Thirteen Moons Read Free Page A

light, but happy knowing how hard he was pushing the man ahead of him across the land, like desperate game driven by beaters. When they’d finally made a great circle and come back nearly to home, the man quit running and holed up in a barn to make a final stand. Bear went in with nothing but a hawkbill knife.
    —I’d a mind to gut him out, Bear said when he told me the tale.
    But instead, after he had cornered the man in the hayloft, Bear just touched him with the crook of the blade and walked away. It was an exquisite point of honor.
    In his middle years, Bear saw even more of America when he traveled all through the coastal plantation country chasing after a Cherokee girl of nine or ten who had been stolen by slavers passing through the mountains. The girl, named Blossom, wasn’t even clan kin to Bear, but the whole business angered him. Slaver trash coming onto his land and hauling children off. He set out afoot and was gone for months tracking Blossom from town to town, slave market to slave market. He went down to Hillsborough and Fayetteville and from there to the coast and then south right into the heart of Charleston to the big market and from there out into the countryside to find the people who had ultimately bought the girl.
    Back then, years before I first met him, he would have been an even taller man than I remember, unstooped by age, broad-shouldered and full across the forehead, his long nose like a hatchet blade and his black hair long and loose except for the one little plait he liked to wear in the back. I can see him walking up the tree-lined drive of a great Charleston plantation, his linen hunting shirt and deerleather leggings dusty from the road. A look on his face of utter calm and disinterest, but intent on claiming the kidnapped girl. And back then, he probably had a drink or two in him, for he achieved temperance only occasionally, in old age.
    He talked with the first whiteman he saw, a stout little music tutor, sitting on a horse watching two men making a wheel hoop in a blacksmith shed. The tutor passed Bear up the chain of command to the foreman and finally to the actual owner and his pale slim wife. They came out from the big house and talked to the dashing and handsome Indian just for the entertainment of it. They disagreed with Bear’s assessment of the situation. And though Bear wanted to take out his knife and kill the man where he stood, he went back to town and found a lawyer. Not an honest lawyer but, better yet for his purposes, a smart mean little bastard with personal and political grudges against the plantation owner and eager to go against him in court.
    For a month, Bear slept every night down by the water in a rope hammock strung in a stand of palmettos, and by day he and his lawyer fielded every argument they could muster, including expert microscopic evidence to show that the girl’s hair bore no Negro characteristics. The long and short of it is, they won. Bear came walking back into the village with Blossom by his side and restored her to her home.
    I asked him one time how he knew to use the law in his favor. He said that the law is an axe. It cuts whatever it falls on. The man that wins knows how to aim the sharp edge away from himself.
    He didn’t much care to talk about the court business, but as an old man he still remembered with great favor the enormous and tasty fish he caught from the sand beach at his campsite. The water, though, was the worst he had ever put in his mouth. When I asked him how he managed to conduct all this business not speaking the English language, he said maybe back then he knew a word or two but not anymore.
             
    TO BE EVENHANDED, I should also tell a representative story about Featherstone, for he was fatherlike to me as well. But more the kind of father you want to kill. Or one who wants to kill you. When I think back on the single instance when we actually exchanged pistol fire, I sometimes still wish I had taken him