Duncan and Sarah exchanged a quick glance. “Long enough to know it’s Europeans who get scalped,” he replied.
“You know nothing,” the woman declared, and began washing the dried blood from the old Indian’s face.
“He died a warrior’s death,” Woolford said, then moved to help the innkeeper straighten a blanket over the corpse.
Duncan placed a hand on Woolford’s arm, stopping him. “I must understand better what happened.” He pushed back the blanket and lifted the tail of Old Jacob’s shirt.
“No!” the ranger protested, grabbing his hand. “Some respect-”
“The last time Ramseys came through, he was arrested. This time,” Duncan said in a perplexed tone, “he died.” Woolford slowly relaxed his grip. “There were two things different the day he crossed the river with Lord Ramsey,” he continued, opening the buttons. “An extra traveler, a trapper, and an accidental dunking.” Duncan quickly explained what the ferryman had told him. Woolford stepped back as Sarah silently helped Duncan unbutton the dead man’s shirt, exposing the old Indian’s chest. It bore another tattoo, unlike any Duncan had ever seen-a large, expertly rendered image of a spreading tree over his heart, encircled by small animals. A wolf at the bottom, in the most prominent position. A squirrel. A hare. Something that looked like a hedgehog, and others Duncan did not recognize.
No one made a sound, except for Woolford, who gave a deep sigh and settled onto a stool.
“What does it signify?” Duncan asked.
“The wolf is a clan mark,” Woolford said. “I told you about King Hendrick. The wolf was his mark, the mark of his clan, given when a youth becomes a warrior. Hendrick and Jacob had the same Mohawk grandmother, and when his parents were killed, Jacob spent most of his boyhood with Hendrick’s people. When Hendrick went to Europe, Jacob decided to honor the dying tribe of his parents and took up their ways, the Mahican ways.”
Duncan pointed to the tree on the dead man’s chest. “The rest of it?”
“Among Hendrick’s people the sign of the tree is very rare. Perhaps five men alive today bear such an image over their heart. A powerful emblem. If it was used in an organized church, it might be the mark of a cardinal, one of great spiritual power. The animals would have been earned later, one at a time, badges of honor.”
“My father would never recognize such things,” Sarah said in a hollow, puzzled voice.
The Dutchman gave the answer, pronouncing the name like a curse. “Hawkins.”
The air went dead for a moment.
Woolford grimly buttoned up the shirt. When he had finished, he placed one of the Indian’s hands under the little neck pouch, the second hand on top. He produced a leather strap from his pocket and tied the hands tightly together. When he finished, he looked up at Duncan. “You say he was attacked four or five hours ago?” When Duncan nodded, the ranger turned to the innkeeper. “When did the Company leave here?”
“Six, maybe seven hours ago.”
The door opened and two of the innkeeper’s boys appeared, each carrying an armful of cedar boughs, which their parents began arranging around the body. Sarah, scrubbing the tears from her cheeks, stepped outside, toward the house. A moment later Fitch appeared at the door, and Woolford joined him, moving silently into the night. The boys left, backing away from the corpse, then one returned moments later carrying a large Bible closed with leather latches. Their mother arranged a stool at the head of the table, with two candles at her side, and began softly reading in German. Duncan also retreated, but not outside, only to a corner, into the dark behind the door, where he leaned against the cold stone wall. He was bone tired but strangely transfixed by the scene. The reason the old Mahican had come to the inn was so important, it had been worth dying for. Another thought, uninvited, overtook him as he stared at the dead man. Jacob must have been in his eighties, been born in the seventh decade of the prior century. Which made him roughly the same age as his grandfather. His grandfather, too, had once called a fish and ridden on its back.
Duncan stared at the body in weary confusion. It was some time later when he realized he was stroking the stone bear in his pocket.
He was about to leave when someone entered and stepped to the side of the dead Indian. Duncan pushed himself back against the wall. Woolford had returned. As Duncan watched, the ranger handed the woman something, then pulled from his jacket a large feather, streaked in two places with vermilion, and set it under Old Jacob’s hands, alongside the little leather bundle.
The woman took the object Woolford had given her, held it over a candle flame for a moment, then dropped it into a bowl.
“I’ve seen that feather before,” Duncan declared as he stepped out of the shadows.
Woolford frowned at him and glanced at the woman, who had taken up her German prayers again.
“You said you discarded everything from the compass room.” A wisp of smoke drifted out of the bowl. It was tobacco. Woolford had given the woman some of his precious Virginia leaf to burn.
“Everything but this,” the officer said. “It didn’t belong in the sea.”
“What does it signify?”
“The sign of a warrior, someone who has drawn blood from an enemy,” the ranger said in a near-whisper, his eyes on the dead man. He reached into the pouch at his belt and extracted a needle and thread, then bent over the old man’s head, pierced the flap of loose skin with his needle, and began sewing the scalp back in place. “People don’t understand the war. And it’s well they don’t. They think it will be won in palaces in Europe. They’re wrong. It will be won and lost at Indian campfires in New York and Pennsylvania. With so many of our troops needed in Europe, a handful of chiefs have our fate in their hands. And if everyone knew how precarious is the balance, the harbors would be mobbed with people fleeing for Europe. Make those chiefs upset with us, and the war is lost. The continent is lost.”
Duncan stepped to the officer’s side and extended his hand.
Woolford hesitated, then handed Duncan the needle. “I forgot. You are a doctor to the dead.”
“Sarah mourned for this man like an old friend,” Duncan ventured. Another tattoo became evident as Duncan reconnected the skin, a three-quarters circle, centered on the ear, with slim red tapering lines radiating outward.
Woolford seemed to consider the words a long time. “You heard her. He had shown her kindness years ago.”
An enigma, Woolford had called her half an hour earlier. Not only was Sarah an enigma, but so, too, was every conversation about her. “She is like a child,” Duncan said. “Why are so many terrified of her? What has she done to them?”
A long moment passed before Duncan realized the prayers had stopped.
“That which we cannot understand, we try to take on faith,” the German woman whispered. “But where our faith is not wide enough, we turn to fear.”
Duncan glanced at Woolford, who was nodding, his jaw clamped shut. It was all the answer he would receive. He finished sewing up the scalp, reconnecting the pieces of the tattoo over the ear. “A sun,” he concluded.
“Mark of the dawn catchers,” Woolford explained. “An old rite, almost forgotten. You have to run from one dawn to the next, pausing only at certain sacred places.”
“The badge of a pilgrim,” Duncan suggested, though he still could not connect the spiritual notions Woolford described with the savages he had seen earlier that day, or the terrifying tales of the heathens told elsewhere.
Woolford settled onto one of the chairs by the body, turning away from Duncan as the woman took up her prayers again. Duncan watched a few minutes in silence, then stepped outside with one of the candles. He paced slowly around the barn, peering into dark places between the posts and beams, and found a lean-to built against the barn and filled with split firewood, then a second matching structure with a plank door on leather hinges. Inside he found a space perhaps twice the size of his cell on the ship, lined with slabs of bark and animal skins, a pallet of sackcloth and moss at one end. He knelt, extending the candle, and quickly found several drops of fresh blood on the earthen floor. Jacob had made it back to his home after all.