The Fields Page 6

  That night he didn’t need anybody to wake him. His eyes hardly shut. Long before daylight he got up, dressed. It was mighty cold. The cabin stood dark when he got outside. The skift of snow on the ground felt hard as iron. He told Put to shut his big mouth and keep quiet. The hound was crazy to go. They started through the still and wintry night woods. It was at Billy Harbison’s where the men from down this way had said to meet.

  That was a sight to come out of the woods and see the blood-red fires with all the men sitting around on logs and saw blocks, for Billy’s cabin wouldn’t start to hold them all. Their hounds made the place ring with music. Put went right in with his head up and his tail high and wary, but Wyitt stayed on the edge, for it wasn’t seemly for a young fellow to push in too far. It was enough to stand there holding his rifle and drinking it all in. The sight of so many hunters, their firearms sticking out this way and that, their powder horns hanging full and their shot pouches heavy, went to his head like whiskey. Oxen couldn’t have drug him away.

  So long as the men laid around, those dogs growled and bristled at each other. But once their masters stood up to go, all was forgotten between the hounds. They raised on their hind legs and bounced in the air, all the time tonguing together till Michael Topping said they “blowed” like a horn band. From now on all would be cake and pie between them.

  It was still dark. Wyitt could hardly tell the brown spots from the white on Put’s waving tail. And hardly could he believe all this passel of hunters. They must have come for twenty miles. He knew folks from the old states were coming into these parts, but never did he figure they could muster up a company like this. About as many more were meeting up the river to beat down. Half of those here had no rifles, only muskets and scatter guns. Those without firelocks carried hay forks and axes. Some had a bayonet or butcher knife mounted on a pole, and that was the only weapon they had. Boys without firearms led the hounds on buckskin thongs. All looked with respect on Wyitt and his rifle. Never had he felt he was his own man like today.

  Once out in the deep woods, Buckman Tull and Billy Harbison, the captains, stood Wyitt at his place in line. That line ran way out yonder, every man an easy hollering distance from his neighbor. And now the password came along carried from man to man. The line began to move forward. Those who had horns or conch shells blew them. Brush was shaken and beaten. Hounds bawled. Back and forward you could hear men calling to each other so they could keep the line straight and drive the game ahead. Oh, those deep, stentorian voices of men in the deep woods, coming from a long ways off! How they rang, full of lusty vigor, drifting with the forest air, echoing in the glades and swampy places. Hardly a word could you make out, yet they stirred the blood with the strange mystery and excitement of what they said.

  All morning Wyitt breathed the free air of the chase. This, he told himself, was the only life he gave a hait for. He was out of the prison house now. Hardly did he recollect at times who he was or where he had lived before now. He thrashed through teeming thickets and pleasing hazel-bush patches. Now and then he would come out in the great reaches of the deep woods where he could see the hunter on either side of him slipping with his rifle among the butts. He tramped down a slew of hollows. He climbed between fern-topped rocks and mossy logs strewn thick as the flotsam of some ancient forest sea. His feet broke through the thin ice of swamps, and slipped on the side hills where the hickories and gray squirrels throve. Most of the time he was among big butts that shot up thirty and forty feet without a branch. Sometimes he could catch sight of some gray, black or tawny back far ahead, dodging into the brown winter mist of the woods. Mostly it was too far to waste powder on, but already four tumbled squirrels lay soft, warm and bloody inside his hunting shirt.

  Guns were beginning to crack harder along the line now. You could hear musketry dead ahead, too, and away to the east and west. The lines were coming together, it sounded like, and Wyitt’s blood started to pump. Could all those gray, black and tawny backs soon be fenced in on four sides now? He was getting mighty close to the spot they all headed for. Wyitt knew the place good, and on the banks of the Sinks he stopped like they told him. Here the ground dropped away for the swampy landmark that ran a half mile long and a few hundred yards across. He could hear hunters firing on the far side and at both ends, too. It must be the bars were nearly closed around their game and varmint pasture now. He could make out deer in the Sinks, running this way and that, trying to break through the lines of men at one place or another. Wyitt saw a doe, then a spike buck, then an old stag with great horns laid back and parting the bushes as he ran. Twice he sighted his rifle only to see other game closer. He didn’t know which to draw a bead on. His hands started to shake and tremble. It was all coming in one pile. But his ague didn’t last long. He had no time for buck fever once he let the hammer go and started ramming in fresh powder and ball. He had to get all he could before some others poled them down. He only had to be careful not to shoot high or he might get a man on the other side.

  When the fire slackened, word came from the captains to let the hounds loose. You didn’t have to sic them in. They knew their own selves where to go. They popped right into those Sinks like frogs in a pond. Then most every bush and thicket started to give out what hid in them. Oh, that wild pasture was a bedlam of black, gray and tawny backs now, racing this way and that, churning and thrashing! Bear, wolves, panther and deer tried to get out, first on one side, then on the other. You could hardly hear anything but a solid roar of musketry. A black powder fog settled over those Sinks like at Sinclair’s Massacre. Wyitt had never heard of anything like this. The rank smell of the smoke, the death struggles of game and varmint, and, when the shooting let up for a lick, the bawling of dogs and wild, fierce yells of the men were sweet as music to his senses. This, he told himself, was the sixth wonder of the world. He wouldn’t trade places with anybody, no not even with his pappy shooting and skinning wild bulls on the Mississippi prairie.

  It was late afternoon till the fire gave up. The Sinks lay quiet at last. Only the stirring of a bush or crack of a twig told that some game still hid in there. The captains hand-picked the carefulest men to go down by themselves and finish up the slaughter. When the last rifle cracked, all hands joined in to drag the game in piles. When they got through, Zephon Brown mounted a log to call the tally. They had nineteen wolves, he told them, twenty-one bear, three panther and two hundred and ninety-seven deer. The coon, fox, squirrel and turkeys, he said, they did not trouble to tally. Now hunters crowded around to tell whoever would listen how many they had shot, how far the ball had to travel and how close to the heart it had struck. Some claimed they had stabbed deer with hay forks when they tried to jump over. One told how he had chopped down a bear with his axe. Oh, if you believed every man there, the count would have had no end to it, with a gray moose or two which some call the woods horse or elk. Now if any man had seen a gray moose today, it must have got away, for there was none among the slain. But it had humans that could have been tallied in the bag. Some were only powder-burned or winged in a fleshy part. But one had been taken home grave hurt, and another lay over yonder groaning.

  Wyitt stood there proud, his rifle barrel still warm in his hands. He was drunk, that’s what he was, drunk on blood and gunpowder. But he didn’t stand long. When they started scalping wolves, he leaned his rifle quick by a tree and set at one of the night dogs with his knife. He would take a back seat with nobody skinning a pelt. He squat on his hunkers, and was still at it, bloody and pleased, when the sleds came. Hardly had the horses stopped till the men made a rush, knocked in the heads of the casks, and those with cups, horns or bottles dipped in. Wyitt took his place at the casks, for he was in his twenties and his own man now.

  They had made out to camp here for the night and go home next morning. Already men were setting up leantos, barbecuing bear and venison. All was done in lively feeling. This was no work but a frolic. When the casks were dry, they made high jack, grabbing bear fat where it got soft o
ver the fires, and running after their neighbors. Every man and boy was greased till his face shone. Liveliest and most pleased were the farmers, for those bear and night dogs would raid no more stock pens. The settlers hollered and capered and cut up monkey shines till the dogs snuck off, fearing they would be next on the list.

  Hardly any man closed an eye that night. After butchering and feasting, they laid around hickory fires telling hunting yarns till daylight. Wyitt sat still as a trapper, a listening to tales of the black moose and wild bulls, the tiger cat, the striped deer and big horns. Now and then he looked around him in the firelit woods. He wished Sayward could look in here tonight. He’d like to see her bamboozled face when she laid eyes on this grove of trees a hanging every place you saw with dressed deer and bear. And what would she make of that pile of varmint carcasses and waste parts? A mountain of flesh, that’s what it was. It would outlast the snow, the men said. When next June came around, it would still be here, festering and rotting so you could wind it a mile off.

  But he wouldn’t be here to smell it. How could he go back to plowing and milking and breaking his back over stumps after this? Never could he do it. Sooner would he crawl in some hole and give up and die. He took after his pappy. His pappy used to have the cabin and all the big butts around drying with skins. Once he ran down a gray moose and fetched it home with a halter, but Jary wouldn’t let him keep it. Sooner than spend the livelong day with a grubbing hoe, his pappy would have hanged his self to a weeping pin-oak tree. His pappy had Monsey blood, and so did he. He could feel right now the wilderness calling, the deep woods out yonder, the prairies and mountains to the Westward. They ran in his blood and scented his nose till he didn’t know any more if he was in the body or somewheres out of the land of the living.

  No, never could he go back to corn-hoeing after today. Those black moose they told about and the hairy and naked wild bulls over the big river! He would have to see them and trail them and get them in his sights. Likewise the tiger cat, the striped prairie deer that outran the wind and the big horns that some called mountain rams. Andy Stackhouse was asking tonight who would go with him. He was setting out tomorrow toward the setting sun. Well, Wyitt would set out with him. He would send home his share of today’s meat with Billy Harbison. He would pick up his traps from his line and go. But never would he stop in at Sayward’s, for if he did, he might stay.

  They were a telling more tales now, and Wyitt stopped his thinking to harken, for never would he miss a story. These were mostly ones he hadn’t heard before. It had men here who claimed they had seen Captain Brady with their own eyes, General and Lady Washington, the Girty Brothers and Tom Faussett who shot the redcoat, General Brad-dock, in the back.

  But the story he listened to closest was about a girl in the old state. Regina Hartman was her name, and she was took by the Indians and growed up with them. Colonel Bouquet set her free with a passel of others. Her mam didn’t know which was her, and she didn’t know her own mam. But her mam sang an old Dutch meeting-house catch, and that made her run to her mam, for she still minded it. And that minded Wyitt of little Sulie, not Sayward’s Sulie, but his sister took by the Indians and never hide nor hair heard of again. Oh, never would he go back to Sayward and Portius now, and yet he hated running off without saying something. Sayward had raised him, you might say. He had fought her plenty and called her names, but most times it turned out she was right. Maybe she was right that those who followed the woods never amounted to much. A farmer could stay in one place and gather plunder, she claimed, but a hunter had to keep following the game. He seldom even owned a horse to carry him, and his women folk had to take shank’s mare. Didn’t he know? Hadn’t his own mam and all of her young ones had to traipse after their pappy with their plunder on their backs? Oh, he knowed all right. He knowed she was right. He had knowed it a long time. He had tried to break his self of it. He’d knock the wildness out of him, he said, if it was the last thing he did. He had done his dangest to kill the ever-hunter in him, but it wouldn’t stay killed. It was his Monsey blood, he reckoned. It would never say die.

  He only wished he had dropped some word before he left that would stand for giving goodbye at the cabin. He might have played a little with his nephews and niece last night, for he was a full uncle to every one. He might have made up talk they thought was in fun. Then when he didn’t come home, they would know it had been real. They would know where he was and think of him when he was away. They were harder to leave than his full sister, for he took to them, and they to him. Especially he took to Resolve. Now that tyke was different from his Uncle Wyitt as daylight to night time. For a little feller he was steady as could be. He could even read and write where Wyitt couldn’t sign his own name. He was his uncle’s favor-rite. Wyitt wished he had asked him to write something on a piece of paper so he could take it with him. Then some time he sat alone at night in some far woods or prairie, he could take out that paper. It would make him see Resolve plain as if standing here, screwing up his mouth and making pothooks and curleycues with his goosefeather pen while around him his smaller brothers watched and admired.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE FLESH POTS OF EGYPT

  THE SETTLEMENT was growing and no mistake, Sayward told herself. What’s more, she and Portius were helping it along. Already they had five young ones living and one dead. It seemed she and Portius couldn’t mix them up like some. No, theirs had to come either boys or girls in a row. Sulie was dead, but Sayward had two girls since. Oh, she wouldn’t have any more Sulies. That was a name like a millstone to hang around a young one’s neck. Twice it had been unlucky. She would give it no further chance. Her newest and littlest girl she called Libby.

  All over the settlement it had a good crop of babies. Most of the women were fruitful. Nobody could say the men hadn’t done right by their country. Even Flora Greer had a little chin-chopper after everybody figured she would have to go through life childless as a barren doe. Oh, the young ones were finding their way into these pathless woods of the Ohio. They seldom got lost on the way like some of the grownups did. A few came dead and some died after they got here, but hardly ever did they show up late.

  If they had known what they were coming to, Sayward reckoned, some might have tried to hold off or land some other place, for this was no time to get born in the wilderness. The year without a summer, they called it, for if it had a summer, nobody ever saw it. Even the dog days stayed cool. Seemed like it just couldn’t get warm. The sun had no heat, and every so often real cold snaps blew down from the English Lakes. They had frost about every month of the year. A skim of ice like a window pane lay on watering troughs four nights in May and June. Then folks getting up on Independence Day found three inches of snow on the ground. It melted before noon but the weather didn’t warm up. August felt more like October. The corn was so held back by cold and want of sun that most people who had live stock cut it in August and dried it for fodder. You hadn’t need to look for any ears. Oh, it was a hard summer, and harder was the winter that followed. A good many died. But once spring dragged around, folks reckoned it would be all right now. Nature had all kinds of weather to draw from. She usually made up for what extremes she gave the year before.

  And that’s what she did this year. Last summer was cold and wet, so this summer came hot and dry. It started early in the spring when the ground lacked a proper soaking for growing weather still to come. Seemed like it just couldn’t rain. The sun got powerful warm in May. Young, tender green stuff began to shrivel. The Shawnees said the Great Spirit was going to burn everything up. Horses, hogs, sheep and cattle that got through the winter looked gaunt for certain now. All they had for feed were leaves and branches cut from the big trees. Wells grew mighty low and some dry. Sayward’s run turned into a slime by summer, and you could walk across the river most any place on stepping stones. Even the leaves on the saplings withered and the green skin under the bark turned yellow and dry. Only the big butts stood green, aloof and untouched, for their
roots reached deep down in the guts of the old earth.

  People said they’d never known a time like this in the old states. Zephon Brown smoked himself a piece of bottle glass to squint at the sun. He claimed it was spotted like a rattlesnake. Jake Tench said he could see the sun pocks with his naked eye. Nobody made fun of Luke Peters now. Last fall Luke told George Roebuck he was going back to Vermont. He had a sign from the Lord. He said he used up his last fodder in October and when he came out of his log stable, he saw some mighty curious clouds in the sky. Right off he knew the Lord was a talking to him. The Lord had written letters in heaven spelling out a warning for him to read.

  “What did it spell?” George Roebuck asked.

  “F–A–M–I–N!” Luke Peters told him.

  Oh, George Roebuck, Portius, Buckman Tull and those who could read and write had made a pile of high jack out of that, the Lord spelling f-a-m-i-n, which it seemed like, was not as He should. But they didn’t laugh any more. By now Luke Peters was back in Vermont, if he got there all right, and those who made fun of him were still out here in the wilderness with their young ones a crying for something to eat. Nobody had flour any more. The few who had a lick of Indian meal put by saved it for sickness. All the Witherses had were frozen turnips. The Wylders one time were down to six kernels of corn apiece a day, soaked overnight in water. Mathias Cottle dug up the roots of bear grass, dried it on boards and pounded it into a kind of flour for baking. He claimed it wasn’t halfways bad, but the Cottles looked mighty poorly to Sayward’s eyes. A woman from Maryland crawled three miles through the woods to George Roebuck’s to beg for meal. He said he couldn’t give her any more on credit, but when she went back, he sent the bound boys after with five pints of Indian meal.