The Light in the Forest Read Free Page A

can understand our language,” True Son warned him, but Half Arrow laughed, and True Son knew he was talking as he always did, just for Indian cheerfulness and companionship, half in joke and half in earnest, but mostly in joke, for there were nearly two thousand armed white men, and not all the Delaware and Shawanose warriors in the woods had dared attack them.
    Most of the day Half Arrow kept up his talking and calling to him. The pair had been apart for three days, and now his chatter ran on to make up for it. All the time he talked he kept tirelessly leaping over rocks and logs and brushing limbs aside. To see and hear him did True Son good like medicine. It seemed an age since he had heard anIndian joke and seen a dark face break into a wonderful Indian smile. Even Little Crane went sad as a bear near his white bride. But Half Arrow was bright and full of village and family news.
    True Son did not notice now when they passed the bare and withered stalks of the May apple. At midday he could even joke a little.
    “Half Arrow. Come out of the woods. You’re burned too red for the white man to want to take back to Pennsylvania.”
    “But not too red to shoot me and take my scalp back,” Half Arrow said quickly.
    “They could have shot you any time all day,” True Son pointed out.
    “Yes, but not so easy. They might have missed me with all the trees and bushes between. They are poor shots anyway, especially at Indians who jump and dance. But if I came in close to you like a cousin, they could reach me with their tomahawks and long knives.”
    “They haven’t tomahawked Little Crane.”
    “Well, then, in that case I’ll take a chance on the white devils,” Half Arrow said and started to edge a little nearer. When at last he came cautiously out of the timber onto the trace, True Son looked with interest at the pack on his back, althoughit wasn’t polite to acknowledge its existence. Half Arrow ate greedily the bread True Son shared with him. At the same time he made a wry grimace over the meat.
    “What kind of flesh is this they give you?”
    “White man’s beef.”
    “So that’s why they’re so pale and bandy-legged,” he nodded, “having to eat such old and stringy leather while Indian people have rich venison and bear meat.”
    All afternoon the two cousins marched together, and at times True Son could almost forget the bitterness of his destination. At supper they ate together, but the red-haired guard would not let them sleep side by side. You couldn’t trust an Indian. Half Arrow would have to go off in the woods by himself to sleep, like Little Crane.
    “I will sleep in the wood,” Half Arrow said with dignity. “But first I bear presents to my cousin.” He lifted from his pack a small buckskin sack of parched corn. It was so True Son would go well-fed with the whites and remember his uncle who sent it. After that, he fetched out moccasins embroidered in red by True Son’s mother and sisters so he would go back to his white people newly shod and remember his mother and sisters. Finallyall that was left of the pack was its covering, the old worn bearskin that had been True Son’s bed in the cabin.
    “Your father sent it so you could go warm at night to your white people and remember your father,” Half Arrow told him.
    In a concealed rush of emotion, True Son held it up in his hands. With the feel of it against his body and the familiar smell of it in his nostrils, he could almost believe that he was back home again in the beloved cabin.
    “But what will you have on such a cold night for yourself?” he asked.
    “Me! I’ll have plenty and more!” Half Arrow boasted. “I have my strouding. Then I’ll scrape myself a hill of leaves, yes a whole mountain to crawl inside of. I’ll have a soft bed of leaves below me and a thick blanket of sweet-smelling leaves above me. I’ll bounce and flex my muscles till I sweat. Then I’ll be snug and warm as Zelozelos, the cricket, in a wigwam.”

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