THERE WERE NOT many Christians among them in those years, and neither were they especially Druidic celebrants of winter solstice, so Christmastime went almost entirely unobserved except among the few families of converts. And even there was division. Some observed the twenty-fifth of December and others waited until Old Christmas. So the best I could do was split the difference and give gifts to anyone who came in the store on the first day of January by the new-style calendar. Everybody got a little bit of spice tea twisted up in paper or a few pieces of peppermint candy. I gave Bear a small bottle of good Scotch whisky, and he drank it immediately by the fire. He took the first shot in his usual manner: I poured a little into a cup and he threw it back at one go. Then he looked straight at me in startlement. He put his nose down in the empty cup and took a long breath in. And then a relaxing out-breath. Deep, deep in each direction.
He believed he would have another.
I KEPT THE ledgers by the new-style calendar—the names of the days in the week, the numbers of days in the month. But in my mind, those were beginning to mean nothing, and it was just the four seasons and the thirteen moons wheeling across the night sky that marked real time. Bear’s people thought of the moon as masculine, which at first made little sense to me for everybody knows it is just natural that the sun is male and the moon female. But Bear said, The moon, he’s like men are. He slips around in the dark. And by the old clan ways, that was what even married men often had to do if they wanted to sleep alongside of a woman and not a bunch of snoring, farting bachelors bunking in the townhouse. Men were in charge of war and the great woods and its animals, but women ran the clans and the household and the fields, and men entered those domains only at the pleasure of the women. There were men who never entered the houses of their wives except late of a night to ease in and crawl under the covers and be gone by daybreak.
SNOW KEPT FALLING beyond all reason. Then, one afternoon shortly after the New Year, Bear came riding up the cove on his little packhorse with his long legs dragging in the snow. Against my objections, he made me go with him to his place, for he said worse weather was coming. I rode Waverley in his wake back down-valley to his place, and I spent the majority of the next two months in Bear’s winterhouse out behind his cabin. I don’t know how I would have made it through that weather on my own. One after another, blizzards blew in from the north and spilled across the high mountains down into the coves. Howling wind, ice storms that broke stout limbs off the trees, snow that stood knee-deep for weeks at a stretch. Bear’s winterhouse was a little tightly made structure of thick boards covered with a heavy layer of mud for insulation and then sheathed with clapboards to keep the mud from washing away. It stood on the earth square to the cardinal points of the compass. It was about the size to keep a few large dogs in, and you could not stand up under its low ceiling. If you wanted to change britches, you had to flop around on your back. You crawled or duckwalked in through a low door at one end. A fire pit stood at the other end, and since Bear was pickier than most, he had a smoke hole about as big around as a persimmon in the roof above it. A flat rock the size of a grave marker stood as fireback. Along both long walls stretched sleeping benches made of peeled poles and river cane, piled with smoky quilts and the hides of deer and one old buffalo of yesteryear.
The first time you crawl in one of those places the smell about knocks your head off. A ripe mix of smoke, meat cooking, the various odors of people, both the good and the bad. But you get to where you don’t notice it at all. February we hardly stuck a head outside other than for toilet urgencies and to stomp through the latest fall of snow to feed and water the horses in their lean-to, Waverley all shaggy-coated under his blanket, ice hanging in his mane and tail like bright beads.
Day and night came not to signify. Our light was the fire. Smoke lay in a cloud above our heads, where it collected before going out the little hole. We kept housecat hours, sleeping three fourths of the day, and the rest of the time we cooked and ate and talked. Though he was not as shiftless as Aesop’s grasshopper, Bear did not believe too overly much in hoarding up for winter. In general he relied on the favor of the Creator to get him through, but we did have basic food. We baked potatoes in the fire, made stews of corn grits flavored with bear jerky. We fried pancakes out of batter made with pumpkin or sweet potato and spread the crisp rounds with walnut butter or drizzled them with honey warmed by the fire. Snacked on popped corn and drank tea of dried herbs. Some nights, our dreams corresponded. I dreamed once of a circus, and over breakfast Bear described an impossible animal with a snake for a nose and great butterfly wings for ears.
Bear claimed there were old men and women he knew as a child who practiced a deep form of winter sleep and could den up nearly as long as bear or groundhog in a state of consciousness more akin to death than anything else. Those old ones would not eat or drink or dream or even rise from slumber to piss for nearly three months. But now the exact art of it was lost, like knapping flint into knife blades sharp enough to shave the hair on your arms.
Even without that lost art of sleep, our emergences into the world were so seldom and brief that it was hard to keep up with the changing shapes of the moon. Our limited powers of unconsciousness left us with long stretches of wakeful time to pass. We traded stories. Spearfinger. Uktena. How the Possum Lost His Tail. Jack and the Heifer Hide. Percival. And Don Quixote, which became a particular favorite of Bear’s. By the time the deep snow began to melt, we had run out of known tales and resorted to making up new. The Old Man with Thirteen Young Wives. The Girl with the Silver Bracelets.
Then sometimes, to let our imaginations catch up, we would sit in silence for hours watching and listening to the fire. And at long intervals Bear would just come out with some question or statement.
—If you knew that tomorrow afternoon the sun would flame up and consume all the world, would you spend the time between now and then praising the beauty of creation or would you sit in a darkened room cursing God with your last breath?
—If tomorrow you came down with an illness that you knew with certainty would kill you, how many different things would you feel? Would relief be at all prominent among them?
On that latter question, when I opened my mouth to speak, he put his hand up and said, It is a mistake to answer too quickly. Then he said, Disease is nature’s revenge for our destructiveness.
I also remember him saying, Interesting fact of creation: the deer has just enough brains to cure its own hide. No more, no less.
Now that’s not exactly a deep secret. One deer brain is widely known to be exactly the right amount of brains to tan one deerhide. It’s the way Bear said it that stuck in my mind. You knew he’d been studying on the matter and found the correspondence to be more than coincidental and convenient.
There was plenty of time for thinking in the winterhouse with the snow banked almost up to the low eaves and the world silent as death except for the little trance-provoking sounds of the fire. I decided that many of Bear’s stories and comments shared a general drift. They advised against fearing all of creation. But not because it is always benign, for it is not. It will, with certainty, consume us all. We are made to be destroyed. We are kindling for the fire, and our lives will stand as naught against the onrush of time. Bear’s position, if I understood it, was that refusal to fear these general terms of existence is an honorable act of defiance.
But when I tried to put what I had taken from his stories into an overall theory of fearlessness, Bear was uninterested in abstract expressions of life truths. He only responded by telling another story, The Origin of Strawberries. A man and a woman fall in love, which is always a good start. Then, of course, they quarrel bitterly. The woman flees from him. The man follows behind. So it is also one of the good stories of journeys and trails. Various things happen, but the man makes no headway against her flight. Then, taking pity on the man’s yearning and despair, the Sun creates little green spring plants with crimped heart-shaped leaves and red heart-shaped berr
ies and casts them in the woman’s path. She picks the berries and eats a few, and their sweetness and their stains on her fingers and lips remind her of love and desire. She picks all that she can carry, and the strawberries bleed in her cupped hands. She turns back on the trail and begins traveling retrograde to her anger. She meets the man and holds the red berries out to him. He eats one, and together they follow the road home.
Then, as stories will do, one led to another, and Bear told of his first wife. She was named Wild Hemp and had died only a year into the marriage when they were both just seventeen, and he still missed her with a bitter ache even though that was way back in the bad times, the violent years after the Revolution, when Sevier’s militia from the lost state of Franklin crossed the mountains and burned villages and cornfields and sent the people scattering away from the broad river valleys to hide up the dark coves. One of Sevier’s men shot Wild Hemp down as she fled. Bear had never entirely found peace about it, and always in his heart there was a little bit of war still flaring all these decades later.
—Grief is a haunting, he said.
The first year after her death, he was agonized by her ghost, which—as the spirits of the loved dead so often do—manifested itself in the form of crushing despair not at all akin to poetic melancholy but more like the grim aftermath of a brutal beating that he reckoned he might not live through.
The newly dead are noted for their absolute lack of pity. Wild Hemp had a powerful desire for him to join her and did everything she could to hasten him toward her. For a while he felt ready to do it, to give up and follow Wild Hemp into the Nightland.
But he went ahead and did all he was supposed to do to fight back against her pull. He paid out large amounts to herb doctors and spirit healers, including the best of the bunch, an old woman named Granny Squirrel who lived half a day’s ride west. Primarily, though, Bear did himself good by going to water and immersing himself in the river every morning at sunrise throughout the year. He went even when big wet snowflakes fell all around him and disappeared into the black water without making even a brief dimple in its smooth face. And he went to water on spring mornings, when the river steamed and carried the fallen peach-colored blossoms of tulip trees and was skinned over with yellow pollen and the wormlike tags from oak trees, and trout held themselves still against the current and waited for food to pass by and their speckled backs merged with the color and pattern of the mossy stones on the riverbed. And also on late summer mornings, when the dawn sky was black and thunderstorm wind howled and rain was flung around sideways and maple trees turned the pale undersides of their leaves upward and lightning blazed its brief white light so bright that he felt sure he could see the insides of tree trunks, all the veins and long fibers running upward from the earth toward the sun. He went to water on autumn mornings, when red and yellow cupped leaves floated along, almost covering the river from bank to bank, and he could lie back in the chill water until his fingernails and toenails turned blue and look up into the nearly bare limbs and watch the final leaves release and fall and spin slowly down the quiet air. And sometimes for good measure he would go to water in the evening, when there was nothing left of the day but a yellow streak over Sunkota Mountain and the stars were lighting up in the indigo path of sky broken through the forest canopy by the river’s passage.
All that year he marked the flow of time by the growth and wasting of moons, and he mourned the deaths of each of Wild Hemp’s four souls in turn. And when a year had passed and her last soul, the soul of her bones, had died, she let up on her efforts to have Bear join her. He could feel her lift away from him. He decided to give up the worst of his lamentations and go on with life for the time being, but with the knowledge that a piece of him was missing and would never be recovered.
FROM THE TAIL end of winter into spring and summer, at new moons I would go nightwalking in an effort to put Bear’s theory of fearlessness and defiance into practice. I’d strike off into the black trackless forest blinded. Offer my body to whatever harm this place might wish to do me. Try to see surviving the night not as suicide averted or botched but as proof that I could rest easy against the malignity or indifference of the universe and refuse to fear the world I occupied. A way to own it in the memory of my body. In the last weeks of winter I could look up and see stars through the net of twined tree limbs. But later, in summer, the canopy of the forest was so solid it might as well have been a pot lid, layers of thick wet leaves lapping over me. At first I would go into the night with my arms out before me and my palms forward, as sleepwalkers are said to posture themselves when they wander about on their senseless pilgrimages. I touched leaf and twig, trunk bark and rock face. Once, I touched a startled grouse that flushed up from low brush and then flared away, leaving me breathless, heart rattling away in my chest like a cowbell, with a memory of the lightest brush of wing tips against my palms.
At some point, I would put my arms down and just walk. Ducking when I supposed a limb was about to slash me at the neck, high-stepping over root and rock, wheeling away to avoid head-slamming a big hemlock trunk, skittering aside from any ground rustle that could be copperhead or rattler. Trusting that huffs and grunts and thumps were other than wolf and bear and panther. Let those sounds be the spirit forms of exiled elk or bison returned from wherever they went when they were all killed down. I would walk a thousand steps, in as straight a line as I could manage, and then turn square around and count back another thousand and see if I had returned to the store. I seldom succeeded. On many occasions I sat lost in the woods, waiting for dawn to light the way home, feeling that Bear would be proud of me for having fought the universe to a draw.
THE CHEROKEE GENERALLY found it beneath them to come into the store chaffering over the price of goods or the trade allowance you were willing to give for hides or ginseng. You’d name a price and they’d either take it or nod ambiguously and walk out. The few white customers, mostly proud old Scots, were about the same. But you could always tell traveling Northerners, for they were not happy unless they could force you through about three rounds of bargaining and come out feeling like they had beat you. If you started out by offering them the item in question gratis, they would most likely try to convince you to throw in something to boot. It’s just the way they are, and they don’t know any better. But that hardly helps when they’re standing right in your face shouting their harsh and nearly incomprehensible brand of English like you’re hard of hearing.
Case in point: one day about noon, Bear sat by the stove looking at the flames and sipping his third whiskey. A stout little Yankee man with a florid face and yellow hair in curls over his red ears came striding into the store like he owned the place. He was touring with a driver in a private carriage, having a big adventure in the far wilderness. He wore a grey suit of clothes spotted with red mud thrown up from the high wheels. Almost without transition, he began objecting to the price of both Cuban cigars and Jamaican rum, saying he could get either of them cheaper in New York City, New York. He offered to pay what he claimed the items in question would cost there.
I mentioned the obvious fact that we were not in New York City, New York. Nowhere near it.
But that one distant little frame of reference was the only one the man would acknowledge. I told him that rather than strike such a poor bargain, it seemed a surer way to make us both happy if he’d direct his driver to wheel the carriage around and ride him straight back up north where he came from. Or at least far away from here.
Over by the stove I heard Bear snort back a laugh.
Then damned if the Yankee didn’t fail to be insulted but instead tried to offer me my original price on cigars and rum. And when I declined to sell at any price, he said, Boy, you will never succeed as a businessman, and the sooner I emerge from this benighted wilderness and cross to the upper side of the Mason-Dixon the better.
I said, Speed to your journey.
He left in a huff without spending a penny.
Bear sipped the last o
f his drink and said one word, Ayastigi. Warrior.
I said, I thought you didn’t speak English.
Bear said that speaking and understanding were separate matters.
BAPTISTS CONVEYED AN offer to render the Bible—or at least a few of its most striking episodes—into the syllabary and supply copies of it to the people. Bear wanted me to read him some of the book before he decided whether to accept the offer or not. I more summarized than translated. He liked the story of Job, especially God’s pride in his own handiwork in creating all the animals and the varieties of landscape and weather. Those features of the world were certainly noteworthy and successful. God’s bragging about how well the nostrils of horses turned out struck Bear as some kind of truth about creation. He said that every being has at least one part that is of especial beauty, and his first wife had many such parts. As for the book of Job in general, he thought it was true enough that whatever power runs the earth sometimes beats a man down for no good reason whatsoever other than whim or black jest, but he also thought a good doctor like Granny Squirrel could work some medicine that would at least lighten the blows. Also, the story of the expulsion from Eden got his full attention, though his most persistent question was how big I thought the snake was. In the end, he said he judged the Bible to be a sound book. Nevertheless, he wondered why the white people were not better than they are, having had it for so long. He promised that just as soon as white people achieved Christianity, he would recommend it to his own folks. And that is the message I sent to the Baptists, which they chose to take as a yes.
ONE DAY ABOUT a year or two into my residence at the store, Bear left his cow-hocked packhorse grazing in the yard and came inside. His hunting costume carried about it the air of the antique. The hem of his rifle frock fell nearly to his knees, and below that, beaded buckskin leggings. Contrary to recent style, he wore his moccasins with the flaps turned up. He was all hung about with powder horn, shot pouch, hunting pouch. His hair was tied back at the neck with a strip of rawhide. He carried a long rifle draped casually over his forearm. I told him all he lacked was white skin and a flop-brimmed felt hat to look like Daniel Boone. But as was sometimes the case, a weak joke set him off on a serious discussion.