Free Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier Page A

partners.
             
    TWO DAYS LATER, I didn’t have to ask if I had reached my destination. You couldn’t miss it. The building stood just back from the wagon road. And there was a sign, a grey slab of shingle nailed to a stob pitched at a leisurely angle to plumb, big writing in red faded paint saying STORE. Which suggested the existence of customers. There was apparently a community nearby, but you’d never know it by looking. This was just the merest gesture of an outpost, a place marker set down in the wilderness.
    The trade post sat on a little level patch of ground with a bold creek running loud to one side and big dark hemlocks growing serene and gloomy all around. It had been out of business since shortly after Christmas, and the board shutters on the windows were closed and an iron padlock big as a beef heart hung rusty from a hasp and loop. The first sprigs of ragweed grew from the packed dirt in front of the three steps to the porch.
    Nevertheless, for all the apparent abandonment, two old men sat on the porch in straight chairs as if they expected business to continue any minute. One looked to be a full-blood Cherokee, and he sat with the chair tipped back on its hind legs and its post ends propped against the log wall, and one of his long legs stretched out across the floorboards and the other hooked by its heel to the bottom chair rung. He was looking right at me, and that was the first time I laid eyes on Bear. The other man was white and he was dozing, chin to chest, the slanting afternoon sun shining off his bald pate. He wore a grey wool coat thick as a saddle pad that appeared to be mine. It fell around his chair like a disorganized shadow. The man dreamed doglike, whining and grunting, his eyeballs jigging about under the lids, one foot thumping the floorboards.
    Waverley stood off to the side in a disused corral with a pole run-in shed. He had his head down grazing on new grass, and I stood amazed, wondering how he had found his way here before me.
    Bear looked at me without changing his posture or any other manifestation of his thoughts, as if twenty lost boys a day passed by this porch and one more was not worth even a quizzical expression. Bear wore his hair long and cut blunt at his shoulders, and it was about half grey, back then, but full to the temples. He had on hunting clothes. Long linen shirt, deerleather leggings. His moccasins were laced with horsehair, eyelet holes in-wrought with quills of feathers. Beaded bracelets, large rings in his ears. And a rifle, shot pouch, and powder horn arrayed at the porch rail.
    The dog went straight to the porch and flopped down beside Bear’s chair. He just touched the dog briefly between the ears, and it began wagging its hard tail against the floor like beating a drumhead with a stick. The other man came awake and threw back his head and ranted awhile in Gaelic, yelling out what sounded like curses and threats until spittle drops hung in his yellow chin whiskers. I’d heard the old language all my life, for our county was full of displaced Scots who still spoke it and a few who even thought in it. Such a great number of people got letters from across the sea that one of the qualifications for postmaster was to be able to read at least a little Gaelic in order to deliver the mail.
    I thought it impolite to interrupt such a fervent tirade, so I just nodded a greeting to the big Cherokee and then sat on the middle porch step and figured to keep close counsel and listen first before I declared myself.
    The Scotsman switched his language to English and began talking about Culloden, a story I had heard all my life in various forms. His voice fell into a solemn minor-key tone, as if the tale he told was a myth of origin, an explanation of how he came to be where he was, as I later heard the Cherokee tell of how Waterbeetle daubed up mud from the bottom of the ocean to make earth and how Thunder first made fire in the hollow of a sycamore tree. The