Ishmael was standing on the mound when Duncan arrived. There was no sign of the dog, but the top of the prisoner post was split and charred from a lightning strike. Ishmael warily touched the post then looked back at Duncan and slowly nodded, as if it confirmed his expectation. His hand still on the post, the boy spoke solemnly to the skulls in the trees, then tilted his head toward the side of the hill beyond.
At first Duncan thought the object the boy stared at was just another log. Then the end of the log rose up, and two black eyes stared at them.
Ishmael leapt toward the dog but abruptly stopped, tottering as if off balance. A moment later Duncan was at his side, pulling the boy back from the edge of a small crevasse concealed by undergrowth.
“It is one of the places where they come across!” the boy declared. “Just as my grandfather said! A crack in the earth where lightning dwells.”
Duncan’s breath caught as he followed the boy’s gaze. At the bottom lay the body of a woman smeared with mud. On her breast was coiled a rattlesnake.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Macaulay said at Duncan’s shoulder. “It’s the witch! The viper has taken the witch!”
Duncan was about to tell his companions that the woman had died in a fire in Albany, but as he studied the frail body, the ragged greying hair, and the square chin that jutted out from mud and hair, he realized it was indeed Hetty Eldridge. It could not be. Duncan had seen the ruins of her cabin, had seen the bones. A witness had insisted she had been inside when it burned, that she had laughed as the flames consumed her.
Ishmael knelt at the edge of the deep crack in the slope. There was no fear on his face, only fascination.
“Why should she come here to die?” Macaulay asked in a tight voice.
“She had already died in Albany.” Duncan did not realize he had spoken the thought aloud until he saw the alarmed way Macaulay stared at him.
“It explains the storms,” Ishmael solemnly stated. “It explains the mound and the strange lodge and the lightning.”
Duncan looked at the boy, once again unsettled by his words. He watched in silence as Ishmael retrieved a long stick and then bent to gently tap the snake. The serpent slithered away to a pool of sunlight at the opposite end of the crevasse.
The dead witch sat up.
“God protect us!” Macaulay cried as he stumbled backward, desperately crossing himself.
Ishmael’s face glowed with excitement.
“The snake was just there for the warmth of her body,” Duncan explained, though there was no certainty in his voice. “She must have fallen into the pit during the storm.” He followed Ishmael as he climbed down to help the woman.
Her employer in Albany had spoken of Hetty the witch, Hetty the rum-soaked ghostwalker, Hetty the exceptional seamstress. Duncan had no idea who was with them now. The woman who sat before them in the lodge was more of an old Welsh grandmother. Ishmael tended to the woman with surprising gentleness, spooning hot broth into her mouth as Macaulay watched from ten feet away. The big Scot seemed not so much scared of Hetty now as resentful of her.
Duncan slipped away from the lodge and returned to the clearing where they had found her. The snake basked in the sun at the head of the little gully. There was no sign of the woman’s presence, no camp, no blanket, no gathered firewood. It seemed impossible that she could have arrived by herself, even more impossible that she could have traveled so far upriver, against the current, except in a canoe propelled by powerful arms.
He covered the grounds systematically, searching for something, anything, that might lend sense to the events, and finally he paused at the post. Something had been added since the day before, a small mud-spattered grey bundle lashed to the bottom. He knelt, pushing the bundle with a tentative finger. He was loath to disturb what may have been placed as an offering for the gods. For a long moment he looked up at the human skull that gazed from the trees. “Forgive me,” he murmured to the skull, then cut the straps around the bundle.
He should have known better than to try to make sense of anything found at such a place. First he saw a short straight stick like a baton painted with stick figures of men and animals, then a heavily worn silver Spanish coin pockmarked with little indentations. A square piece of thin, finely worked doeskin folded in a square. A worn linen handkerchief folded over a ring made of bone carved with leaping animals. He lifted the ring on his palm and studied it, realizing it was not bone but ivory and the figures were elaborately carved dragons. It was not an object of the tribes, it was European, something that the Welsh traders who called on the ports of his youth would have sold to local nobility.
To his surprise the doeskin contained nothing inside its folds. The treasure was the skin itself. Its inside surface was covered with faded drawings, images like those of tribal chronicles that told of battles and great chieftains. But these were no stick figure characters of warriors and bears. The images had been done with an artful hand in a European style. A little girl stood at the rail of a great sailing ship, watching whales frolic in the ocean. A young woman stood hand in hand with a man before a prosperous-looking farmhouse. In the next panel the house was burning, the man lay with an arrow in his chest, and the woman was being led away by a neckstrap. Next the woman was at a bark house of the tribes, grinding corn on a stone, then with a tall warrior under a crescent moon. She carried an infant in the next, then stood beside a young boy at a burial scaffold. The next was a scene of Indians casting stones and sticks at the two. In the last the woman and child clung to each other in the night, looking up at a wolf silhouetted by the moon. He thought of the frail woman in the lodge. Maybe Ishmael was right. Maybe Hetty had died and had been called back for one last task on earth.
He spun about, suddenly aware of eyes on his back. The great brown mastiff sat only three paces away, watching him. But there was no anger or challenge in his eyes this time. What Duncan saw there was sadness. He looked back at the last image on the doeskin. It could have been a wolf in the scene. Or it could have been a great dog.
Without knowing why he bowed to the animal, then shifted so the dog too could see the objects. It approached warily, sniffing them attentively. As it did so, a memory stirred unexpectedly. He had seen an old silver coin like that, a precious heirloom preserved by his mother. It was a teething coin, passed down through families for the infants of each new generation. The sad, drunken, angry witch had had a human life once, had been part of a proud family. But she had decided that here, after the massacre at Bethel Church, after receiving a message belt from visitors from the West and destroying her existence in Albany, here she would finally abandon it.
He stayed very still as the dog studied him, pushing its muzzle against his chest as if taking the scent of his heart. When it backed away, Duncan wrapped the ring in the doeskin, stuffed the skin inside his waistcoat, then packed the other objects in their grey cloth and refastened the bundle to the prisoner post.
As he walked back to the longhouse, the dog followed. By the time he reached the entry it was walking quietly at Duncan’s side, as if they were old companions.
The appearance of the creature seemed to awaken something in the Welsh woman. A new light entered her eyes. As her gaze shifted back and forth from the dog to Duncan, he realized it was not so much the arrival of the animal that stirred her as its choice to stand at Duncan’s side. It was as if Ishmael, and now the dog, were reconnecting her to the world. She seemed to become aware of her surroundings, and she studied the lodge and then Ishmael and Macaulay as if seeing them for the first time. She touched the boy’s hand and ran her fingertips along his forearm with a strangely affectionate motion. “The tribes sometimes call this place the fount of thunder from the way the storms like to settle here,” she said in the voice of a tired old matron. “I hope it did not frighten you.”