Shadow Country Read Online Free PDF Page A

of half-breed help. “You are vair uppity, my good man,” he says. Hands on hips, he looks around like he’s inspecting his new property, then puts on glasses so’s to study the breed of riffraff he is dealing with—me and the big woman in the doorway of the shack and the boy watching from behind her skirts.
    I jab my gun barrel into his back, then wave the barrel toward his boat, and damn if he don’t whip around and wrench that gun away, that’s how quick and strong he is, and crazy. Backs me up, then breaks my gun, picks out my cartridge, tosses it into the river.
    Any man would try that trick when the home man has the drop on him has
got
to be crazy, and this is a feller getting on in years who looks plain puny. Even my Mary ain’t snickering no more and she don’t overlook too many chances. Bein Catholic, she knows a devil when she sees one.
    Around about now, young John Owen comes out of the shack lugging my old musket from the War. At six years of age, our youngest boy already knew his business. Not a word, just brings the shooting iron somewhat closer so’s he don’t waste powder, then hoists her up, set to haul back on the trigger. I believe his plan was to shoot this feller, get the story later.
    The stranger seen this, too. He forks over my gun in a hurry while Mary runs and grabs her little boy. She don’t care much about me no more, but John Owen is her hope and consolation.
    â€œ
Infant
shoot
visiteur
in thees fokink
Amerique
?” the stranger yells, pointing at my son. “For
why
?” He has come from France to collect bird specimens, he’s hunting egret plumes to make ends meet. Looked like some old specimen hisself, damn if he didn’t—black beady eyes, quills sticking up out of his head, stiff gawky gait—the dry look of a man who has lived too long without a woman, Big Mary said. Looked all set to shit and no mistake. Spent too much time with his feathered friends, I reckon, cause when he got riled, his crest shot up in back, and he screeched as good as them Carolina parrots he was hunting, being very upset to find squatters on a wild river bend that was overgrowed and empty when he passed by here a few years ago. Only last week, he complains, folks at Everglade had told him he could camp at Chatham Bend. “For why nobody knows it you pipple here?”
    â€œThey know we’re here.”
    He sinks down on a log.
“Sacray-doo,”
he says.
“Holy sheet.”
    Because Msyoo Chevelier, as he calls himself, was taking it so hard, I told him he could stay awhile, get to know the place. Never says thanks, just lifts his shoulders, sighs like he wants to die. All the same, we go fetch his gear off a Key West schooner anchored off the river mouth. He is aboard, packed up, and debarked again in about six minutes. The skipper hollers, “When shall we come pick you up?” That rude old man don’t even turn around, that’s how hard he’s pestering me with questions. Don’t wait for answers, neither, just answers himself according to his own ideas all the way upriver.
    First time he come to Chatham River, the Frenchman shot the first short-tailed hawk ever collected in North America—something like that. Weren’t much of a claim cause it weren’t much of a hawk—tail too short, I guess. Why he thought that scraggy thing would make him famous I don’t know. He finally seen his Carolina parrots in some freshwater slough way up inland, bright green with red and yeller on the head, but they was shy and he never come up with no specimens.
    Them parrots used to be as thick as fleas back in the hammocks, I told him. Us fellers always took a few, out deer hunting. You
eat
?
Le perroquet?
He squawked and slapped his brow. Well, that was a long time ago, I told him, and I ain’t seen one since: somebody told me them pretty birds might of flewed away for good.
    â€œ
Sacre Amerique!
Keel