Free The Eden Hunter by Skip Horack Page B

the fronts of his spindly legs and could not walk. The highwayman yelled again, and Kau watched as Hungry Crow dragged himself to the entrance of the cave. The redstick had his longrifle in his lap. “Do not run,” he said, but then he slumped over and was dead.
    Kau shoved Hungry Crow aside and then slid his own longrifle back between the cinched saddlebags. He squeezed out of the cave and sunlight blinded him as he stumbled gasping into the day. The ground dropped off beneath his feet, and as he fell he reached out and caught hold of the rope ladder. Something clattered off the rocks beneath him—the longrifle, lost—and more shouts came as he began to climb.
    At the top of the ridge he looked down and saw that three dusty white men had emerged from the cave and were now climbing one by one toward him. He began to saw at the rope ladder with his knife, but then a black-haired man aimed a pistol up at him and so he fled. He circled back down the ridge, following Hungry Crow’s path to the canebrake and then the river. Morning Star was on the opposite bank, watching, and his diseased horse lay dead in the
shallows. The prophet motioned for him to cross the river, but Kau hesitated until he heard the highwaymen entering the cane behind him. Finally he splashed into the water and began to swim. The saddlebags threatened to sink him but he was able to push on.
    He reached the other side of the Conecuh and found Morning Star kneeling on the bank. The prophet smiled at him, revealing his own cut teeth, and then he began to sing, his long silence finally broken. Kau listened and was reminded of the songs of the Ota. He tried to make sense of the words being chanted over and again:
    I will fly with the winds
I will swim with the rivers
I will return
to some far corner
of the world
    Morning Star seemed almost to be screaming now. Shots were fired at them from across the river, and finally Kau took off running into the forest. He would be traveling alone again, he realized. The prophet was singing a death song.

VI
    Across Florida—Honeybees—Lorenzo Dow—Another cave
    S OUTH, THEN EAST. With the longrifle lost he kept slow, vigilant and—as if engaged in some barefoot child’s amusement of balance—walked heel to toe in the way of his people, the bone club held loose in his hand, his breechcloth snug against him. Water was plentiful, and his saddlebags still held some of the smoked venison; it would be days before he needed to hunt again.
    This was a Spanish territory in name, but he saw that more than anything it was an everyman’s land. Country where a lone Ota trespasser walking with the pole star off his left shoulder belonged as much as the assortment of runaways and filibusters and renegades who shared the forest with him. On occasion there were shots in the distance, sometimes even the hollerings of men, and he
saw that all but the ignorant or fearless moved after sunset, eyes averted from the bright moon to maintain their night vision.
    Most travelers rode horses and came so rank and noisy that he could avoid them with ease. Only the runaways moved on foot, and at certain moments in the dark flatwoods strangers would each become aware of the other approaching. Like the warm-water sharks that had once circled his slave ship, as they neared they would both veer slightly so that to a next-day tracker it would appear almost as if the first had careened off the second, that directions and destinies had been forever altered by that chance encounter.
     
    FOUR NIGHTS AFTER the clash with the highwaymen, the deaths of Little Horn and Hungry Crow and Morning Star, he arrived upon a place where the pine forest was split by a wide creek. He was filling his canteen when there came the pungency and then the whinnies of upwind horses. He made to run and hide himself but then he grew very angry. He was tired of playing the coward, and so instead he pushed open his saddlebags and removed Lawson’s hunting pouch and powderhorn,