People of the Weeping Eye (North America's Forgotten Past) Read Online Free PDF

black soil clinging to his moccasins. Somehow he’d managed to help her bathe, wondering at the perfect form of her lithe body, painfully aware of the full swell of her pointed breasts and moonlike buttocks. It was later he’d finally remarked, “It was as if you knew I was coming.”
    She’d narrowed her eyes, voice softening. “Oh, yes. I’d heard your souls whimpering from quite some distance.”
    He had stayed, and she had partially healed him. Hand in hand they had explored the old earthworks, line after line of curving ridges. Forest had reclaimed what had once been a great city, but in the backdirt of squirrel caches, and in places where the leaf mat was disturbed, old cooking clays, bits of pottery, and chipped stone tools caught the light.
    “What was this place?” he had asked in awe.
    “The ghosts,” she said softly, “they tell me this place was called Sun Town. They say it was the center of the world. All manner of men and Spirits came here to marvel. That is, if you can believe the ghosts.”
    “Can you?”
    She had shrugged. “Even ghosts lie.”
    He had studied the layout of the place, so different from that of the peoples he knew. He had sketched it out in the black loam, and thought it in the shape of a bird. It was while digging for greenbriar root that he noticed the little red jasper owl lying among the old cooking clays.
    Her eyes had shone, pensive and intrigued when he’d given it to her.
    “Masked Owl,” she’d told him. “He comes to my Dreams sometimes and tells me stories about the past. Tales of murder, intrigue, and poison.”
    “Then your Dreams are as haunted as my own.” And he had looked sidelong at his heavy pack where it lay beside her door.
    Several hands’ journey to the south, the Serpent Bird band of the Natchez had built a town around several temples atop tall mounds. Despite being so close, they shunned the quiet ruins of Sun Town, left it to the ghosts and the solitary woman who lived atop the tree-studded mound. But on occasion some individual, driven to desperation, would brave his or her fear and follow the trails north, seeking the Forest Witch for some cure or other.
    That long-ago summer had been blissful for him. He’d been alone, with only her knowing eyes and her soft touch for company. She had heard his story, and salved his souls in the house she’d built atop the ancient tree-studded mound.
    “You are lost in the past,” the old woman said, breaking into his thoughts. “What brought you back to me after all of these years?”
    He took a deep breath and looked around the walls of her little house. Cane posts had been planted upright in a square trench, soil piled around the bases, and the uprights tied together like an oversize mat to make the walls. Overhead, batches of moldy thatch had turned gray, most covered with soot. Her few possessions consisted of cooking pots and net bags that held her herbs,
dried corn, and Spirit Plants. Two plucked ducks he’d brought with him slowly roasted in the ash of the firepit. Tantalizing odors rose to his nostrils as fat sizzled and spit. The skin had begun to brown just right.
    “The Katsinas, out west at Oraibi Town, told me to go home,” he told her. “Then, when I reached the western Caddo, I had a Dream. It has plagued me. Over and over, I see her.”
    “Her?”
    He nodded. “A young woman. Maybe a girl. I don’t know. She watches me. Sees through me. When I really look at her, I see fire reflected in her eyes. Not just a cooking fire, but a conflagration. A huge roaring fire. It spins out from her fingers, and where it touches me, my skin freezes. Then she laughs and turns off to the south, pointing. But when I turn to look, I can’t see any way but north. Upriver.”
    The old woman watched him thoughtfully. “Still the Seeker, aren’t you?” A bitter pout lined her mouth. “What I would have given to have kept you all those summers long ago.”
    “I had to go. The Dreams …”
    “I