فصل 12 - بخش 01

TWELVE

Leaping Turtle and I loved to run, and we had always been the fastest in any running games. Even when we were small boys, before the plague, we had both taken pride in running faster than the others, and we would each try all the time to beat the other one. Everything was a race, and each of us made the other run faster, try harder.

So before long we were chosen as runners by One Who Waits. Yellow Feather and his sachems kept careful watch over our land. From every important sachem, messages were sent every few days to and from Yellow Feather’s home in Sowams, to report in particular on any event involving other tribes or the white men. The runner had to be not just fast, but able to convey his message well. Leaping Turtle and I were as tall now as any grown man, but we were the youngest of them, so perhaps that’s why we were sent as a pair. If one inexperienced memory were to lose a piece of a message, the other would fill the gap.

One Who Waits told us what he wished to say, and we repeated it back to him. He instructed us to take a trail that would need a day’s more running than a direct way, so that we could visit a village nearer the white men’s settlement and bring a report from the sachem there. We were both very excited at the thought of meeting the great sachem Yellow Feather.

It was spring, and though the nights would be cold, our running would keep us warm. We each wore only a breechclout, leggings, and moccasins, and carried at our belts a knife, a tomahawk, and a small pack of food. Quickbird gave Leaping Turtle and me each a pouch filled with grain that she had ground herself, and patted my shoulder.

“This time, they would let me give you needles and thread,” she said, smiling, “but you won’t be gone long enough to need them.”

“Safe travel,” Suncatcher said. “Carry my respects to our father Yellow Feather.”

And we ran. We ran through the grasses and big trees of the land that had been burned for hunting and farming for so many years; we ran at night, guided by the stars. We ran along old trails that had been beaten down by centuries of feet, but were being gradually overgrown now that our people were so much fewer. When we had to, we paused to eat a little food, or to drink from a stream.

For a day and a night we ran toward the east, away from the setting sun, knowing that within another day we should pause at a village close to the first English settlement. After pausing to talk to their sachem, we should turn south.

We ran.

We were running along a trail so little used that it was being overtaken by scrub, slowing us a little. All at once we heard somewhere ahead of us a great thump, with a crackle of breaking branches. There was only one thing it could be: a tree falling. The breeze that day was only light, but even a small wind can bring down a tree if it has finally reached the end of its long tall life. We paused for a moment, then ran on.

But then we heard the screams. And we stopped again, looked at one another, and ran toward them.

The voice was high—a child or a woman. They were the short quick screams of panic, growing louder as we crashed through the undergrowth. Then we were out in the sunlight on the edge of a clearing, and we saw that a big tree was indeed down—not fallen, but chopped down. And clearly the white men who cut it down had made the terrible mistake of not running clear in the proper direction as it fell, for one of them was lying crushed under its trunk, which had come down squarely on his back.

The other was trapped by his leg underneath a big branch, and beside him was a boy, screaming.

We ran to the trapped man, who did not move, and the boy stopped screaming and started to babble to us in English. His face was all wet with tears. He was about ten years old and he was clearly begging for help, terrified.

“We can cut him free!” I was peering at the branch. “Look—if we can cut it there, we can roll him out!”

“No!” Leaping Turtle said. He grabbed my arm. “Leave them! Whites will come—if there are two, there are more. It’s too dangerous!”

“Too dangerous to help?”

“You are a runner, you mustn’t stop—you have sworn to run to Yellow Feather!”

And at that I would have turned to go, but the boy was staring at my face. At the scar.

He said, “Hawk?”

I looked at him, and although he was taller and a little changed by the years, I recognized him.

“Hawk!” He was pleading now. “Hawk!”

It was the small boy John, who had come to see us fishing, and the man lying trapped under the branch must be his father, who had smiled at me that day.

So I pulled out my tomahawk.

“No!” said Leaping Turtle urgently.

I motioned the boy to stand clear, and I took a great swing to hack at the branch that had trapped the man’s leg.

It all happened so fast. My tomahawk hitting the branch must have masked the sound of the first shot. As I swung my arm back again, with my axe high in the air, I heard John shouting in alarm, and I saw a puff of smoke, though I never heard the sound of the second shot that blasted a great hole in my chest and killed me.