Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

The sound that rose from the creature as it opened its mouth was not the ferocious roar he expected. It was more of a long, weary groan. But the animal continued to bare its teeth at Duncan after the sound died, in the manner of a patient predator, confident of its kill. It smelled the blood of his wound. It would never let him pass.

Duncan lost track of time as he stood motionless, replaying in his mind the past half mile of travel, considering and rejecting each tree, each outcropping as a possible refuge. Finally-had it been fifteen or fifty minutes? — he took a single step toward the trail by the bear, then another. The creature did not move, but did not take its eyes from Duncan. Duncan willed his hand toward the tomahawk on his belt only to find its fingers were full. They had already found, and clenched around, Adam’s carved stone. For no reason he understood, he raised the stone, then, for good measure, shouted out the name of the McCallum chieftains. The bear cocked its massive head as he spoke.

With agonizingly slow progress, step and stop, step and stop, his knees shaking, he reached the fork and the well-worn northern trail, passing within twenty yards of the terrible creature, close enough to smell the wet musk of its fur. The bear followed him only with its eyes, which seemed to take on a chiding, impatient expression. Duncan backed down the first fifty paces of the trail before turning. When he paused and turned to look back after another fifty paces, the bear had not followed, but was still there, watching.

Hours later, aware of little but the throbbing in his head, he reached a river. He extracted Ramsey’s map, realizing he had no way of determining if it was indeed the river shown on the map, the river that connected Edentown to Stony Run, but he had crossed no other in his journey, and he had no strength to push on. He found an overhanging ledge and covered himself with leaves. When he woke in the dawn, his head no longer spun, no longer roared out in pain at every movement. He washed himself, had a quick, cold meal, and began following the bank northward.

It was nearly midday when he glimpsed three towers of rock by a bend in the river. He found himself trotting, pulling Ramsey’s map from his pocket, and relief surged through him as he searched for the cabin or farm, a resting place at last, he expected to find. He had, against impossible odds, navigated the wilderness alone, had found his way to the Chimney Rocks, the first landmark marked on the route to Stony Run. He slipped on a root and fell, then rose, his head now throbbing again, and hobbled past stands of small, dead saplings, his shoes crunching on dried sticks; then he was touching the vertical stones as if to confirm they were real, confirm he was not losing the thread of his sanity, that he actually had a chance of finding his way in the wilderness. Then he froze.

He was not in a grove of dead saplings. They were poles, arranged in groups of four, platforms of cut limbs at the top of each group. Objects were hanging from some of the poles, dangling from the platforms. Feathers. Strips of fur. Necklaces strung with clamshells and beads. Human legs and arms. He had not crushed dried sticks, but old bones. He was surrounded by pieces of the dead.

There were at least three dozen of the scaffolds, some so old as to have been overgrown with vines. Fitch’s description of what he and Woolford had done with Old Jacob’s body echoed in his mind. He pressed against one of the rock columns, the fear he had wrestled with now breaking free and overwhelming him. He slid down the rock, utterly sapped of strength, dropping to the moss below.

He had been gradually steeling himself against another encounter with the strange living natives of the forest, but dead Indians were far worse. He had entered a nightmare, for now he saw that the inhabitants of the platforms, who communicated with birds and visited from the world of the snakes, had been moving about the terrible field. Pieces of skeletons were scattered across the ground, as if the dead had simply collapsed at the end of the night. In a new paroxysm of fear he had a vision of himself, still trapped there hours after sunset, surrounded by sacks of skin and bone dancing in the moonlight, waving snakes in the air.

Then the sound of a solitary thrush cut through the miasma, and his senses revived. He remained very still, as he had seen Fitch and Woolford do, studying the scene with a new, calmer eye, examining the forest floor, the platforms, the stumps of poles that had been freshly hacked away. Nowhere did he see a complete skeleton. The dead had been disturbed, bones dragged from the burial platforms. A skull lay in pieces ten feet away, recently broken, stomped, he suspected, by a boot. The poles of many of the broken platforms had not rotted away but had been hacked with axes.

He discovered he had risen, had taken a step away from the chimney, toward a long, fresh rut in the moss-laden earth, along which lay remnants of several necklaces, old withered feathers, the carpals and tarsals of hands and feet. The track ended at the water’s edge. The dead had been pulled from their platforms and thrown into the river. He took another step, numbed now with a new feeling, lifting a strand of intact beads from the bank, and found himself staring into the clear, fast-moving current. A piece of buckskin clothing clung to an overhanging branch fifty feet downstream. Much closer, several feet under water, a skull, some skin still attached, had been trapped by a submerged limb. It seemed to be looking up at him, asking why.

The thrush was joined by another sound, a low murmuring that he might have mistaken for the working of the wind were it not so constant. He pursued it slowly, consciously placing each foot so as to remain silent, to the far side of the second chimney, where on a wide, flat bank more platforms lay ravaged. Something frigid clutched his heart as he first thought he had discovered one of the sacks of bones, crusted with grime and blood, come to life.

Then with a stab of pain he recognized the gentle old man collapsed against the stone. Conawago had stripped to his loincloth, had covered all his skin except for his tattoos with dirt. He rocked back and forth, uttering low, prayerful sounds as with his knife he made a row of cuts on his arm. One leg was already oozing blood from two dozen parallel slash marks along his thigh. Tears rolled down his cheeks.

When Duncan reached out and pried the blade from his hand, the old Indian continued the cutting motion as if he still gripped the knife. Duncan closed his hand around the blood-soaked fingers. It took a long time for Conawago to become aware of him.

Finally the Indian scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand and looked up. “Who would do such a thing?” he asked forlornly. “Who would kill our dead again?”

It was nearly an hour before Duncan finished ministering to Conawago. The Indian moved like one of the decrepit aged when he rose, letting Duncan lead him toward the water, advancing in short, hobbling steps, pausing to silently lean on Duncan every few feet. He was as ruined as the cemetery.

Finally they sat on a rock ledge at the edge of the river, with Conawago’s limbs washed but still oozing blood. He began speaking in his native tongue, not to Duncan, but toward the sky, then toward the water, in low, anguished tones. Eventually he fixed his gaze downward. Duncan looked away awkwardly then, as Conawago began what sounded like one side of a conversation. When he turned back toward his companion, another chill crept down his spine. The old Indian was speaking to the head under the water.

Duncan lowered his gaze and watched Conawago’s blood drip from his fingertips into a still pool at the edge of the river.

“When I was young,” he began when the Indian finally grew silent, “some English soldiers came up the coast seeking enemies of their king. My family sailed away to distant islands for a month. When we returned, we found that the English had slain all our livestock. My grandfather paid it no mind, said there were always calves and lambs in the mountains. But the next day I found him speechless, weeping on a rock by the sea. Our ancestral graveyard was in a small vale above our croft. The English had pulled up the grave markers and smashed them to pieces. They opened several graves. The most recent was that of an uncle three months dead, whom they hung from a tree, with a note pinned to his chest saying he had been tried and found guilty of treason. Other bodies, mostly just bones, were scattered over the hillside.”