Free The Eden Hunter by Skip Horack

thunder on top of lightning and he was chased back into the canebrake. He ended his search and returned to the redsticks, announcing his approach with a cardinal whistle that was smothered up by the slapping rain.
    Hungry Crow and Little Horn sat huddled beneath the wide stomachs of their stallions; both Morning Star and his horse were missing still. Hungry Crow called out, but Kau ignored him and instead went to Little Horn. He knelt beside the hobbled horse and spoke. “I believe that we are safe now,” he said.
    “Was it a white man?”
    “I think. But his tracks are gone.”
    Hungry Crow had left the shelter of his own horse and joined them. The redstick’s wet strip of hair was pasted flat against his skull. “Gone?” he asked.
    “Yes. Washed away by the rain.”
    “So you say, baby slave.”
    Kau nodded and then walked off. There was a cypress on the riverbank that had been killed by pecky rot. Lightning flashed all about, yet he took refuge inside the hollow tree without regard. He draped the damp horse blanket over his shoulders, then began to squeeze water from his breechcloth. He was exhausted and miserable, and a piece of him wondered if to end his life here—beside a rain-dimpled river, inside a warm tree—was about the best he could dare hope for in this second world. There was a shimmer of blue light, and for a single second he saw Benjamin alive and standing in the hard rain. The hay hook dangled from the boy’s throat, and his thin white shirt was red with blood. Then thunder boomed and it was dark again. Kau pressed
the tip of his knife against his bare chest and was not afraid. There was comfort for him there, knowing he had that one power still—the only absolute power that any man ever truly possesses.
     
    IN THE QUIET that followed the thunderstorm he returned to the camp and found Little Horn stabbing at the wet ashes of a fire with a crooked stick. The redstick looked up at him.
    “Where is Morning Star?” asked Kau.
    “He has left us for now.” Little Horn shrugged. “I think he will go searching along the river for Blood Girl. That would be important to him.”
    Kau sat down on his heels. “But not important to you?”
    “I have seen many deaths.”
    “And him?”
    “Him, too,” said Little Horn. “But he has let them stir at his mind.”
    “You do not believe he is a prophet?”
    “I suppose he could be many things.” Little Horn drew a cross in the dead ash. “But does it even matter?”
     
    WITHOUT MORNING STAR, Kau came to doubt that they would ever learn exactly who had killed Blood Girl during the crossing. Little Horn suspected the highwaymen but Hungry Crow disagreed, promising that they were still at least a day’s ride from the cave where the white thieves lived. In the end Kau decided that it did not matter really. She was dead and had died poorly, shot like a deer in a bean field.

    Hungry Crow and Little Horn rode north, following the river, and he trailed after them for all of the next day. That night they made a fireless camp and then, at sunrise, left the two remaining horses secured in the canebrake. A short stretch of creek led them to the foot of a steep ridge, and Hungry Crow pointed to where bits of stone showed through a thick green layer of wild grapevine and creeper, explaining that the whole of that broken ridge was hollow, that inside was the cave they were seeking.
    “And the entrance?” asked Little Horn.
    They crept forward and took cover in the branches of a fallen magnolia. Hungry Crow aimed his longrifle at a rent in the side of the ridge. “There,” he said. “Hidden.”
     
    MIDDAY A THIN white man dressed in fine clothes emerged from the cracked earth. Kau saw now that a series of ropes had been woven into the tangled vines, forming a sort of ladder that fell down across the side of the ridge. The man slung a sagging feed sack over his shoulder, then began to climb the twenty yards of rope ladder one-handed. Two pistols were tucked