“You make it sound as though they have a civilization,” Duncan observed.
The grizzled ranger gave an amused grunt. “Last time I wasted time trying to figure who was civilized in this world and who weren’t, I had only fuzz on my cheeks,” Fitch said, and spat a dollop of tobacco juice between his feet.
On the fourth day, as they had lunched at the edge of a high, open ledge, Duncan had stood alone, surveying the blue-hazed ridges that rolled toward the west. “She’s there by now,” a voice had suddenly observed. Fitch knelt at his side, looking at the ranges.
“You mean she’s safe?”
“I mean she’s at her father’s town.” The sergeant extracted a musket flint from his pouch and began freshening it with a stone, a habit that had begun to worry Duncan, for it meant Fitch wanted to be ready to use his weapon at any moment. Just as he had learned about the plants and animals of the new land, so, too, had Duncan learned more about the odd ways people spoke about Sarah. More than once when they had stopped at settlements and farms, he had heard the inhabitants ask Jonathan or Virginia if their older sister traveled with them and had seen the relief in their faces when the children replied. The prior night, at a huge trestle table populated with a family of twelve, a girl had completed Arnold’s blessing by adding, “and keep their witch from our door.” Jonathan had responded by rising and taking his meal outdoors, then sleeping in the coach.
“Where did you go that night at the inn?” Duncan asked the soldier, who was showing signs of a grudging friendship after Duncan repeatedly rescued him from the evangelical ardor of Reverend Arnold. “Did you see what became of Old Jacob’s body?”
Fitch paused and rubbed the gray stubble on his jaw. “He took his own skin and kept it all those years. Sorry few can claim that, red or white.”
For a moment Duncan’s spine crawled. He had heard the words before, on the ship, spoken by the murderess Flora. Take the skin you are, she had said. “His own skin?”
“It’s an Indian way of speaking. He did only true things. His true things.” Fitch shrugged. “I don’t know the words, McCallum. I’m just an old soldier. He was totally his own man, knew who he was and never let anyone change that, even as his clan died around him. He knew things about the workings of the earth that you and I couldn’t even guess at.”
Duncan stared at the man, unable to fathom how Flora could have acquired such words, but wanting more desperately than ever to understand. “What are the true things, Sergeant?”
Fitch considered the question a long time as he kept working the flints. “I s’pose if you could speak them, they wouldn’t be true,” he said at last. “It was like when Jacob would call a trout, and the fish would come and kiss his hand, never afraid. Ain’t no words to describe the watching of that, or the way that fish and Jacob would look each other square in the eye and know what the other was thinking.”
Duncan gazed back over the mountains. “Are you saying you and the captain buried Old Jacob?”
“We did the right thing,” he said. Fitch looked up and searched Duncan’s face, then reached into the pouch at his belt.
“You mean you-” Duncan began, but the words choked away as he saw what lay in Fitch’s outstretched palm. It was a length of cloth, a tartan plaid, a brown field with stripes of dark green and red.
“An odd thing, lad,” Fitch offered with a meaningful gaze. “We lifted this from the belt of a dead man at Stony Run.”
Duncan squatted and took the cloth from the sergeant, stretching it between his fingers. It was a sash, a belt cloth of the kind a Gaidheil, a Highlander, would wear. “There were Scots at that battle, with the Indians?”
“I’d nay say a battle. More like murder on a grand scale. Half a dozen Iroquois were dead in the brush, including the one with this sash. Sixteen more were lined up and shot. Major Pike and the captain arrived not long after, from different directions, and exchanged harsh words. Pike wanted to burn the bodies and be gone. The captain posted rangers around the bodies to keep them from Pike and sent me to the towns for men to carry the dead back.”
“Towns?”
“The Six have settlements same as white folk. They have ways about their dead, too. They wash ’em and dress ’em and say words over ’em.”
“And place cedar boughs on them,” Duncan asserted.
Fitch nodded. “Some of the old tribes, like the Mahicans, they would place ’em on a scaffold in a likely spot, overlooking a valley or close to where two rivers join. Seven, eight feet in the air, with food and fixings for travel. Takes a year, the Indians say, for a spirit to find its way to heaven.”
Sergeant Fitch, Duncan realized, had finally told him what they had done with Jacob the Fish. He looked back at the plaid in his hand. “Were there fair-skinned men among the dead?”
“No, but if a man were to shave his head as some warriors do, and dye his skin with walnut juice, might be difficult to say.”
“Did you know my brother?”
“He ran with us a spell.”
“Ran?”
“Run the woods. That’s what rangers do. You have to be like a deer. Quiet. Fast. Always watchful. Forget that for a minute, and be ye deer or soldier ye can die. Officers from the regular army get assigned to run with us, sometimes to punish them, sometimes so they can understand the enemy. Most don’t last. They die. They get sick with nerves. One shot himself in the foot so he would be sent home. But some understand.”
“You mean,” Duncan said in an inquiring tone, “some change.”
When Fitch looked up, there was a glint of surprise in his eyes.
“Because,” Duncan continued, not certain where the words came from, “they glimpse true things.”
Fitch said nothing but stopped his work and followed Duncan’s gaze over the rolling, forested hills below them.
“Why didn’t my brother join you and Captain Woolford then?”
“The Forty-second wouldn’t have it. He was too valuable.” Fitch eyed Duncan again. “He had a quick hand and a good heart, y’er brother, but he would not suffer mule-headed officers.”
Duncan offered a nod of gratitude. He had been ashamed of his brother for joining the army, but now, his brother a target of public condemnation, he felt no shame at all. “And Adam Munroe, did he run with you as well?” he asked.
Fitch needed a long time to compose his answer. “Munroe was a Pennsylvania man,” he said at last. “Our work be in New York territory.”
“But you knew him. And Adam knew Old Jacob, who died not long after he did.”
The observation seemed to worry Fitch. He busied himself with his stone again. “Not everyone who runs in the woods is a ranger,” he said in a nervous, low voice.
Duncan gazed out over the hills, watched one of the great white-hooded eagles that sailed the currents above the ridges. After a moment Duncan squatted beside the grizzled soldier. “Did Jacob speak with bears as he did with fish?”
Fitch’s chipping stone lost its direction, slicing into the back of his hand. He gazed at the oozing blood a moment, then returned the flint and stone to his pouch. When he rose, a look of wonder had entered his eyes. “There was a settler who took a huge bear a few years ago. He boasted about it, told how he would make a fine bear blanket and mittens from its paws. But that bearskin disappeared from his barn, along with the skull and paws and claws he had cut out. His maize crop failed that year. Since then I’ve heard of three or four other bears shot in these parts. Each time the skin disappeared. Folks say those skins got up and walked away to some bear paradise deep in the woods.”