Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

Duncan considered the Moravian’s words as they gazed at the stars. “Are you saying, Reverend, you have lost your appetite for converting the Indians?”

Zettlemeyer seemed to struggle to get his response out. “I am only asking the question. What if our spirits are blinded by what we bring from across the ocean?”

A shiver ran down Duncan’s spine. “Why do you say these things to me?” Something small in the forest began screeching in terror, its cries gradually subsiding as it died.

“Because I am the one who betrayed the ghostwalkers,” Zettlemeyer blurted out in an anguished tone. “The price for doing so has been far heavier than I expected.”

“But they were captured by soldiers.”

“The three asked me to release them. I refused, for the good of their souls. I kept Sarah Ramsey locked in a room until she could be safely conveyed to New York.”

There was more, Duncan sensed. The missionary still was not telling him what weighed most heavy on his heart. “You visited Edentown last week,” he ventured.

Zettlemeyer sighed heavily. “We had nothing, hardly enough to feed ourselves, no hope of anything so costly as an iron furnace.”

Gradually Duncan fit the pieces together. “There was a reward paid by Lord Ramsey,” he concluded.

The Moravian’s head moved up and down in the moonlight. “A wagonload of food at the start of the winter. It was a great blessing. We gave thanks to Ramsey in our prayers. But I did not understand something about Ramsey.”

“A man like Ramsey,” Duncan suggested, “doesn’t pay rewards. He pays retainers.”

“Crates of Bibles. The equipment to build the furnace. More cases of Bibles, even copies of the Greek philosophers.”

“Money for transport of new settlers,” Duncan said.

“Even our bishop prays for Ramsey now. And I get letters from Edentown asking about things.”

“Things?”

“How many Indians have we baptized. How many Indian children in our school. Send the last known location of the shaman Tashgua. Make two maps of the location of all the settlers’ farms we know of. It doesn’t seem like much, does it? Ramsey sent me a passage from the Old Testament about how true believers must destroy the temples of the idolators. When he was here two days ago, Reverend Arnold announced that the hand of God soon will make a fist.”

The words left a smell in the air, like the smell after a lightning strike.

“Once every few days I see a huge bear at the edge of the fields, by the northern trail,” Zettlemeyer said in a thin, weary voice. “Sometimes it brings the body of something to eat there. It eats, then it sits and watches us. I couldn’t bear to tell Sarah about my dreams when she asked. I often wake in cold sweats, my heart pounding from a dream in which I find the bear sitting at our hearth in a chair, reading our Bible.

Duncan did not respond, in that moment did not believe himself capable of responding. The old Moravian began whispering a prayer, in German. Duncan studied the thousand stars overhead. When he looked back down, Zettlemeyer was gone.

He retrieved his pack from the shadows by the furnace and found his way to the cow shed, then located the small, slender form lying against the slumbering ox and settled onto the straw-covered earth beside the boy, pulling straw over them both. He listened for a long time to the strangely harmonized breathing of the two creatures.

“Alex,” he whispered at last, “I know not how to reach you when you are awake. But my grandfather taught me there are parts of us that listen while we sleep.” The breathing of the ox seemed to grow in volume, the great hairy back heaving up and down.

“My name is Duncan McCallum,” he began. “And I live between worlds, as you do.” After these first difficult words, the others came out with surprising ease. He explained how he had been arrested and transported, how he had met Adam Munroe, how Adam had died, then spoke of Reverend Arnold and Ramsey and Pike and Woolford. In a lower voice he spoke of Sarah’s kidnapping, and of Conawago and the ruined Indian graveyard where he had left him. “There are questions left by the dead, Alex, which will never be answered unless you and I help.”

When he finally fell silent, the ox turned its great head toward him, as if it had been listening and knew that Duncan had left something out. After a moment he whispered his final, brittle confession. “I built a dream around finding my brother, and all the while he has wanted me dead.” When he settled back onto the straw, he realized his hand had closed around the stone bear, his fingers rubbing the head. So often it had done so in the past weeks, it had become something of a reflex.

He rose before dawn, when he could still fix the North Star, and quietly slipped out of the shed, after piling added straw over the sleeping boy, pausing to touch the crown of the ox, who watched him intently, and pausing again with a grateful grin when he found a pouch of food lying on top of his pack. Five minutes later, on the far side of the fields, he halted. Someone had lit a small fire at the head of the trail to the north. Looking about for a sign of the Moravians, he warily advanced and was almost upon the fire when he glanced down and froze. It was a small mound of tobacco leaves, carefully laid over burning coals. He gasped in alarm as a hand closed around his shoulder from the back. His assailant did not speak, and was already returning his war club to his belt as Duncan turned to face him.

“Conawago!” Duncan exclaimed.

The old Indian acknowledged him with a slight nod, then solemnly pointed to the trail and began a slow trot toward the north. Duncan squatted by the fire a moment before following, cupping the smoke in his hand as he knew Conawago must have done, washing it over his face.

The old Indian did not speak the few times they paused to rest, but somehow Duncan did not expect him to. He was in mourning still, for the dead who had been killed again by the Ramsey men. He had made no more lacerations on his limbs, and, to Duncan’s relief, those he had made were healing well, though they gave the old man a fierce aspect, the look of an ancient and awful warrior.

As they sat on a high, stony ridge, silently sharing a piece of bread from the mission, Duncan began to notice the wariness in Conawago’s eyes. Pushing ever northward, he watched uncomfortably as the old Indian knelt several times to study the trail, sometimes pressing his ear to the ground. Suddenly he gestured Duncan off the well-used path, leading him at a run to a smaller parallel game trail on the ridge above, then pausing at a stout oak to gaze back, his hand on his club.

The explanation came half an hour later, as they moved along a series of high outcroppings. They had slowed to a walk, Duncan in front, and he had cleared the end of a long pile of huge boulders when he spotted a solitary figure moving at a steady lope nearly a hundred yards away on the main trail. It was an Indian, adorned not unlike those he had seen at the army headquarters, a musket strapped upside down on his back. When he turned to point the man out to Conawago, his friend was nowhere to be seen.

“There is-” he began, then a figure materialized in the air, leaping onto Duncan, knocking him to the ground, clamping a small hand over his mouth. Duncan frantically tried to free himself, then realized his assailant was not trying to hurt him, but was using his free hand to cover them both with dried leaves. A small face appeared near his own, aimed not at Duncan but at the trail below. It was Alex.

A moment later more figures appeared. Alex tensed, seemed to stop breathing. Twenty-four, Duncan counted, all appearing much the same as the first, except for two men in the center who wore white fringed tunics with green wool caps and green leggings. They all trotted at a uniform pace, fleet and silent as deer.