Thirteen Moons Read Free

sound repeated over and over, and all I could tell was that its inflection seemed to suggest a question.
    Then, after several more repetitions, I believed it was my name being spoken.
    —Will? the voice said.
    I leaned toward the mouthpiece projecting from the wooden box and put my mouth to the rim of it, which flanged like a nostril on a horse. What was the etiquette of this device? What salutation or acknowledgment of identity was called for when you were summoned to speak?
    —Will? the little voice said again.
    —Present, I said.
    There was a pause filled only with a sound like ham frying faintly in the distance.
    —Will?
    —Yes, I said. Will Cooper. Right here now.
    The earpiece hissed. A faint voice said two syllables. I believe it said, It’s Claire.
    Then nothing further. I said, Yes? Yes?
    The only answer was sizzle and hum.
    I said, Claire? Claire? Saying it loud enough to carry down the wires.
    I held the earpiece pressed tight for a long time, but nothing else emerged except a hollow sound, a ghost moving away.
    May came down the hall. I said, How does one bring this to an end?
    She turned the crank on the side of the box and rested the earpiece in its fork. The brown woven cord hung in a deep droop almost to the floor and swayed in a small diminishing arc like the pendulum to a wound-down clock.
    —Who is she, Colonel? Claire?
    —Someone I lost a long time ago.

2
    T HE HISTORY OF INDIAN RESISTANCE ON THIS CONTINENT IS A grim record of failure, even though a few battles were won now and again. As prime examples, I’ll use the somewhat recent Little Big Horn; also, much earlier, the nearby fight at Echoee against the English. Indians won those battles, along with some others. Wars, though, were inevitably lost. To take my point, see the widely published recent photographs of fierce Geronimo all swollen up like a brood sow riding in a Cadillac automobile.
    So what Bear accomplished was remarkable. If he did not prevail against America, I think it is at least fair to say he fought to a draw. In his battle, Bear used all the weapons at hand, including me. But the only killing shots any of us fired were against our own. Charley and his boys.
    Bear was not one of your mystic Indians. He was only interested in this one momentary world, not some hypothetical other. Bear loved all the tangible manifestations of Creation as fervently as Baptists do King Jesus. It was not the spirits of winds, rivers, mountains, trees that he worshiped, but the living things themselves.
    Bear was the possessor of the deepest and sharpest mind to which I have ever been exposed, and I say this as one who has known presidents, though, to be fair, only vicious Jackson and dim Johnson. That’s if you don’t count President Davis, who was plenty smart, but whose mind was thin and brittle as a water cracker. Bear, though, could not read or write, neither English nor the syllabary. Still, he more than held his own. The way I look at it, we have all
been
illiterate. Only a few of us stay that way, usually for the worst of reasons. Poverty in some cases. Law in others, at least back in the day of slavery. Bear, though, remained illiterate out of personal philosophy. But he loved stories, even the ones written down in books. I remember, when I was a boy, reading him long episodes from the
Morte d’Arthur
and the
Quixote,
translating into Cherokee on the fly. Bear would listen for as long as I cared to read, late into cold endless January nights when the whole world contracted within the circle of light from the fire in the center of his winterhouse.
    But Bear was not some isolate, living within a little narrow circumference of experience. He had seen a lot of what there was to America back then. As a young man, he had taken a blood grudge against a whiteman and sworn to kill him. He pursued the man for a year and a half, all up through Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and down into the wastes of Alabama and Georgia. Traveling rough and