentrated his energy on keeping up with Comes Singing, who moved well for so large a person. Soon he saw Comes Singing's purpose: they were running headlong in a straight line that might make it possible to intercept the others on the longer route along the river trail. By the time he and Comes Singing were able to stop running, Rob J.'s feet were leaden, he was gulping for breath, and there was a st.i.tch in his side. But they got to the bend in the river before the pack.

Indeed, the pack had been left behind by front-runners. As Rob and Comes Singing waited in a grove of hickories and oak, sucking as much air as possible into their lungs, three white-painted runners loped into sight. The leading Sauk didn't have the ball; he carried his empty net-stick loosely as he ran, as if it were a spear. His feet were bare, and for clothing he wore only a pair of ragged trousers that had started life as white man's brown homespun pants. He was smaller than either of the two men in the trees but muscular and made even more fierce-looking by the fact that his left ear had been torn off a long time ago, a trauma that had left that side of his head knotted with scar tissue. Rob J. tensed, but Comes Singing touched his arm, restraining him, and they let the scout runner pa.s.s. Not far behind, the ball was carried in the net of the youthful Brave Man who had snagged it when Makwa-ikwa had thrown it into play. Next to him ran a short, burly Sauk in cut-down trousers that once had been issued by the U.S. cavalry, blue with a broad dirty-yellow stripe on each side.

Comes Singing pointed to Rob and then at the youth, and Rob nodded: the boy was his responsibility. He knew they had to strike before surprise was lost, because if this Brave Man ran away, he and Comes Singing wouldn't catch him.

So they struck like thunder and lightning, and now Rob J. saw one of the purposes of the leather thongs tied about his arms, for as quickly as a good shepherd would have upended a ram and bound his legs, Comes Singing flung the guard runner to the ground and trussed his wrists and ankles. And none too soon, for the scout runner had turned back. Rob was slower in binding the young Sauk, so Comes Singing went out alone to face the one-eared man. The Brave Man used his net-stick as a club, but Comes Singing eluded the blow almost disdainfully. He was half again the other man's size, and fiercer, and he grappled him to the ground and tied him almost before Rob J. was finished with his own prisoner.

Comes Singing picked up the ball and dropped it into Rob's net. Without a word or glance at the three bound Sauks, Comes Singing ran off. Holding the ball in the net as if it were a bomb with a lighted fuse, Rob J. plunged down the trail after him.

They'd gone unchallenged when Comes Singing stopped him and indicated they had reached the place where they would cross the river. Another use of the thongs was demonstrated when Comes Singing tied Rob's net-stick to his belt, leaving his hands free for swimming. Comes Singing tied his own stick to his loincloth and kicked off his deerskin shoes, abandoning them. Rob J. knew his feet were too tender to allow him to run without his boots, so he joined them by their laces and hung them around his neck. That left him with the ball, and he tucked it down the front of his trousers.

Comes Singing grinned and held up three fingers.

Though it didn't represent the soul of wit, yet it broke Rob's tension, and he threw back his head and laughed-a mistake, for the water that carried away the sound gave back cries of pursuit as their location was discovered, and they lost no time in entering the cold river.

They kept pace, although Rob used the European b.r.e.a.s.t.stroke and Comes Singing propelled himself by moving his hands the way animals swim. Rob was enjoying himself mightily; he didn't feel like a n.o.ble savage, exactly, but it would take very little to convince himself he was Leatherstocking. When they reached the far sh.o.r.e, Comes Singing grunted at him impatiently while he pulled on his boots. The heads of their pursuers could be seen bobbing on the river like so many apples in a tub. When finally Rob was ready and the ball was back in his net, the foremost of the swimmers was almost across.

As soon as they ran, Come Singing's pointing finger showed him the mouth of the small cave that was their goal, and the dark opening pulled him forward. An exultant cry in the Erse rose to his tongue, but it was premature. Half a dozen Sauks burst onto the trail between them and the mouth of the cave; although the water had obliterated much of their paint, traces of white clay remained. Almost at once a pair of Long Hairs followed the Brave Men out of the woods and attacked. In the fifteenth century, one of Rob's ancestors, Brian Cullen, had single-handedly held off an entire war party of the McLaughlins by whirling his great Scots sword in a whistling circle of death. With two less lethal circles that were nonetheless intimidating, the two Long Hairs now held three of their opponents at bay by whirling their sticks. This left three Brave Men free to try to get the ball. Comes Singing neatly parried a bludgeon swing with his own net-stick and then disposed of his opponent with the well-placed sole of his bare foot.

"That's it, in the a.r.s.e, kick his murderous a.r.s.e," Rob J. bellowed, forgetting none could understand his words. An Indian came at him as if hemp-crazed. Rob sidestepped and, as the man's bare toes hove into range, stamped down a heavy brogan. A few running paces beyond his groaning victim, and he was close enough to the cave even for his limited skills. With a snap of his wrists the ball was on its journey. Never mind that instead of a hard, clean shot it bounced its way into the dim interior. The important thing was, they saw it enter.

He threw his stick into the air and screamed, "Victore-e-e! To the Black Clan!"

He heard rather than felt the blow as the net-stick swung by the man behind him connected with his head. It was a crisp, solid sound, similar to one he'd learned to recognize in the lumber camp, the thunk made by a double-bitted ax coming into contact with a solid oak log. To his amazement, the ground seemed to open. He fell into a deep hole that brought on the darkness and ended everything, turning him off like a stopped clock.

15.

A PRESENT FROM STONE DOG.