“No mans here,” Keokotah suggested.
“Sometimes it is better so.”
He threw me a quick glance over his shoulder, a glance of agreement. Perhaps that was why Keokotah traveled, to be alone with all this, or almost alone. How long would it remain so? Knowing the driving, acquisitive people from whom I came, I did not give it long. We were among the first and the most fortunate. A man might travel forever here, living easily off the country, untrammeled and free.
“The Englishman? You knew him long?”
He held a hand above the water. “I am no higher when he come. I am a man when he die.”
This surprised me, for I had not realized he had been with them so long. This was a mystery. Why would an educated, intelligent man choose to live his life away from all he knew? And how had he come there in the first place?
“It is good to have a friend.”
He made no reply, but after a few minutes he said, “It bad. No good for me.”
“No good to have a friend? But that’s—”
“I ver’ small. He tell stories. I like stories. No stories of coyote. No stories of owl. Stories of men in iron who fight on horseback.” He paused. “What is horse?”
Of course, he had never seen a horse. “It is an animal. Larger than an elk. It has no horns. Men ride them.”
“Ride?”
“Sit astride of them and travel far.”
“He has long tail? Two ears … so?” He held up two fingers.
“That’s it.”
“I have seen him. Run ver’ fast.”
“You’ve seen a horse? But that could not be, you—!” I stopped in time. There had been that other day when he spoke of what could only be an elephant, but with long hair. I had made him angry then. “Where did you see it?”
“Many.” He gestured off to the south. “I kill young one. Eat him.” He looked at me to see if I believed. “Only one toe. Ver’ hard.”
I’d be damned. I’d be very damned. Horses here? But then, the story had it that when De Soto died his men built boats and went down the river. What did they do with their horses? If they had turned them loose they might well have gone wild. And the Spanish were inclined to ride stallions, using mares or mules for pack animals.
Horses … now wouldn’t that be something! If we could catch and break a couple of horses—
If a man had something to ride, those plains in the Far Seeing Lands might not seem so vast.
Our canoe glided smoothly upon the waters of the Mississippi and as night came on we held closer to the western shores. Once we saw a thin smoke but kept well into the stream, for we would find no friends here. At night we camped on a muddy point and killed a water moccasin as we landed. It was a big snake.
Keokotah puzzled me. That the Kickapoo were wanderers we had learned from the Cherokees, but I sensed something else in him. Had his boyhood teacher been too good? Had the lonely Englishman taught his pupil too well? Had the Englishman’s teaching created a misfit, as I was?
The thought came unbidden, unwanted, unexpected. Yet was I not a misfit, too? Had not Sakim’s teaching given me ideas I might never have had?
Kin-Ring and Yance were better fitted for survival in the New World than I. Yance perhaps best of all, for he asked no questions. He accepted what he found and dealt with it in the best way he could. He lived with his world and had no thought of changing it. If a tree got in the way of his plowing he cut it down. If an Indian tried to kill him, he killed the Indian and went on about his business. Kin-Ring was much the same, although Kin was a planner, a looker-ahead.
Sakim had been a philosopher and a scientist in his own way, and like those of his time and country his interests had extended into all things. He had questions to ask and answers to seek. He had learning to do, as I had.
Keokotah had a restless mind. The Englishman had aroused something in him that took him away from his people. I began to see that his thinking was no longer theirs.
We were strange ones, Keokotah and I, but the result was less for me than for him. The Indian peoples I had known belonged to clans, and the clans demanded that each member conform. The Indian seemed to have lived much as he had for hundreds of years, and now here and there an Englishman, a Scotsman, a Frenchman was coming among them with disturbing new weapons, new ideas. Keokotah was a victim of change. His Englishman had dropped a pebble into the pool of his thinking, and who knew where the ripples would end?
“Big village soon.” Keokotah pointed ahead of us. “Quapaw.” He swept a hand to include the country we were in and where we had come from. “Osage. Ver’ tall mans.” His hands measured a distance of a foot or more. “Taller than me.”
Six and a half or seven feet tall? It was a lot. By signs he indicated they were slightly stooped and had narrow shoulders.
“No good for us. Kickapoo fight him.”
The village was on the eastern shore so we hugged the western, watching for the mouth of the Arkansas River, which would soon appear. It flowed into the Mississippi from the northwest and despite its flow of water could be easily missed because of the bayous and convolutions of the Mississippi.
According to Keokotah the Quapaw were allied to or a part of the Osage people, but were inclined to be more friendly than the Osage, who were very jealous of their lands along the river.
At dusk we killed a deer.
Night came suddenly to the river. The shadows under the trees merged and became one, the day sounds ended and the night sounds began, tentatively at first. Bullfrogs spoke loudly in the night, and some large thing splashed in the water. “Alligator,” Keokotah said, “a big one.”
Alligators here? It could be. We often saw them in Carolina, and Yance had seen many when he went south to trade with the Spanish for horses.
The thought of our flimsy canoe with alligators about was not a pleasant one.
He made a motion for silence and began dipping his paddle with great care. The canoe glided through the dark, glistening water. There was a smell of rotting wood and vegetation from the shore. Once, on a fallen tree lying in the water we passed only the length of a paddle from a huge bear. He was as startled as we, but we slid past in the dark water and he gave only a surprised grunt.
It was very still but for the sounds from the forest and the soft rustle of water. In the distance and across the river we heard the beat of drums and occasionally a shrill yell. Then a large island came between us and the village.
“Soon,” Keokotah whispered.
Several long minutes passed. Peering into the darkness of the western shore I saw nothing but a wall of blackness where the trees were. The air was damp and still. The current was strong.
We felt the movement of water before we saw it. There was a push against the right side of the canoe, thrusting us toward the middle of the stream.
“Now,” Keokotah said. “It is here!”
He turned the bow into the now strong current from our right and then he dug in, paddling with strength. No longer drifting with a current, now we were breasting one, and a strong one at that.
It was a rich and lovely country and there was beauty where the river ran. Once a canoe with four warriors tried to overtake us, but their clumsy dugout canoe was no match for our lighter craft and we drew steadily away from them until finally they gave up.
My wounds had healed well. There were scars on my skull from the teeth of the cat, and there would always be claw marks on my thighs and one hip.
Without doubt Keokotah had been correct. The panther who had attacked me had had one injured leg and could no longer capture and kill a deer except with the greatest good luck. It must have depended upon slower, less agile game. I must have seemed a perfect catch. I had been fortunate in seeing the beast before it leaped.
The wounds had healed, but the scars would be mine forever. There were none on my face. Not that it mattered. I smiled at myself. Where I was going no one would care about my looks, and my mother and Lila were far away.