After a long time I opened my eyes and the water had boiled down leaving a kind of mush of my stew. With my wooden spoon I managed a few mouthfuls before passing out again.
There was a long while then when I fought wild battles with gigantic cats, when buffalo stampeded over me and Kapata returned with his spear. It was delirium, and I knew it, and from time to time I crawled to the stream and drank. Once I made chicory coffee and then passed out still again.
Once I chewed on raw meat, and finally I slept, a deep, long sleep almost like the sleep of death.
In it I felt gentle hands—my wounds were being treated and I was home again.
Consciousness returned and my eyes opened. I was clearly awake and there was no delirium. I turned my head. An Indian sat by the fire, eating.
It was Keokotah.
ELEVEN
“One leg no good,” Keokotah said, and took another bite from the meat in his hands.
“I fell,” I explained.
“Not you.” He pointed into the brush where I had fought the panther. “Him.” He chewed for a minute. “No catch deer, catch you.”
“You mean that cat had a bad leg?” I struggled to sit up.
He motioned for me to be still. “You stay. You much scratch. I fix.”
With gentle fingers I felt of my wounds. Where the flesh had been torn by the panther’s talons my wounds were bound with some kind of poultice. It had not been a dream, then. My wounds had been treated. “I’m obliged,” I said. “Are you a medicine man, too?”
He chuckled and gave me a wry look. “No medicine man. All know.” He showed me the slender trunk of a young pine no thicker than two of my fingers. Then he indicated the inner bark of the plum. He had pounded them together with some wild cherry bark also, boiled the concoction, and made a poultice.
“You no come. I know something wrong. I come to look.” He pointed. “I find him. He dead. Some meat gone, so I look for you.”
He had killed a deer, and he made a broth of the meat, bone marrow, and some herbs. I ate it slowly, savoring every bit. Then I was tired and I lay back, resting and willing to rest.
“Kapata was here?” said Keokotah.
When I had told my story he shrugged. “I find tracks. They go to Great River.” He chewed in silence and then glanced at me again. Then he placed my bow and quiver close at hand and lay down and went to sleep.
It was night and I was tired, but no longer wished to sleep. Keokotah had come back to look for me, and a lucky thing. Could I have survived? I think so. I knew of herbs to treat wounds. I could have survived, yet he had returned. He was my friend.
Listening to the night I heard no sounds but those natural to the forest and the night—only the wind in the long grass of the cove and the chuckling sound from the stream near the cave mouth. I closed my eyes but not to sleep, only to think.
When I was up and about, we must move with speed. Kapata would seek Itchakomi and might find her before we could. He was a hard, stubborn man and not to be frustrated by any woman, yet from what Ni’kwana had said this was no ordinary woman. Still, we must hurry. I would deliver the message from Ni’kwana and protect her from Kapata if that were necessary, and then go on about my business.
It was a new land out there, and I wished to see it. I wanted to wander down the long hills, seek out the wooded canyons, follow its running streams. I wanted to live from the country, breathe the air of the high mesas, and climb where the streams were born from under the slide rock.
Now I must become well quickly. It was no time to be lying here. I finished what remained of the broth. I would need strength for the bow, strength for walking the long miles, strength for the paddle of my canoe.
Did Kapata have a canoe? Perhaps not. In that might lie an advantage.
Wind bent the tall grass, stirred among the leaves, fluttered the small flame of my fire. I closed my eyes. A morning would come.
Gently, I eased my broken leg. I could manage that leg in a canoe. I would have to sit and not kneel as I most often did, but the bone would knit as well in a canoe as lying here.
How many days had passed? I had kept no record, had only the vaguest idea. I had slept and awakened, but how long had I slept? Was I not unconscious a part of the time? No matter. It was time to move on and I would move, if only a mile a day.
How long had Keokotah been with me? Again I had no idea and when I asked he merely shrugged.
Yet for two days longer I rested, gathering strength, moving about the camp, making a better crutch, planning our move. Of one thing I was sure. Someday I would return to this place, to this grassy cove.
There was a trail that led through it, and Keokotah was convinced the stream in the cave was the same that issued far below in the Sequatchie valley. I had seen but little of the valley, yet it was a place I could come to love. It was a place where we Sacketts belonged.
On a tree near the cave I carved an A, but this time I carved an arrow beneath it, pointing down.
The first day we traveled but five miles before I tired too greatly to go on, but on the second day we reached my canoe.
The river called Tenasee flowed south, described a great curve, and turned back to the north to empty into the river the Iroquois called Ohio. There was, Keokotah warned, a great whirlpool not far south of where we were. Many canoes had been lost there and Indians drowned. Keokotah had sat on the cliffs above and watched canoes go through or into the Suck, as it was sometimes called. It was a place where Indians said, “the mountains look at each other.” The waters above were about a half mile wide, but where they entered the deep gorge they were compressed into a space of less than seventy yards.
“Can we go through?” I asked.
Keokotah shrugged. “It is best to hold to the south,” he said. “I have seen some canoes go through.”
There was a whirlpool where boats were seized and swept round and round, and some were carried into the depths, whence only bits and pieces came to the surface.
We beached our canoe above the narrow river, and on a small point of land among some willows we ate and slept. Keokotah had not known chicory before but was developing a taste for it. I shaved some of the dried and roasted root into a bark dish and made enough for each of us.
It was in my mind to collect more of the root, for I had seen less and less of it and doubted it would grow beyond the Great River, where not many white men had been.
We rested there above the gorge, and at night when all was still we could hear the muffled roar of the waters below us. It was a dangerous place for a man to go, even more so with my crippled leg. If I had to swim against a powerful current …
Well, one must take some chances, and to go west and not to follow the river would be hard indeed.
When evening came I paused by the water before going to sleep, and stood there facing westward toward the unknown lands.
What mystery lay waiting to be solved? What strange lands to be seen? I might well be the first white man other than the men of De Soto to see these lands. Even he had seen but little, and the Far Seeing Lands beyond … who knew of them?
Even the Indians had not seen most of those lands. Water was scarce and a man could not carry enough. Someday men would come with horses that could carry them far out on those wide, mysterious plains.
Were there buffalo there? Could a man break a buffalo to ride? The idea seemed ridiculous, but it stayed with me. Why not, if one was captured young and taught from birth to be friendly to a man and if the man fed and cared for it and broke it gradually to the idea?
When morning came we put the canoe into the water and shoved off, but no sooner were we in the current than we felt the difference. The river seemed to have taken on a new power. The water was dark and swift and the canoe shot forward. There was no visible turbulence, no white water, just a sense of rushing power that swept us along. Keokotah, who was in the bow, turned once to glance at me and then gave all his attention to the canoe.