Free An Embarrassment of Riches by James Howard Kunstler

remembered that his happiness had been purchased at the expense of Lord knows how many waylaid innocents, such as ourselves. In any case, he evidently did not expect to return. The formality concluded, we waded out to Megatherium , cast off our lines, hoisted the anchor, and poled out into the current.
    Captive or not, it buoyed my heart to be back out upon the mainstream, floating swiftly under a fleece-dotted sky, amid the teeming waterfowls and stately vistas of the hills clothed with infinite thick woods. We had not been on the river two hours when what would we spy at the head of an island but a family of five signaling distress from the prow of a half-submerged flatboat.
    â€œWhy, boil me in bear piss!” Bilbo cried with equal parts delight and affront. “Look what’s doing over on Cathead Island. Nowadays I guess everyone wants to go freebooting it. Ain’t that so, Neddy?”
    â€œArrruk arrruk!” Neddy replied.
    Bilbo drew his pistol and sent a ball whistling over the family’s heads. The quintet leaped for their lives into the river, while Bilbo reloaded. The current carried us closer. Unlike Bilbo’s trap of a derelict, this craft showed no saplings sprouting in the deck, nor moss grown upon the gunwales. Bilbo gleefully discharged shot after shot, as fast as he could reload, blowing huge splinters out of the hull while the family remained hidden. We never did learn whether they were troubled pilgrims, or trouble incarnate, as we had lately met to our continuing woe.
    At twilight, we turned our craft into one of the innumerable coves that scallop the river’s banks, and in a fine grove of ancient walnut trees (Juglans nigra) and pin oak (Quercus phellos) we made our camp for the night. We were gathered ’round the fire enjoying a ragout of opossum (Didelphus viginiana) , procured by Neddy in his mysterious fashion, when a brisk wind very suddenly arose out of the north, rattling the treetops and causing their swaying trunks to groan ominously, like the ancient druidical spirits we read about in the chronicles of Ossian. It sent a chill through all of us, including especially that poltroon, Bilbo, who halted yet another implausible braggadocio of his youthful exploits—this one placing him on the high seas as gunnery officer to none other than John Paul Jones.
    â€œA spring zephyr, heh heh,” he remarked unconvincingly.
    We resumed eating. A minute later something rustled the laurels at the penumbra of our firelight. Neddy growled. Bilbo drew his pistol.
    â€œIndians …?” I wondered aloud.
    â€œW-w-w-who g-g-goes there?” Bilbo called out.
    In the next instant, a figure flew out of the shrubbery with all the faultless physical grace of an acrobat. He turned an handspring, vaulted the campfire, caracoled swiftly around, performed several cartwheels, and finally leaped atop the sturdy overhanging bough of an oak. Doffing his skunkskin hat, he bowed. Our company could only gaze up at him in utter thrall.
    The figure on the limb rose from his bow. Dressed in a fringed, snow-white doeskin tunic with lapis-colored beadwork sewn at the yoke and matching leggings, he was a lean and muscular white man in the prime of life. His hair, worn shoulder length in the frontier fashion, hung in golden curls. In the flaring firelight it glittered almost like precious metal. His face, with its solid, clefted jaw, its sparkling, even rows of pearly teeth, aquiline nose as straight as a splitter’s froe, wide, noble brow, and lustrous blue eyes, was the embodiment of those qualities we Americans idealize as the essence of manhood.
    â€œGood evening, gentlemen,” he declared in a ringing, virile baritone. “And madam,” he added upon ascertaining with some difficulty the sex of Bessie, who had been wrapped against the chill in a blanket. “How fortunate to meet a party of my countrymen ’round the cheering campfire this fine night.” He struck