Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

“Hurons are here in strength, Major. My skirmishers have engaged them several times. A party of that size could pose a threat to the supply trains behind the lines. The general will not second-guess my decision to keep a few men behind while we gauge their intentions.”

“You are mistaken, sir. Leave this forest. Not being in the west is a dereliction of duty. The general waits my assessment of the situation here. I shall report that your failure to follow his orders destabilizes our efforts.”

“The integrity of a report is but as good as the integrity of the officer who pens it.”

Pike’s eyes flared again. He took a step toward the ranger, sword extended low at his side. Strangely, he did not look at Woolford, but at the half-dozen soldiers of his own party, as if silently assessing them. Duncan slowly sat up and pushed himself against a rock. Pike’s burly sergeant placed a boot on Duncan’s leg.

The whistle of the thrush came so perfectly pitched, so clear, that only when it was repeated did Duncan realize it came from Woolford. A moment later it was echoed from somewhere else among the rock ledges. Instantly Pike’s men raised their weapons, some taking cover behind rocks. Woolford whistled again and the reply quickly came, though this time fifty feet from where the first had come, then another, from the rocks above them.

The sneer on Pike’s face disappeared.

Duncan pulled his leg free of the sergeant, who gazed with a worried expression into the forest. He rose and hurried to the other side of the fire, looking for a rock, a stick, anything he might use as a weapon. Another thrush sounded, behind them now. He spotted his knife and tomahawk, near the sergeant’s feet, and calculated whether he could reach them before the sergeant shook off his distraction.

“We are all good soldiers of the king,” Pike ventured. “Call them out. We shall make breakfast.”

“No. Rangers eat cold breakfast, at dawn, or not at all. And you smell too much. Toilet water, soap, brandy, talcum, boot polish. My men spend weeks taking on the scents of the forest. Your stench could endanger their lives.”

“You address a superior officer, Woolford.” The cold fury had returned to Pike’s voice.

“Your stink is unbearable, sir.”

For a moment Pike seemed about to explode. Then he studied the surrounding ledges with a worried eye, muttered quick orders to his men. In less than a minute they had shouldered their packs and were gone.

Duncan watched in confusion as Woolford squatted at the fire, stirring the coals, then rose to pack his few belongings for travel. Five minutes later Conawago and Alex materialized beside the nearest outcropping, the old Indian signaling to Woolford with a thrust of his hand toward the northwest as the ranger warily watched the forest in the direction of the redcoats.

As Woolford gestured for Duncan to pack his own bag, the truth began to dawn on him. “There was no one else,” Duncan concluded. He recalled the location of the bird signals. The Indian and the boy, as fleet and silent as they were, could possibly have shifted to most of the locations, though he never would have expected it from one of Conawago’s years. He pointed to the high rock opposite them, the source of the last whistle. “But you couldn’t have climbed that,” he said to the old Indian.

“The creatures of the forest choose their sides, too,” Conawago explained.

A slight grin grew on Duncan’s face, answered by one on the Indian’s countenance. It had been an actual thrush, joining the skirmish. A low sound of amusement rose from Woolford, breaking the brittle air of the camp. For the first time since Duncan had known him, Conawago laughed.

Their lightheartedness quickly faded as they moved northward. Woolford insisted on scouting ahead, always running, waiting every quarter hour until they caught up with him, conferring with Conawago before setting off again. It was midmorning when they abruptly changed course.

Duncan was about to ask for an explanation when he began to detect the scent of burning wheat.

They reached the source of the smoke half an hour later, pausing at the edge of a wide clearing along the river. The overgrown field of ripened grain, the garden of insect-pocked vegetables, the half-burned stumps, the scrawny cow, indicated the little farm by the river had been struggling. But now its struggle was at an end. The small cabin was in ruin, collapsed into embers. The field was smoldering. The cow was dead. Woolford took a step forward and froze. A moccasined foot extended from a tree in front of him. The ranger bent, raising his rifle, then as quickly relaxed as he advanced another step.

It was a man with long, ragged hair, clad in buckskin, slumped against the tree, his eyes opened forlornly toward the farm. But he could not see. An arrow had pierced his breast, leaving a long streak of blood down his leather tunic. A gourd canteen was upended at his side. He had taken time to die.

Woolford made a hand signal to Conawago and they separated, circling around the ruined building. Duncan saw the empty way Alex gazed at the dead man and pulled him away.

They found Conawago bent over a soot-stained woman who sat on the ground, cradling the head of a man on her lap, stroking his face. Tears streamed down her cheek. Her calico dress was torn and stained, her hands bloody.

Duncan dropped his pack and urgently leaned over the man, looking for injuries, then froze and backed away. The man was beyond his help. Blood had congealed on half a dozen wounds in his belly and chest. A four-inch strip of hair at his crown had been sliced away.

Alex appeared, carrying water in a charred wooden bowl draped with a rag. Conawago knelt, pulling down the lids of the man’s unseeing eyes as he murmured strange words to the woman, who still not did not respond.

Ramsey’s painting. The image recoiled in Duncan’s mind as vividly as the hour he had seen it in the aristocrat’s library. The woman at the cabin at the edge of the woods, cradling a man’s head. Except this woman and this man were Indian.

“Moravians,” Woolford explained when Duncan stepped to his side. “Part of Reverend Zettlemeyer’s flock.”

“But the cabin. The field. The cow. . ”

“Go to any large Iroquois town and you’ll see acres of maize and pumpkins. They understand farming. This is the way of the peaceable kingdom, the Moravians tell them. These two would often travel to the mission on Saturday to be there for the Sabbath.” Woolford began lifting pieces of debris, bending over a footprint here, the mark of a heel there, studying the landscape as if to reconstruct the attack.

Duncan, too, surveyed the rolling field, the stream, the blue mountains in the distance. It was the kind of place where, in his own dreams, he might have started a farm for his clan. But in the world in which he was living, every dream ended in something smoldering and bloody. He gazed in confusion back toward the trees where the man in buckskins had died.

“It was quick, hot work here,” Woolford said, as if to answer the question in Duncan’s eyes. “They didn’t linger, didn’t even finish everything. Like they were in a rush to be elsewhere.” He knelt, studying the dark, moist earth, then the ranger rose and circuited the house, examining footprints and breaks in the plant stems that had been trampled by the raiders. Finally he motioned for Duncan to help lift a half-burnt roof beam that had fallen into the cabin ruins. He raised a charred blanket from the remains of a bed and stepped back to the woman, who had refused to leave her dead husband. Conawago gently coaxed the woman to her feet, then led her to a bench at the side of the cabin that had escaped the fire. As she walked, Duncan noticed the slight, low roundness that said she was with child.