Duncan stepped to the box and repacked Franklin’s fossils inside their protective papers, then closed the lid and touched Rohrbach’s fossil, in his pocket. When he finished, he looked up to see the girl staring at him uneasily.
“The picture letter from Philadelphia told of the world’s end,” she said. “Now seed stones are being sent to Philadelphia.”
Analie’s words seemed to transport Rush back to his dark mood. The young man from Philadelphia had sent a message about the world’s end to Peter Rohrbach, and at least Rohrbach’s world had ended. When they set out again Analie did not sing but laid in the front of the dugout like a bowsprit, sometimes trailing a finger in the water, sometimes predicting, always accurately, great trees, high cliffs, or other landmarks they would encounter around the next bend. She had been that way before.
Rush, whose short, laconic paddle strokes in the middle of the dugout did little to aid their passage, eventually stirred from his silence by taking up his anatomical queries. Had Tanaqua known any Indians with six fingers on one hand? Did his little toe hide behind the adjacent toe? Did he ever know a tribesman to burn his skin in the sun? Did Tanaqua know how many teeth he had? Did he know that the little fingers of Indians did not grow as straight as those of Europeans? Had he ever, perchance on a battlefield, seen the structure of a tribesman’s digestive tract or the pleural membrane that covered the lungs? Even better, had he ever counted the total joints in his skull plates? The Mohawk rebuffed him with short, curt syllables, and Duncan noticed that each time he gave his paddle an extra twist to splash Rush.
“I can assure you, Mr. Rush,” Duncan finally declared, “that the temporal fossa of Tanaqua’s skull joins with the parietal and occipital plates just as it does in ours. His xiphoid process extends from his sternum to the back of the ninth thoracic vertebra, and his femur rises on his meniscus just as in our knees.”
In the stunned silence a rumbling sound came from Tanaqua that may have been a laugh.
“Sir?” Rush finally sputtered.
“We are of the same species, I warrant you, though the best specimens of the species I have ever seen all wore loincloths.”
“But you are just a . . .” Rush, for once, was at a loss for words.
“Before I wandered the frontier, Mr. Rush, I studied at the College of Medicine in Edinburgh.” Duncan chose not to mention the intervening period he spent in the king’s chains.
“Edinburgh?” Rush gasped. “The Edinburgh? Why it’s the best medical college in the world! I dream of matriculation there!”
Duncan guided them around a patch of white, roiling water as he spoke. “I counted friends among the professors.” At least, he thought, those from the Highland clans. “I could write them if you like, offer my-”
“Harris’s!” Analie interrupted.
They cut the dugout close to the western bank as the girl pointed to the wide landing on the far side where the flat-bottomed ferry conveyed travelers from the eastern settlements onto the Great Wagon Road that led south.
Drained by the efforts of the last two days, they made camp on a high flat a few hundred paces from the great river, where Tanaqua had taken only a quarter hour to catch the string of fish he was spitting for the flames. While Duncan nursed the fire, Rush had spent the time quizzing him about the famed medical college of Scotland, until Duncan impatiently instructed him to tend to the smoking kindling and pulled Analie away to gather spring greens for their pot.
Duncan watched the ungainly apprentice doctor from the adjoining hill as he struggled with the fire. Rush had no skills for the frontier, seemed almost perversely uninterested in acquiring them. He was not a man who got dirt under his fingernails. The young doctor was intelligent yet inept, sophisticated in demeanor but shockingly naive, and would quickly become a victim if they encountered the Blooddancer. Rush had been a small link in the cryptic chain of events, an assistant to well-placed men whose dealing in codes and smuggled goods seemed to have brought the wrath of an Iroquois spirit down on them. Not for the first time Duncan puzzled over the connection between the stolen mask and the conspiracies of a Philadelphia committee.
He turned back to Analie, who for now had sloughed off the darkness of recent days, and was softly singing a ditty she made up about her search for fiddleheads and wild onions. They had pushed hard, and would push even harder the next day to reach the family of Jessica Ross. For now they had earned a few moments of relaxation.
When they returned to camp with their spring bounty, Rush had Tanaqua sitting on a log, his mouth stretched wide as Rush probed his teeth. The Mohawk rolled his eyes at Duncan and patiently complied as Rush turned his head this way and that to position the slender rod with its polished mirror disc. He seemed to regard Rush as not altogether right in the mind, and the tribes treated such people as reserved by the gods for some special destiny. It explained the Mohawk’s patience with the intrusive young doctor, but Duncan’s own patience was wearing thin. He would not have Tanaqua put his own life in danger out of some naive inclination to protect the awkward young interloper from Philadelphia.
Rush, energetically writing in his notebook, seemed not to notice Duncan’s approach. Duncan spoke to his back. “Why is it so urgent to ship fossils to Franklin if he is away in London?”
Rush spun about in surprise, dropping his bundle of instruments on the ground. “He is a collector of intellectual curiosities. His wife carries on his work in her own fashion. Using his name assures the security of the shipment, for no one would interfere with something bound for the great Franklin.”
“Bricklin is delivering a box for Franklin. But Bricklin could be collaborating with the killers.”
Anguish creeped back into Rush’s voice. “Surely no one would dare harm anyone in the Franklin household!”
They bent to gather up the instruments. “Your friends all died,” the Mohawk said. “What if the Blooddancer passed you by for a reason?”
Rush grimaced and stared into the fire.” He said after a few minutes, “I am in someplace dark. I hold a candle and keep walking forward.” The night before he had been too overwrought with emotion to answer Tanaqua’s question about his dreams but he had clearly not forgotten it. “I hear a chant and follow the sound. I reach a chamber with a huge fire in the center. Dr. Franklin and the other one are dancing around it.”
Tanaqua leaned forward. “The other one?”
Rush’s gaze dropped to the ground at his feet. “He was wearing Dr. Franklin’s spectacles. It was a great bear, a giant bear, more than twice as tall as any man. Yet it seemed gentle, and wise.”
Tanaqua stared in astonishment at Rush, then walked away to sit by himself. He kept quiet until after sunset, and spoke to Duncan only after Rush had fallen asleep. “I told you my half brother, Kaskay, went to the cave of the spirit bear. It is said the ghost of the ancient bear dances there when the moon is full. That is known only to those of my society,” he explained, meaning his secret society dedicated to preserving the old gods. “This is a sign. Kaskay and the bear need me. In the morning I must leave for the cave.” Tanaqua looked at the sleeping form of Rush. “He is a messenger,” the Mohawk said in a sympathetic tone, “who never understands his messages.”
They rose at dawn and stirred the embers into flame to make tea and fry the remaining fish. As they struck camp, Duncan, still wary of being followed, once more climbed the ridge, its vegetation now rippling in a rising wind, to survey the river and western road. For several minutes he watched the little grove by the western landing where they had left Bricklin’s dugout, then turned back. As the camp came into view he froze. A hulking figure was bent in the shadow of a bush, a tomahawk in his hand, creeping toward Tanaqua, who was apparently once again listening to one of Rush’s soliloquies about anatomy.