ran his fingers over the stock of Lawson’s longrifle. There were stripes and curls in the amber wood. “I gave you a good choice in this,” he said.
“Turning tail from some rag-wearing nigger wasn’t no choice.”
“You done ran though.”
Lawson called for the two hounds but they stayed huddled together and frightened among the already dead. Kau watched them and thought of the calmed lions in one of Samuel’s Bible stories. Lawson cursed the dogs and then he cursed him. “You son of a bitch,” he said. The slavecatcher coughed and a trickle of blood escaped the corner of his scabbed mouth. He started to shiver. Sweat had pooled in the hairless hollow of his chin.
Kau touched him on the shoulder. “I can go and cut your throat if you want that.”
“Well,” said Lawson. “I don’t.”
“Be a long while fore they findin you.”
“I ain’t afraid.”
“You gonna be. At the end.”
Lawson spit blood at him but missed. “What I might fear ain’t no concern of yours.”
Kau nodded and the two of them sat there in silence, thinking. A fox squirrel chattered as he unsheathed his knife. He had realized something. “I should scalp you,” he said.
“Now why?”
“Them soldiers maybe go thinkin redsticks about.” Kau moved closer. “Lose they heart for chasin me.”
The slavecatcher sighed a scratched breath. “Play Indian with your possum teeth. I ain’t gonna die begging.”
“I’ll kill you fore I do it.”
“Well, thank the good Jesus for that.” Lawson sneered and then spit more bright blood. “You kill that boy?”
Kau looked up, searching the blackened forest for danger. “Not wantin to.”
The slavecatcher repeated the words, mocking the thickness of his accent. “Ain’t what I asked,” he said.
“You go and whip my friend?”
Lawson nodded and Kau smelled shit, piss. “I was a scout for Marion, spied with my own eyes that British bastard Tarleton making a Patriot widow dig up her dead husband.” The slavecatcher shook his head. “Least that was a war.”
“That means you ready?”
“Don’t mean that at all.”
“You won’t feel nothin.”
The slavecatcher laughed a high chopping laugh, and a red mist sprayed from his mouth. “Get on,” he said. “This has become an ugly world.”
Kau pressed the blade against the loose and wrinkled skin folded across Lawson’s throat. “I know that,” he said.
“Well, then you go on and live free in it awhile,” said the slavecatcher. “See if it treats you any better now.”
II
A land forfeit—Redsticks—Florida
DAYS OF WANDERING. He buried the slavecatcher’s scalp in a bobcat den and walked south, moving at night, following the stars to Florida. The clay that had once coated him dried into brick dust and fell away, and his skin was left stained red and itching. His breechcloth was now dyed the color of rust.
It was easy country to traverse and at times he grew angry with himself for not bolting long before. He crossed pine flatlands that in low spots dropped off into thin finger forests of virgin oak and elm—beech, sycamore and chestnut—shady hollows where clear springs flowed and he could escape the stunning heat of the day. The cut on his shoulder from the musket ball scabbed and then healed.
As a distraction from thoughts of Samuel and the boy, he collected arrowheads as he walked—chert bird-points and deer-points. This was land forfeited by the Creeks to the Americans at the end of the Creek civil war, but still the Indians lingered. He could see their scattered sign and surely they his, and yet one did not cause harm upon the other. A peace persisted. Some understanding that he was only a traveler passing through. A visitor laying no claim. A small man who would leave no lasting mark of any consequence, no evidence that he had ever even existed. This was a wilderness.
HE HAD TRADED the dead sentinel’s musket and accessories for Lawson’s longrifle and hunting pouch and powderhorn. Kau brought the longrifle to his shoulder and his finger only barely reached the trigger. Though lighter than the musket, the flintlock was as long as he was from brass buttplate to muzzle. Still, he stared down the barrel and nodded, supposed that he could continue to kill at very close range and that maybe—one day and with practice—he would be able to shoot with the skill of the innkeeper, a man who could snipe a fish crow from the top branch of a cross-river cypress, tumble a running fox.
ON HIS WALK he saw many deer, sorrel in their spring coats, and though he needed to test himself with the longrifle he thought it even more important that he move in a whisper through this strange land. He foraged for his food at dawn and at dusk, collecting ripe berries and fat white grubs, stabbing pine snakes and woodrats with a three-pronged gig sharpened from a hickory stick. He was tracking a diamondback through sugar sand one morning when he encountered an old Indian woman sitting alone near the entrance of a tortoise burrow. She was a Creek, he decided. Her lined face was the color of dark cedar, and she was wearing only moccasins and a faded British redcoat decorated with broken pieces of mirror. Though he made no effort to hide, she did not seem aware of his presence.
He spoke out to her in the faltering Creek he had learned during his years at Yellowhammer. “Grandmother,” he asked, “is this Florida?”
The woman gave a vague and toothless smile but said nothing in reply. Nearby a gopher tortoise—its scaly hind legs hobbled together by the end of a long rope—struggled across the sand, fighting to return to the burrow that it had been stolen from.
He stood watching the woman, and after a while another tortoise emerged. The woman rushed forward like a statue gone living and flipped the tortoise onto its back. She tied this second tortoise to the other end of the rope and then lifted them both up so that they hung like fish on a stringer. The rope was placed atop her balding head like a tumpline, and the kicking tortoises bounced against her small hips as she disappeared down a thin scratch path that meandered through the clumps of pale green wiregrass.
MOST NIGHTS IT was humid and hot like some darkened day and the snap of a broken stick would cut the stillness with a sound like a whipcrack. Other nights it would rain and this was in fact best because he could move through the forest trackless and without sound.
To sleep was to dream. And to dream was to see the dead boy.
Late afternoon. Upon rising for his tenth night of walking south he spotted a thickening thread of smoke in the near distance. He folded his horse blanket as he considered whether to keep on or investigate. Soon he would have the cover of darkness, and in the end he decided that perhaps in seeking out that fire he would come upon some clue as to whether finally, after so many nights of travel, he had at last crossed over into Florida.
