so, and a long nose like an arm. They were very hairy.”
The elephant? Here? It was not possible. There were elephants in Africa, and my
father told me of the Carthaginians using them in war against the Romans, and
the bones of still more ancient ones had been found in Europe. But here?
“You know of the great sea beyond the mountains?”
He shook his head. “There is a sea to the north, very far off. There is a sea to
the south, also very far, but beyond the mountains there is no sea. There is
only land.”
No great western sea beyond which lay Cathay? No land of Cipango? Wa-ga-su must
be mistaken. All the best minds said there was a sea beyond the mountains.
For days upon end we walked. We carried our burdens and we hunted for game, and
somehow we lived, and somehow at last we came to the land of the Catawbas, after
fording another great river. We moved into the foothills of the mountains, and
Wa-ga-su led us to a small valley, its steep sides heavy with forest, and a
stream that ran though the meadow at the bottom.
Abby came up beside me and stood, looking about. “We will stop here,” I said,
“and here we will build our home.”
“Our home, Barnabas?”
“For a time, Abby. For a time … there are still the mountains … and the land
beyond.”
25
Once again we were at work, felling trees, hewing them into timbers, building a
series of cabins and the stockade that would surround them. Tom Watkins and Kane
O’Hara went to the woods, a-hunting. Near the slope of yellow mountain, in an
open meadow, they killed two buffalo. This meat we dried against the winter’s
coming.
Our skills were the greater for what we had built before, and the houses and
stockade went up easier, despite our lesser numbers.
Kin had filled out amazingly, and was a laughing, energetic little fellow as
befitted the first of our name to be born in the new lands. Abby was much with
him, and Lila with them both.
Peter Fitch, who was the best of us all at timber work, having been a
shipwright, paused in his work one day. “I think of Jonathan Delve,” he said. “I
did not like the man. There was a crossgrain of evil in him, but he was strong.”
“He was that,” I agreed.
“And dangerous,” Peter added.
“Aye. He is well gone.”
Fitch stooped to take up his broadaxe. “If he is,” he said.
I had turned away, but at that I stopped. “You do not think he is?”
“If he finds not what he went after, he will think of you. He will know you had
some money from furs and timbers, and he will come to believe the story of King
John’s treasure. He will also begin to wonder why you go west into an unknown
land.
“He will not believe you are what you are. He believes all men are evil, that
all will steal, connive, do whatever is necessary to obtain wealth. He will
think you very shrewd. He will say to himself, ‘He goes to the western sea,
there to build a ship and sail away to the Indies or Cathay.’ ”
I shook my head. “The Indians know of no western sea, and when Hawkins’ men
marched up the country, they saw no western sea, nor heard of it. Some say they
walked from Mexico to the French lands in the north, some say only from Florida,
but they covered a deal of country.”
“No matter. Let the Indians believe what they wish, and you as well, but Delve
will believe what pleases him best. He hates you, Captain, as he hates us all.
Mark it down … we have not seen the last of Jonathan Delve.
“He proposed to us once to leave you and join Bardle, or to open the gates to
Bardle when he attacked.”
Later, talking to Jeremy and Pim, I spoke of Fitch’s words. “Aye,” Jeremy
agreed, “I have been thinking of the man. It is far to follow, but who knows?”
Yet there was little time to think of such things. When men live by hunting it
is a constant task with all our mouths to feed, and usually the Indians who came
visiting. The amounts of fresh meat they could put away was astonishing.
Often I went with Abby and Lila to the woods, gathering nuts, and whenever we
went, Kin was along, carried by one of us.
We learned to make clothes of buckskin, and moccasins such as Indians wore, and
we learned to know the roots and leaves that could be eaten, although with
winter coming the leaves were few and no longer tender.
Barry Magill set up shop in a corner of the yard and went to work at his trade.
Barrels were needed for storing nuts and fruit. Yet the barrels were only one of
the things he made, for he made several brooms, buckets for carrying water, two
rakes for raking hay, and sap buckets for the gathering of sap from the sugar
maples.
Black Tom came in one day with a smooth section of slate about four feet square.
“It’s big,” he said, “but I figure you might cut it up to make slates for the
young un. I see some chalk rock down the valley a ways, too.”
He rubbed his palms on the front of his pants. “No use him bein’ without
eddication. No tellin’ what will come to pass in his time, and a body should
know how to read, write, and do sums.”
“Thank you, Tom,” I said, and he went away vastly pleased.
Wa-ga-su was with us much of the time, and he went often to the woods with
Sakim.
Soon the stockade was built and the cabins roofed, a larger stockade then
before. Building with logs was a foreign thing to we of England, yet my father
had seen it done by men from Sweden, as had Jeremy Ring. The timber was present,
and land must be cleared for planting, so we were able to accomplish the two
tasks at once. Yet never were we to feel secure.
The Catawbas were our friends, but they had warred against nearly all the tribes
at one time or another, and as we were the friends of the Catawbas we were
regarded as the enemies of others, although we had no such feeling or desire.
Most to be feared were the Cherokees from the south or southwest, and the
Tuscaroras from the north.
There came a day when I had taken my rifle from the hooks above the door, and
with Kane O’Hara and Pim Burke I went far into the mountains.
“Do not be afeered,” I told Abby, “if we come not back this night. We must look
about and find a way into the farthest mountains, as well as to scout the land.
We may lay out a night or even two.”
“Well … have a care,” she said, and went to join Lila, who muttered something
about “going gallivanting.”
We went up the bottom of Muskrat Creek and crossed the southern tip of the
Chunky Gal Mountain and over the bald peak known to the Indians as
Yunwitsulenunyi, meaning “where the man stood.” Wa-ga-su had told us the story
that once a great flying reptile with beady eyes and furry wings had dived down
suddenly from the sky and seized a child. This happened several times and the
Indians cleared the mountaintops with fire and set up a watch to warn them of
the flying beast. Then its den was found in an inaccessible place on the side of
the peak and the Indians invoked their gods to strike the monster dead, and the
gods responded with crashing thunder and vivid lightning and the monster was set
aflame, writhing about in its agony.
The Indian on watch on that bald peak fled in terror and so for surrendering to
his fear the gods turned him to stone, and there he remains to this day, the
so-called Standing Indian.
We killed a brace of wild turkeys and camped that night against the rock face of
a cliff in a corner away from the wind, and shielded by several ancient
hickories. Our camp was on a river I thought to be the one called Nantahala, but
we were high up and in a lonely place.
“It is far from London,” Jeremy commented.
“Do you miss it?”
“Not I … I was nothing there, a soldier without a cause, a sailor without a
ship. This … this is grand, beautiful! Had I not come here I should never have
known it existed.”
Dark bent the trees above us, flickering the flames and their shadows; the fire
crackled, and a low wind moved through the trees, mourning for a summer gone. We
huddled above our fire yet thought how beautiful was fire, how much a companion