Running Hawk

By Jad Davis

When sixteen-year-old Running Hawk is exiled to the South Yadkin River basin for twelve months-ostensibly as punishment for getting the chief 's daughter pregnant-his tribal elders believe it's a death sentence. Nevertheless, he sets out to build a home for himself, Summer, and their baby. Soon after the resettlement of the half-Saponi orphan, a

• Language: English
• Publisher: GoldTouch Press, LLC
• Release date: May 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781955347457

Jad Davis

Jad Davis is an investigative freelance writer. His novels are the result of years of research into the involvement with extraterrestrial life. Instead of referring to his work as "science fiction", Davis specifically focuses on "evidentiary conclusions" drawn from reported or written documents substantiating his opinion that the entire human race has been assisted by "aliens" since the beginning of this planet. His book, Sea Buzzards, simply reiterates that notion. The novelist lives in North Carolina with his family and two dogs. He spent many years in the teaching profession. He currently intends to follow his passion- writing.

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Running Hawk

Jad Davis

Copyright © 2021 by Jad Davis.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021909127

HARDBACK: 978-1-955347-44-0

Paperback: 978-1-955347-43-3

eBook: 978-1-955347-45-7

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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Recognition

David Gaines (Cover and Content Artist)

Stephen Beaver (Technology Research)

George Walker (Historical Analyst)

How I Met Running Hawk

It was a moderately warm Wednesday morning, the sky was clear and the roadmap indicated my arrival in Watauga County would be around lunchtime. It was just a hair over one hundred miles which was no problem for a 1962 Volkswagen filled to the brim with ten and a half gallons of Sunoco 260. I wore my best civilian clothes consisting of a my brown cotton slacks, a pair of weejun loafers, a madras long-sleeved shirt and my latest Christmas gift, a London Fog knee length coat. My suitcase held three packs of Winston cigarettes, underwear and all the rest of the preventative things an eighteen year old might luckily need.

I’m a Believer was playing on WKIX as I rolled out of my parents’ driveway and headed northwest on Highway 421. A U.S. Army Captain, Edwin Norris was expecting me to check me in at the college’s field house at 0400hrs. It was the week-end for the R.O.T.C. scholarship recipients to take their physical exams - running, doing pushups, peeing in a cup and getting examined by an authentic Army doctor. In those days, 4 years of college meant 4 years of draft- deferment, but a Commission added to a diploma guaranteed a trip to Southeast Asia.

Dan K. Moore was the governor, Lyndon B. Johnson was the President, 5 Australian troops were killed by Viet Cong guerrillas even though there was a ceasefire in effect, and it was on that day (December 29) some ways back in time, that Woodrow Wilson and the Commandant, of the military academy that I attended, would have celebrated their birthdays. President Wilson was dead but Major Chandler was not. If a first year cadet wished to rise above the rank of maggot, that same knob must always remember the commandant’s birthday. College raised its daunting head.

Into Justice Hall we went. I bunked in with a Ringo Starr looking boy from California who made a couple of remarks about my buzz cut. It was right there and then I decided to get a motel room in Blowing Rock where the beer and women were in the same place at the same time. So after Third Mess, I cranked up ole yaweh and headed southwest. It began to snow.

Hollars Restaurant and Motel was the first place I came to that I could see, which advertised a vacancy. It was ski season so the motels had jacked up their prices to $10.00 per night. I paid it, but I was running low on cash after that. I then made my way to the Antlers Bar and Grill. A foot of snow was on the ground. It was 30 degrees with the winds busting through the gorge at fifty miles per hour.

The wind-up alarm clock went off at 0500hrs. My high hopes of making it back to Appalachian’s gymnasium by eight o’clock were doused when I realized a three foot deep snowdrift prevented my motel room’s door from opening into the white abyss. WATA radio out of Boone stated that it was the worst blizzard seen in those parts in six years. There were twenty-three inches of snow covering Hwy. 321. The roads were closed. Telephone lines were down as well.

After explaining my plight and announcing the depletion of my funds, Mister Hollars kindly loaned me some tire chains. An hour later, I was following a road scraper supposedly moving north toward Boone but then he turned off to the right on Aho Road. Ole yaweh slid off the narrow slit cutting through the wood lined hillside. I had no choice but to leave my car. About a half mile straight up a mountain was a porch light. It was the kind that deterred insects from flying into their house.

It was dark because of the hemlocks blocking out the sunlight. You don’t know what slick is until you’ve tried to walk up a slippery slope in a pair of Weejuns. I sat down and changed into my track shoes - the ones with the metal spikes sticking out of the bottom. After hiking a hundred yards, each of my feet looked like a snowman’s head.

With less than fifty yards to go and getting sleepier by the footstep, keeping focus on the yellow light was all I could discipline myself to do. A giant of a man stepped out from behind an equally large red oak. At first, I couldn’t feel the heat from his woodstove.

The silhouette of his wife, although quite old, froze in my mind. It was the cinematic moment of an Apache combing her flaxen black hair. She looked shocked to see me, but then the seven foot gentleman poured us all a big jar full of his freshest batch of peach flavored white lightening. I awakened eighteen hours later. It was still snowing on New Year’s Day.

WATA 1450 AM Radio played its usual mix of twangy country songs juxtaposed with some religious tinge to it and sung by someone who usually sings ‘rock and roll’. The airway was full of talk about the big fire on the teachers college’s campus. The scuttlebutt’s main pusher at the station house was a terrible announcer but he really shined when he went into the details of Thursday’s devastating fire.

The President’s Office, fifty years of student records, departmental libraries and the famous Appalachian Room, where the mounted busts of great industrialists once stood, all burned. And then he told his captivated listening audience there were a total of 184,314 American soldiers in South Vietnam. Forty-seven inches of snow had fallen in three days. A possible break in the weather was expected the next week.

By day TEN, the amazingly agile old man and I became drinking buddies.

By day FIFTEEN, I had learned about Running Hawk and his father, White Wolf. In between strokes on a mandolin and a bluesy mountain tune banged out on his piano, it dawned on me that this man was Running Hawk and his Indian wife was 355, a Culper.

On day "NINETEEN’’ as I was about to leave, the Cerian told me the story about his adolescent years. He cried when he spoke of his half-Cerian brothers, especially Sir Francis George of the Walkers and Andy Jackson. He made me promise to tell this story only after his death and that’s what I did. He was 193 years old.

Running Hawk is about that old man’s memory of when he was 16 years old.

To:

ELSIE WEAVER

Contents

Chapter 1:    Banishing

Chapter 2:    Salisbury

Chapter 3:    Professional Choices

Chapter 4:    Mr. Canter Falk

Chapter 5:    Celestial Spaces

Chapter 6:    The Deal

Chapter 7:    Lodge Work

Chapter 8:    The Game Plan

Chapter 9:    The Convention

Chapter 10:  War Seeds

Chapter 11:  The Marriage

Chapter 12:  SERE School

About the Author

Chapter 1

Banishing

Lifting wet logs out of the South Yadkin River sounds like a simple thing to do because the river runs only about four miles an hour. That’s about how fast a fox walks. It’s not the water speed that kills you; it is the quicksand that lines that part of the Yadkin that can get you.

When you are prying off logs from the top of a river-bend pile, you had best be careful to not get your foot caught under some shifting logs. That’s a two-week death right there. A man must be very careful.

Yesterday was my first day of banishment. Things went well, considering the mental anguish that type of duress can cause on a person. I began digging out the foundation for my home. I put the footers three feet deep and hammered the ground so everything would be flat enough for my eight-by-ten-foot cabin to sit on. I had chosen a high place for my house, just as the Saura Tribe had done fifty years before. The tribe’s population in those days was probably over five hundred people, judging from the lay of the land.

There were artifacts everywhere I dug into the soft black sand. A lot of people would be afraid of spirits and stuff, but the way I see it, life is what it is and death is what it is, and that’s that— nothing to get blurry eyed over. As a matter of fact, death is just normal. Anyway, I won’t be worried about Keyauwee ghosts tonight, and that’s for darn sure!

Before my ousting, I grabbed my entire box of shipbuilders’ tools, along with several pouches of seeds to restart my trail business. I knew that my priority would be to build a shelter; however, the second demanded that I replant my cannabis and poppy seedlings along with a host of other valuable herbs as soon as possible.

I believed the soil around my new place was even better than it was back home. Poppies grow best in acidic dirt. Once the plants are processed and readied for the market, the road traders will buy me out within the second day of me putting my crop up for sale!

To sum things up, my name is Running Hawk. I belong to the Saura tribe, located at the juncture of the Mayo and Dan Rivers. I’m from the Upper Sauratown village, located about five miles from Madison’s Village. It was there that my troubles began to multiply. You see, I bought and traded for all sorts of things during times when most people were in the trading mood. I offered my customers a place to sit down and rest while serving them a couple of slugs of rum and some smoked venison on a stick. I was looked upon as a very good trader in those days!

It was raining so hard that you would have thought that the heavens were trying to taunt the ground plants into bloom. My oilcloth did very little to keep me warm throughout the night. I’m afraid it was one of those times when a person needed a warm embrace from his mother. I had one of those once. Her name was Snow.

At first light, I headed out to retrieve my catch from the rabbit gum that had been set the night before. As I approached the rectangular box, it began to rock with jerking motions.

A freedom-resolved raccoon had ripped up my trap’s trip mechanism. It would take an entire day to carve out a new one. I knew I would have to drown the animal for my own safety. A frightened raccoon will attack its captor just for reciprocity’s sake.

The morning sun was beginning to heat the Yadkin up, causing steam to dance on the slow-moving currents. I pulled the drowned coon from the gum and gutted it with my boot knife. With one slit, the animal’s belly opened. I put the brown and blue entrails into a clay jar. I then skinned the mammal, making sure that I did not cut the penis off. Once the fellow’s dick cartilage had dried, it became an invaluable asset as an all-purpose tool. It was to be used as a toothpick, a sewing needle, and a flash-pan pick. I baked the animal.

The largest of the logs that I had fished out of the river the day before were now ready to be dragged into the set trough for the front base of my river home’s leverage. That job took an hour.

A young boy must be careful with an ax and wet wood. Water-slick logs can cause the edge of a poorly angled ax to slip and can make the blade go sailing like a shot bird. There have been many children who have run to their mothers to help them hide the long gashes from their fathers’ gazes. Kidding from a parent is usually worse than the injury itself.

As I realized the huge amount of work that was still before me, a rush of anger raised the hair all over my body. I must admit that I threw one hell of a temper tantrum because of the hatred I have toward mundane tasks in general. The nuggets I had earned last year afforded me the ability to pay someone to build me ten houses. Tragically, it was hard to find a crew of white folk who would build a house for an exiled Indian in those days. Instead of sulking any further, I crafted a new plan for myself. Starting tomorrow, I swore, I would abstain from another single drop of the rum cache stored in the smoke tree. Things, however, did not turn out that way.

Thick fog had rolled in from the south. A young turkey, probably fearing he would get caught in a tree with wet wings, made a careening dive into some laurel bushes about fifty yards from where I was sitting. I reached for my oilcloth — which would camouflage my silhouette— my bow and two blunt-tipped arrows. I slipped to the place where I thought the young male turkey had landed, but I saw no tracks. The woods were dead silent. It was very strange. Turkeys don’t just disappear

A fish weir is a very smart thing that we Indians have been making for thousands of years. It fishes for you around the clock. Every minute of every day, your weir is always working to feed your family. All you have to do to make one is sharpen about twenty-four two-foot stakes and hammer them in a V shape. If you place those pilings close enough together, it causes the water to rise and then spill over into an artificial exit route. From then on, fish will spill into a waiting basket on a regular basis.

One also needs to be cautious of the cottonmouth moccasins that live along the Yadkin River. By the way, they get worse the farther south you go toward the Pee Dee tribal lands. The cottonmouth is a smart snake. They quickly learn where they can snatch an easy meal. It is prudent to watch your hands and face when picking up your night’s bounty.

My plants needed protection from the nocturnal deer. There was a large growth of bamboo about a mile south of my cabin. My intention was to transplant enough of those trees to make a fence to protect the female plants that were just beginning to sprout.

The laughing bush that I called white widow was the most desirable purchase by the traders. I could get five dollars an ounce for it any day of the week. My garden looked like it might yield about twenty pounds of the crop if I could manage to keep the night herbivores out of it.

Deer and rabbits are the greatest nemeses of a seed plot. Even garlic would not be spared by the furry sprites. Now, the crows are a different story altogether. They are the wisest thing in the forest, so you have to work out a deal with them. If a person does not feed the crows and consequently shows them no respect, they will intentionally pay you back. Let’s say, for example, you are hunting on some bright and sunny day and your quarry comes into range. All of a sudden, the revengeful birds alert your prey of your presence. Just don’t piss off crows!

I prepared a cooking pit for the coon. Lard would convey the oven heat toward the center of the roasting beast while my added spices, along with some extra rosemary leaves, would coat the sizzling delicacy with a tasty crust.

Then I wrapped the readied coon in several maple leaves and finally insulated the meat by sandwiching it between two layers of cut sod. A five-log cherrywood fire blazed above the prepared coon.

Something kept bothering me. I felt as though someone was watching me. Since that turkey had disappeared into thin air, I suspected that a predator had entered into my territory.

With extreme caution, I took my full quiver of arrows with me. I had to prepare for the worst. A Cherokee would likely challenge me to a fair fight. On the other hand, a Shawnee would most likely ambush me. I prayed it was a white man. I had heard that they are much easier to kill than an Indian.

With the intent of building a fence around my herb plot, I headed out toward a bamboo grove some twenty minutes away. In preparation for my transport sled, I cut two poles so I could drag about twenty bamboo trees along with their root balls back to my river house.

As I began pulling my skin-wrapped sled back toward my cabin, I happened to look down at a footprint I had made on my way to the bamboo grove. There was the footprint of a wolf in the dead center of my indentation.

The odd thing about that was that there were no other prints made by the large lobo. As crazy as this might sound, I was so thankful that the wolf track wasn’t an Indian’s. I dragged the bamboo back to the house site and collapsed from nerve-burned exhaustion.

I woke up with only four fingers of light left until sunset. In another hour, it would be dusk. I had rolled an old stump up to the edge of the cooking fire and opened a new jug of rum. Immediately, the alcohol began doing its work, warming me. But despite the rum’s promise of a sense of well-being, I knew something was very wrong.

A white widow’s seed popped as an ember from a cherrywood twig ignited my pipe. Within seconds, my anxiety falsely faded into a dulled sense of safety, although realistically, I knew a confrontation with the wolf was inevitable. My thoughts became even more muddled as I swallowed another and another gulp of rum.

An excited spark lifted into the night air. From across the river, a set of red eyes were staring at me. I looked around the home site and noticed that wolf prints had covered every square inch of the ground in front of me. Strangely, I no longer felt endangered. This time, I knew within my heart that the wolf was trying to communicate with me.

The pile of bamboo root balls that I dragged up either yesterday or earlier this morning— I simply don’t remember when— were beginning to dry out. I was quite aware that I had to replant them immediately. If they survived the transplant, I would be able to fashion a fence around my garden in the morning. My foundation logs were well-seated. I would split out the floor tomorrow afternoon. Frankly, if I never saw another tool in my hand again, I would be a very happy man.

Building a roof is purely a painful experience. Every rafter must be placed exactly nine inches apart from the other. When that is equated into the number of trees a man has to chop down to support a damn roof, it kind of makes you wonder if a good cave might be a better idea, you know?

I could smell the raccoon cooking beneath the smoldering heap of red and blue coals that were slowly roasting the beast below. It would be ready in the morning. I was starving. Even big swigs of rum could not numb the pangs of hunger I was feeling. To alleviate my discomfort, I headed for my fish weir.

With a lantern banging against my wrist, I hurried down the path leading to the dammed-up creek. Salt-and-pepper fish on a stick sounded like the hot ticket to me.

Sure enough, when I threw the lantern light on the fish basket, a southern banded water snake sprang from the basket’s lip and dropped into Second Creek below. The snake had a lump in her long belly because of the theft of one of my fish.

There were four sunfish remaining in the basket. I slid a stick through their gills and then through their mouths to make a carrier for their shaky trip back home. The snap of a stick breaking from the weight of an intruder told me that the wolf was closing in. I slid off one of the fishes and let it flap in the sand. Peace.

An owl swooped in front of me in search of his evening meal. Oddly, the bird’s face turned toward me, exposing two glowing red eyes. The coincidences were mounting. They could no longer be ignored. I cautiously headed for my roofless cabin.

The battered fish hissed from the licks of the campfire’s flame.

The birds had become silent. Night had come and it had brought danger with it.

White people, when they are on a river, are constantly making noise. In this case, someone was playing a flute coupled with another’s singing. Consequently, I lost my shot at the wolf.

Both men drifted toward the sand mound that protected my home from their dangerous eyes. I watched the men as they loudly drifted past my bunker. They were dressed in identical black suits along with matching red hats. Their wooden poles banged against the sides of their flatboat as they made their way down the Yadkin. To me they looked like gamblers headed for a saltwater town. Their front lantern had a large metal reflector behind it that illuminated their current choices and rock avoidance. Their sound, along with their light, softened as they floated southward.

Two unmistakable eyes had also watched the passing travelers. The rogue wolf slowly backed away from the river’s edge and then disappeared back into the laurel bushes. I unstopped another jug of rum and lit up my pipe. I was very thankful to still be alive.

Twelve more good trees would frame in my rafters, but there was only one problem— I had a roaring hangover. Despite my self-inflicted malady, I had to get them in place— that is, if I hoped to ever have a roof over my head again.

I was angry at myself for allowing my emotions to superimpose themselves on me to the point of clouding my generally good judgment. I mean, think about it. A man has a lethal predator actively pursuing him, and instead of protecting himself, he sits down beside of a roaring fire and gets blitzed out of his mind! Now, is that stupid or what?

The bamboo trees were spaced perfectly around the perimeter of my laughing bush garden. All the roots got a pint of water each before I tied them together with green strands of honeysuckle vine. The lower half of the fence was thatched with blackberry limbs to keep the squirrels and rabbits out. I also put out a pound of corn for the crows’ tariff.

By the time the sun was directly above me, I had sweated out most of the fever- like effects of my reckless imbibing. There were only seven more logs to set and tie to complete the rafters.

Cutting out two hundred rectangular shingles made from bark was to be my evening’s task. That was the job I dreaded doing the most.

I promised myself that this would be my last night of heavy drinking. That oath was mainly made because I was facing no less than five hours of tedious labor and I needed some kind of coping mechanism to get me through it.

In the lower part of Second Creek, about two hundred yards downstream from my fish weir, is a stretch of creek that is flush with smooth slate rocks. After the roof’s completion, I planned to start fetching a few hundred slabs to make a fireplace.

I dug up the roasted raccoon and sliced off enough of the steaming meat for my first meal of the day. Strength seemed to flow back into my body with each mouthful of the protein-rich meat I swallowed. The rum provided a needed boost— hair of the dog.

I spent the rest of the day cutting and setting rafters. Around four o’clock that afternoon, just after the last log had been skillfully tied into place, I decided to take a break.

By throwing a couple of handfuls of pine cones on the cooking coals, I was able to get the fire going again. I stacked about six pieces of arm-sized logs with a root ball on them, which would provide enough warmth for about three hours. Thirty minutes remained until sundown. It was forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.

After pouring a tablespoon of molasses on a half pound of the coon’s hindquarter and devouring a boiled potato, I finished off the rest of the rum in the jug from last night. I then fired up another bowl of laughing bush and sketched out an oven that would dominate my entire cabin wall.

With another jug of rum now opened, I began the task of laying the foundation for my massive oven works. It was two thirty in the morning.

I heard some starlings erupt into an unexpected flight from their roost. Something of the predator class was moving along the riverbank. There was a dark cloud blocking out the moon. Seeing anything beyond fifty feet away was like trying to find the value of a tit on a boar hog.

Perhaps it was some sort of dissonance due to the darkness or just my imagination. Nevertheless, I believe I saw a pair of wolf’s eyes from across the river. The lulling effect of the laughing bush, along with the booze, beckoned me to lie down and sleep— Trojan.

Quite unrealistically, the earth began to spin beneath me as if I were being pulled into the sky. In my questionable dream, spectacular colors flashed before my eyes. The warmth from the light source felt as if it were heating my bones through and through.

The river sand burned my face as it whirled around me, causing me to hide my eyes from the stinging funnel. For the first time in my life, I began to question whether I was experiencing a dream or death.

One female turkey yelping for her busted-up flock woke me up from a hard sleep. The dew had already dried on the ground, which told me it was way past ten o’clock. The distressed bird began purring, which is not a normal thing for a lost bird to do. I grabbed my oilcloth along with two bird arrows and clamped my fist around my bow handle. I was going to kill that turkey.

When I reached an abnormally shaped cedar tree, I realized from the bird’s approaching sound that I was directly in line with her expected arrival. The odd tree afforded me a perfect place to stand while still commanding a clear shooting lane that would not deflect a launched arrow. I began my most appealing mouth call to assure the wild turkey that home and friends were just around the corner.

A sweet clover meadow dotted with silver birch trees formed a perfect backdrop for the panic-stricken hen to find her lost girlfriends and cousins. I saw movement about seventy-five yards away.

The tops of the foxtail rye moved in unison— a dead giveaway for a moving animal. There were four crows watching the thing play out from their high perches atop a couple of poplar trees. Like horny voyeurs, they waited breathlessly for the climax to come. Their craning heads told me that the turkey was less than thirty-five feet away.

I drew my bowstring and aimed at the moving grass just twenty feet in front of me. A wolf’s face appeared, which left me sorely perplexed. I had a blunt-tipped arrow nocked. It would never penetrate a mammal the size of a wolf.

My so-called stalker limped by my impotent position. Neither the animal nor I was any wiser from our encounter. However, I did notice the timber wolf had been badly wounded. The droplets of a blood trail told the whole story— gut shot.

I waited for almost an hour until I was sure the gimp wolf was out of hearing range. I couldn’t believe that the animal didn’t pick up on my scent when he hobbled in front of the tree I was standing under. After all, the wind was at my back and was blowing right into his face. It was very odd, indeed.

As I walked away from the cedar tree, I saw something glitter on the trail leading toward my house. There was a splotch of thick black blood coagulating in one of the dying wolf’s footprints.

Drops of frothy blood dotted a cluster of rhododendron leaves, which directed me toward an expected death scene. Instead, I found a female wolf profoundly suffering from the badly breeched birthing of her pups. A small hind leg was protruding from the wailing animal’s birth canal. I cried for Snow.

Within seconds, death had begun to stiffen the hinge of the wolf’s pelvis, making a natural birth an impossibility. I pulled out my boot knife and carefully split open the hardening belly tissue, freeing her two pups. Most wolves have six to eight young in their litters. This wolf, whom I had thought was a male, turned out to be a dying pregnant female that had only two pups— an anomaly for sure.

I wrapped up the newborns in my shirt and began the half-mile walk back to my house. I would put them in the bread warmer I had made in the stove wall. They seemed very hungry.

My shovel was leaning against the cabin foundation. I had to bury the mother. I decided to name the little beasts Romulus and Remus.

Her body was gone. There were no signs of large animals dragging off the dead mother. No buzzards. The wolf had disappeared.

I returned to the whimpering sounds of two famished furry balls.

I inverted my coonskin cap in my attempt to give the baby wolves somewhat of a normal welcome into the world. It was their first day of life, after all!

Romulus was beginning to gnaw on his brother’s leg. Today’s cubs grow into tomorrow’s wolves, something my father used to say, was certainly showing some element of truth in this case. They were predators, that was true, but they did seem quite harmless rolling around like domestic puppies.

I needed to find some milk. A placebo would have to do for now. I boiled some honey and water together, along with a couple of mouthfuls of chewed-up raccoon meat. I strained the concoction through a piece of cotton cloth and into the raccoon stomach I had saved in a jar. It made a perfect tit.

Romulus and Remus ferociously sucked on the small intestine nipple I had fashioned. They would want to be fed again in about three hours. It was going to be a long night.

Music rang down the valley. It was announcing the arrival of another group of river travelers. When I peeked over the top of my protective bunker, I got the surprise of my life.

A black dome skimmed across the surface of the river. There was no light, no sound— only an Italian soloist assuring me of the existence of genuine flying craft. Harps faded as the vessel diminished into the distance. A red light then ascended into the midnight sky.

A faint blinking red light caught my attention as I climbed up the sandy bank toward my home site. Because of the dimness and intermittent nature of the light source, I had a hell of a time finding the thing. It looked like a very smooth creek stone, except this one was as clear as a piece of glass. When I cleaned off the sand from the crystal pebble, it began to vibrate in my hand. It was the oddest thing I had ever held. I put it into my pocket.

When I was ten years old, White Wolf took my mother and me to stay with some of his friends while he attended to some business out of town. I remember it was the first time that I had ever met a white family, but I liked them.

There was this one kid. His name was Matthew. He was twelve.

He was the one that introduced me to the odyssey of prostitution. We went into Winchester on several occasions. Each time, we would station ourselves outside of this certain cathouse where the back alley hid us from the local constable.

I reckon that was when I veered off the righteous path. Just listening to all of the exotic noises coming from the upstairs bedrooms caused me to never change my course too much. The nearest town was Salisbury.

One of the several books I had bought from the traders was the memoir of a prostitute named Fanny Hill. On a personal note, figuratively speaking, when I reached the point at which the local farm animals began to look attractive, I would just whip out The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and give myself the rabbit-hand.

Romulus and Remus were hungry. They had gotten to the point that the raccoon intestine wasn’t feeding them quickly enough now. The young wolves had started competing for double turns on the coon tit. Greed.

Remus became more violent with his boorish brother as each day passed by. Their fighting had escalated into nothing less than dangerous throat lunges at one another. Kills seemed to be the end game for both.

Soon after, they started to stalk an item of interest, they regularly performed a genetically fed tactic against anything smaller than they were. Once the mutual target had been grasped in their jaws, the young wolves would then pull their prize apart with opposing tugs, as if it were a wishbone.

I separated the last hip from the baked raccoon and put the morsel in a wooden bowl. The meat slid from the pale white bone so that I could cut it up with light taps from my hatchet. I then chopped the hind leg into identically-sized halves, longways and down the femur. Romulus would settle only for the side with more marrow.

A whore would cost about two dollars in Salisbury. I figured that the city was at least ten to twelve miles away. On foot, I could be there in four hours; by canoe, three, but I had no boat. More than likely, I could scrape up enough money for a room and a woman, but this was not the time to go to Salisbury. The dogs could not be left alone for that long.

It looked as if we were going to have a bad winter. The woolly worms were almost all black. I knew I needed to get a deerskin and a head for summer hunting. With that kind of camouflage, I would be able to get within thirty yards of the wary does. A couple of fawns would fill up my smoke tree.

Dutchman’s Creek offered the greatest chance for a successful night’s hunt. The moon was full, so the two-mile trek would likely be uneventful. I double- checked my bow along with the ten sharp arrows I had selected. All were in good shape. I would leave as soon as I situated the pups.

Romulus and Remus growled as I pretended to exclude them from their meal. I left a pile of the raccoon leftovers in a large wooden bowl and shut them inside of my cabin. I quietly slipped away with my bow and quiver full of arrows.

When I got to Bear Creek, I followed it north for about a half mile until I ran into another creek feeding into it. That was Dutchman’s Creek.

I climbed into the fork of a huge sycamore tree and found the perfect perch overlooking a worn path. I propped up my quiver so that I could gain quick access to more arrows if I needed them. My eyes had adjusted to the dull moonlight. I would be able to clearly see anything moving within fifty yards from my twenty-foot-high position. I silently adjusted my comfort level and got ready for the yearlings to make their evening debut.

The first shot I took was at a spotted spike. He was maybe eight months old. He fell dead in the creek, with the impact of the arrow splitting his spinal cord. His sister came out to see what had happened to her brother and she died as well. I returned home dragging both behind me.

Wolves naturally become ecstatic when they smell a freshly killed animal lying within a tongue’s length of them. Remus attacked Romulus because his brother licked one of the fawns before he did.

Right from the beginning, those two animals despised each other. I sensed that a final showdown was not far away.

Romulus then swept past his brother and clenched his teeth on the throat of the same deer that Remus was then also exploring. With angry flashes of fangs, the miniature wolves began tearing the fur from each other’s bodies.

Their screams and snarls echoed across the Yadkin as the two wild animals did their best to kill one another. The smoke and the fire left only the opaque images of the beasts battling over the principles of savage etiquette.

Instantly, as if choreographed, the wolves turned their rage toward the other young doe. The immensely territorial carnivores, jealously hot, tore into the unlicked spotted spike like furry piranhas. They raced to see which one could get through the animal’s skin first. The blue-ribbon prize was a captured organ.

***

The sun made it very clear to me that I needed to wake up. A passing crow sent out an alarming message. Something or someone was approaching. I looked around my house at all the visible signs that might tip me off to an encroaching threat. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed.

A lone crow brazenly flew into my garden, challenging me to approach the patch of poppy and cannabis plants. When I did, I discovered a human had walked into my garden of young sprouts. I saw footprints.

The tracks were from a grown man who had carefully avoided damaging missteps. There were no footprints leading to or exiting the bamboo fence.

The wolves sensed my concern and began to make a shrill howl that reverberated throughout the surrounding forest. Masses of starlings took to the sky. It was noon.

"Is’wa is the Indian word for river." Indian lore describes an is’wa as having a beginning and an end. I thought about change, and like a never-returning river, living life and accepting those inevitable changes are synonymous with maturity. I knew that the very change I just mentioned was happening to me. There seemed to be a force pulling me like a magnet— but for what purpose I hadn’t a clue.

There was a noise coming from the upstream. I peeked over the ridge protecting my cabin only to see a lone boater paddling down the Yadkin. His fur-covered kayak kept banging into the debris on the west side of the river. He was seemingly quite drunk. I let him pass.

Romulus and Remus had already outgrown their playground. The sandy beach of their ideal universe was becoming too small. They independently began exploring life’s other curiosities. During the day they slept, but at night, the pair hunted like grown wolves.

A gunshot exploded just over the bunker. The dogs heard it first. Fear gripped me.

Right as the first rim of daylight showed itself over the Allegheny Mountains, I spotted a flicker of light blinking from the corner of a cove just behind a dogleg in the river. I had been on the lookout all night.

The seven-o’clock sun commanded the reflection of a gold medallion that was dangling from the neck of a man who had shot himself in the head. As I got closer, I recognized the poor soul as the same traveler that had passed with the fur-covered kayak the night before. His necklace flashed as the boat kept arguing with the sharpening current. Apparently there had been a lot of rain in the mountains. A finger of driftwood had snagged a tie-on loop that had once been used to strap furs to the front of the trader’s boat. That black spear would not let the dead man continue south.

I thought about the situation for a few minutes, puffed on my pipe, and then got my rope. After much consternation, I dog-paddled across the muddying water with the cotton cord clenched between my teeth. I swam toward the trader’s boat.

The kayak would easily slip away from the debris hang up, but now wasn’t the time to release it. I had to tie the rope onto the front of the dead man’s craft. Once I pushed the trader’s ship loose, the current did its job. Hesitantly, it lurched for freedom and then began stretching out the secured rope that I had tied to a tree on my side of the river. The rope was then pulled tight by the river’s current.

Green flies had already begun their feast on the trader’s eyes. He smelled like a rotted pig. A newspaper fluttered from within his pocket. The year on it was 1786. There were new treaty laws levying severe penalties for pillaging, murder, and all the rest of the atrocities that man delivers so vigorously to others.

I firmly secured the dead man’s boat on my side of the river. I threw branches over the stinking body. It wouldn’t fool an Indian, but it probably would a white man. I went to the house for a drink. I had to do some thinking.

The shadows darkened as the sun began to drop behind the valley treetops. I kept wondering what I was going to do with the corpse. The guy must have had a thousand dollars of cargo onboard.

Pepsin roots, when shaved correctly, will boil down into a thick syrup. With an upper-lip swipe of the oil leeched from their roots, I could deal with the smell of a decomposing man. As much as I wanted the dead man’s whole kit and caboodle, I finally decided that I would keep only the things that could never be traced back to me. After that, I would let the boat go.

There were a lot of valuable things wrapped within the dead man’s pouches. Small things like needles and large things like three nuggets of gold were among the items the trader had stored in various compartments. More than a hundred pelts were rolled up under the bow. Even armed with a thick swipe of winter mint oil wiped underneath my nose, I almost puked when I pulled the dead man onto the shore. Below the seat, I discovered a long box. It contained a British Morrison-16, the finest sniper rifle ever made. I had become instantly wealthy.

The things that would never be incriminating I kept. The deceased captain and his boat, along with the musket he shot himself with, I kicked into the current.

The trader drifted away. I could not believe my luck. I had in my possession the most accurate rifle known to man.

In the mahogany case that the rifle had been packed in also had fifty conical bullets along with a pound of black powder and three quartz flints. The rifle had never been shot before. There was still wax in the barrel.

A cluster of dogwood trees was putting on quite a show. Several tom turkeys gobbled.

A long time ago, White Wolf made me a turkey whistle. That call would insult any self-respecting suitor. When I blew the leg-bone lure, it made the sound of a hen having a screaming orgasm. Jealous strutting normally followed. It was a good