Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

It was the Indian who had brought him from the ridge that morning. His paint had been wiped away, so that for the first time Duncan saw his face clearly.

“A crow,” Duncan heard himself say as he saw the tattoo above the Indian’s jaw. “You have a crow on your cheek.”

“A raven,” the Indian replied in a calm voice, the first time Duncan had heard him speak any English. “When I was young, my father found me in a nest of ravens on a cliff, playing with the birds. When I became of age, I was given the name Ravencatcher, though I always thought it was the ravens who had caught me,” he added. Then, to his utter surprise, Duncan saw a small, quick grin.

“This morning at the ridge you didn’t-” Duncan began, then started over. “You speak English well.”

“I had a good teacher when I was a boy,” his voice seeming to wander for a moment. “An old Nipmuc.”

“I am called Duncan.”

The Iroquois replied with a sober nod, then turned, gesturing him to follow. As Duncan followed him, an adolescent girl in a deerskin dress darted out of the bone lodge. With a shy smile she handed Duncan a turtle shell filled with water, motioning for him to drink. He drained the shell, then she handed him a small, round, yellow loaf, no bigger than his palm. He brushed off the soot from its edges and bit into it. It was of cornmeal, and to his long-deprived palate it tasted like the finest of cakes. She smiled again as he quickly devoured the bread, then darted back into the bone-covered entrance. Inside, Sarah lingered, shrouded in shadow, gazing at him. He moved toward her, returning her stare, question in his eyes. She had not been mistreated. She was no slave. But he could not decipher her strange behavior. What did the feather cloak signify? He had heard of cultures where captives were feted until they were offered in human sacrifice.

Duncan had already taken a step toward her when Ravencatcher touched his elbow and gestured him toward the other lodges. Woolford and Conawago were there, stripped to the waist, washing from woodcarved basins, scraping their skin with narrow slabs of fragrant cedar. A boy was helping them, dumping fresh water into another basin. It was Alex, still wearing his shirt without sleeves, looking more at ease than Duncan had yet seen him. As Duncan stepped toward his friends, Ravencatcher held up a restraining hand and gestured at his belt, then at a log at the side of the nearest lodge. Their rifles lay against it, as did his companions’ other weapons and carrying packs. Duncan quickly laid down his tomahawk and knife, then stripped off his shirt.

As they finished cleansing themselves, Ravencatcher stirred the embers of the fire, placed several coals on a flat stone, and dropped tobacco leaves over them. He stepped to each man with the stone in his hands. Duncan followed the actions of Conawago, cupping the smoke in his hand, washing it over his face, rubbing it over his skin before putting his shirt on again.

When they finished, no word was offered, no gesture made. Ravencatcher simply set the flat rock on a log, turned, and walked away, up the steep trail. It was a very old path, rutted from decades, perhaps centuries, of use. As they climbed, painted images appeared on the rock walls at its sides, of varying complexity and design, of varying age, though all were of forest animals. On the downward side, all the paintings were of snakes.

As they descended through the maze of rocks, Conawago began a low, whispered prayer. Woolford kept glancing back uneasily at Duncan. Suddenly they rounded a huge boulder and emerged into a half-mile-wide bowl through which a boulder-strewn stream flowed. The valley was almost perfectly symmetrical, with steep rocky walls rising up on either side and dense groves of white birch trees at either end. In the center was the most remarkable living thing Duncan had ever seen.

It was a tree, though to call the massive oak before them a tree was to call the mighty Atlantic a lake. It was as tall as the grandest cathedral he had ever seen, its canopy as broad as any village square, its huge lower limbs spreading out like the beams of a castle hall. Its vast trunk, easily a dozen feet in diameter, was split by a jagged, three-foot-wide hole, as high as a man, that seemed like the entrance to a deep cave.

Conawago noticed the awed look on Duncan’s face and waited as he slowly advanced. “Stony Run is just the name of the stream that feeds into the river over the waterfall,” the old Indian said. “It is the name Europeans use for the place because no one of the tribes will utter the name of the sacred tree itself.”

“It must be ancient.” Duncan was whispering.

“Once I met a natural philosopher in Philadelphia who insisted you could age a tree by the number of rings in its cross-section. When limbs blow off in a storm, there is a ceremony for burning them. Years ago I was here when it happened. I counted two hundred rings in the limb alone.

“The shamans of the Iroquois have been coming here since before memory,” Conawago continued as they walked toward the tree, “since before the Iroquois were even a nation. It is the most pure place on earth, Tashgua says. Wampum beads are not needed here.”

Duncan weighed his words as he studied the small group of men sitting at the base of the tree. “You mean the tree makes people speak the truth.”

“When I was young and came here the first time with my mother, there was a woman of over a hundred winters who lived in the bone lodge. She said if a human were to be deceitful here, the limbs would reach down and tear him to pieces.”

The Iroquois who sat against the far side of the oak seemed to have grown out of the tree itself. He sat between two massive, gnarled, lichen-covered roots that disappeared into the ground at his feet. The lines on his worn face seemed to match the grooves in the surface of the tree. The gray strands in his hair made it blend with the bark. He had a profound stillness about him, like the power of the sea in repose. Nothing moved but his eyes, brilliant as obsidian. Duncan did not need to ask. He had found Tashgua.

Before the shaman were a dozen men. Ravencatcher and another of their band sat to his left and right, facing eight other Iroquois, older men, though clearly not so ancient as the man who sat against the tree. Together they encircled two men from Edentown. Reverend Arnold was patiently speaking, seemed to be giving a sermon, as Cameron warily watched the Indians. Arrayed on a hewn log before Arnold were printed pages-more of the pages, Duncan saw, that had been ripped out of Evering’s Bible. Beside the pages was the brass cross that had been stolen from Edentown. Every few moments Arnold paused as one of the Indians, a sinewy man wearing the skin of a fox over his crown, translated for the others. They were, Duncan realized, testing the words of the Bible.

As they spoke, Ravencatcher’s hands began to work at what looked like a linear drum, a hollowed log, perhaps six inches wide and four feet long, carved with images of forest animals. The sound Tashgua’s son drew from it was soft and undulating, like a distant moan of wind on a winter night.

“Tashgua and the tree are listening,” Conawago whispered, and dropped to the ground, folding his legs beneath him. Woolford, then Duncan, silently followed his example. Though the old sachem gave no acknowledgment of their presence, Arnold stopped his discourse in midsentence, his cheeks filling with color as he jabbed a bony finger toward Duncan.

“This man is a lawbreaker,” he declared loudly, all patience gone from his voice, “cast out from our God! He must be removed! My man will take him away.”

Tashgua leaned forward, squinting. A smile lit his leathery countenance as he recognized Conawago; then he studied Duncan, cocking his head, his eyes growing round as if he were surprised at something he read in Duncan’s face. The shaman turned back to Arnold and shrugged. When he spoke, his voice was like leaves rustling in a breeze. “The reason we are here, Major,” he said in slow, imperfect English, “is because it not be for mere men to say who is cast out from the gods.”