Eliot Pattison - Original Death

“Just admiring your animal,” Duncan offered. “I’ve seen many mastiffs and hunting hounds but few as magnificent as this beast.”

“Not my animal, nor any man’s here. It just appeared two days ago. Will have naught to do with us. Won’t take meat, won’t take a bone. I’ve got Iroquois here who say that warriors killed in battle sometimes come back as such creatures for unfinished business.”

Duncan inched closer. The dog did not move its broad, heavy head, but a low rumble of warning rose in its throat. His expression was suddenly that of a fierce predator.

The man produced a rag from his pocket and began wiping his face. “It just stares like that. All day, all night as far as we know.” The man, Duncan realized, was frightened of the animal. “A boy threw a stone at it. The dog just gave him its eye and the boy fell back into the pit, broke his damned ankle. My men are calling it the hell dog.”

“Perhaps it waits for a boat, for some trapper to arrive,” Duncan suggested.

The man snorted. “That’s what I thought at first. But someone pointed out that the Welsh witch has been inside there ever since he arrived. Yesterday two of my men refused to come to work. Today four more. I said I was going to shoot the damned beast, and one of the Oneidas said my wife would be a widow by the next moon if I did.”

With a chill Duncan now saw the dog stared not at the river but at a decrepit log hut near the bank.

The structure clearly survived from the town’s early age, when Albany and before that Fort Orange had been centers for the fur trade. The logs at one corner were rotting, lending an unstable tilt to one side of the roof. The low roof had skulls scattered across it, of beaver, otter, hares, and other small mammals. Several of the willow hoops used for stretching skins lay rotting against one wall. From the low uneven eaves hung the black-and-white furs of polecats. From a pole near the door feathers fluttered in the breeze, all of them from crows or ravens.

Duncan ventured several steps closer to the cabin then turned uneasily. The sounds of the work in the yard had stopped. The eyes of every man in the yard seemed to be on him. The rumble of the dog grew louder. A sharp complaint from the man who had spoken to Duncan sent the men back to work.

He approached to within six feet of the dog then dropped onto one knee, holding his rifle upright like a staff. He collected himself, looking down at the grass for several moments before addressing the animal with soft, respectful words in the Mohawk tongue, words he had heard Conawago speak to a bear that had walked into their campsite one night. When the dog did not react he tried them in English. “I honor the tooth and claw of your spirit,” he intoned. “I honor the beauty of your paw and know your greatest strength lies in not using it.”

A low growl came from the creature’s throat, but it slowly shifted his eyes to meet Duncan’s gaze as he repeated the words, shifting between the tribal and English tongues. He steadily lowered his voice, until it was a faint whisper, but stopped only when the dog stopped growling. From a belt pouch he extracted a small yellow feather he had found in the forest and set it on the ground in front of the animal. As the dog cocked its head at the feather, he slowly rose and backed away, toward the hut.

The door of the structure was ajar. He called out the woman’s name, then slowly pushed the door open when no response came. A strange translucent veil hung over the entry. He advanced a step then froze as he realized it consisted of the skins of huge rattlesnakes, the heads pinned inside the lintel, the rattles hanging to betray the passage of any who entered. He clenched his jaw, pushed the skins aside, and stepped into the single room of the decaying cabin.

The air was thick with the smoke of cedar, used by the tribes to summon spirits. He stood still, letting his eyes adjust to the dimness, surveying the strange chamber he found himself in. More animal skins, moth-eaten and tattered, hung on the walls. Woodcutting trestles supported rough planks for a low table, with a lopsided milk stool the only seat. The woman sat in a corner on a pallet of cedar boughs, her eyes fixed on the bottom of a green onion-shaped bottle she clenched in her hands. A piece of cedar wood smoldered in a bowl at her side.

Duncan leaned his rifle against the doorframe and settled onto the floor in front of her. Her hollow eyes slowly found him, and her lips curled into a lightless smile. When she turned the bottle he saw that her wrists were encircled with such heavy scars she seemed to be wearing bracelets of raised flesh.

“Poison snake take you home,” she suddenly declared. Her voice was dry as sticks.

A chill crept down Duncan’s spine. “I am here about Henry Bedford,” he declared, and paused. He had made an assumption about the relationship of the woman who sent the letters and the schoolteacher, but it did not seem possible that this fearful crone could be the man’s mother. “Mr. S.,” he tried. “And a student of his who may have come looking for him.”

She trapped some smoke inside the bottle and became so engrossed with it she seemed to have forgotten his presence. After several long moments her gaze shifted to Duncan’s foot and slowly wound its way up his leg. She finally looked him in the face. Even then her only reaction was to cup some of the smoke in her hand and release it under his chin.

He noticed a crumpled paper that lay at her side, similar to the letter he had inside his shirt, and he fought the temptation to grab it. “The boy Ishmael. Has he been here?”

She leaned close to him, so close he could smell her sour breath. But she did not seem drunk. “You are one of them then.”

He paused, noticing now a pattern drawn on the earthen floor beside her, a parallelogram with two dots and a slanted line inside. “One of them?”

“The dead of Bethel Church.”

Duncan swallowed hard. “Madame, I am here, sitting in front of you in this world.”

“Then you know nothing.”

“On that much we agree,” he muttered. He saw now a belt of beads on her lap, not the shiny glass beads of European traders but the plain wampum shell beads of the tribes. His head snapped up. It was a message belt, used in the wilderness for communication between native villages, even between separate tribes. He had not seen many, but he knew they always conveyed vital, solemn messages. Belts might warn of epidemics or summon members of tribal councils to meetings. Black belts, comprised solely of dark purple shells, were used as a declaration of war. This one held a complex pattern of stick figure humans and animals. It made no sense that the woman in front of him, a Welsh seamstress with a taste for rum, would have such a belt.

Duncan saw now more beads, a single strand of white wampum laying on the pallet. He lifted it and conspicuously draped it over his open hand. The white strand was a warrant of truth among the tribes. No man could hold such beads and lie, though he was not certain what they might connote to a Welsh widow living in Albany.

“My name is Duncan McCallum,” he tried again, raising his hand with the beads. “I seek the boy named Ishmael, Ojiwa of the Nipmuc, who came here from Bethel Church after its people were massacred.” His free hand extracted the letter he carried and held it in front of her. “You know the schoolteacher there. You are his mother,” he ventured. When she did not object, he continued. “Ishmael was here because he believed you knew something of those who captured your son and his students.”

Her cackle was like a rattle in her hollow chest. “If he is gone he needed to be gone. The half-king stands tall. White George stumbles. Not long now. When the dead walk the living tremble. How many times can you die?” As she laughed again, Duncan glanced toward the entry, fighting a compulsion to flee.