The Light in the Forest Read Free

Yengwes.
    “Tomorrow we leave for Pennsylvania,” she told him.
    That day the boy lay with despair in his breast. His life had been short but now it must come to its end. Never would he go to this enemy land. How could he exist among a race of aliens with such slouching ways and undignified speech! How could he live and breathe and not be an Indian!
    He would have to act now. He remembered his father’s friend, Make Daylight, who lived in the next village. Make Daylight had been forsaken, too. His squaw had gone to another Indian’s cabin to live. She had taken Make Daylight’s children with her. Make Daylight had stood his abandonment and disgrace a few days. Then he went in the forest and ate the root of the May apple. He had been brave in war. No one thought him a coward now. So no one would think True Son a coward when they found him lying silent and superior to the white man. They would say True Son had triumphed over his enemies. Never could they carry him off to Pennsylvania now. No, his body would stay in his beloved land along the Tuscarawas. Word would be sent to Cuyloga, his father. Through the village the mourning cry would pass, “He is no more!” His father and mother, his sisters,his uncle and aunt and cousins would come to him. They would put logs and posts on the fresh earth against the wolves. Under the ground near his head they would set good Lenni Lenape food to feed him on his journey.
    Three times that day the boy tried to get the root of the May apple. His white guard, Del, gave him no chance. When he went from the council house, the guard kept hold of him like a haltered beast. He would have to wait till he was on the march. Some time tomorrow they would pass through a wooded meadow. At the place of the May apple he would fall to the ground. When they lifted him up, he would have the death medicine in his hands.
    It was a gray morning when they left the Forks of the Muskingum. For a while their way lay on the path by which the boy and his father had come. True Son’s heart rose. It was almost as if he were going home. When they came to the parting of the trails, something in him wanted to cry out. An ancient sycamore stood at the forks, one dead limb pointing to the gloomy trace to Pennsylvania. On the far side, a live branch indicated the path running bright and free toward home. The boy’s moccasins wanted to race on that path. He could feelhimself light as a deer leaping over roots and logs, through the deep woods, over the hills and by the narrows to the village on the bank of the Tuscarawas. Violently he struggled to escape, but the guard pushed him on.
    Through the blackness in his heart, he heard a voice calling in Delaware.
    “True Son! Look! Not yonder. I am here.”
    The boy’s eyes found a young Indian in leggings, breech clout and strouding. He was moving in the woods abreast of him. Never had he believed that such a feeling of joy and hope would sweep over him again. He would know that form anywhere.
    “Is it you, Half Arrow? Do you still live?” he called.
    “No, it’s Between-the-Logs,” Half Arrow called back in delight, for Between-the-Logs was very old and lame and that was a joke between them. “I wait a long time. I think you never come. Then you come but I see you bound up. How is such a thing? I thought you were among friends and your people!”
    “I am not among my people, but my enemies,” the boy said bitterly.
    “Well, anyway, I am your people and am with you,” his cousin cheered him. “If Little Cranemarches with his white squaw, I can march with you and keep you company.”
    “I cannot believe it. What will my father say?”
    “He says plenty, but let’s talk of pleasant and cheerful things. How we can kill these white devils so you can come back to the village with me.”
    “
Jukella!
If only I could! But there are too many for us.”
    “The more they are, the more scalps and loot we get!” Half Arrow declared eagerly.
    “
Sehe!
Watch out. Some