The Eden Hunter Read Online Free PDF

where three stallions—a white, a gray and a red—stood hitched to scrub pines. The cutnose told him that his name was Little Horn. “And you?” he asked. Kau said his own name, and Little Horn copied him slowly. “ Kaa-ew ?”
    “Yes.”

    Little Horn nodded and then climbed on to the white horse. “Kau,” he said again. The redstick offered his hand, and when Kau took it he was lifted in a rush so that in an instant he was sitting straddled and felt like a child.
     
    THE REDSTICKS RODE south, talking. The young woman was called Blood Girl. The giant, Morning Star—a prophet who spoke only to Blood Girl. When Morning Star had a thing to say to the others he would point to Blood Girl. She would ride to him and he would whisper into her ear, stare off at the stars as she shared his message.
    “You are one of the caught ones?” asked Little Horn. “An African?”
    “Yes.” He could hear whistles of air passing through Little Horn’s clipped nose. What Kau knew of redsticks he had learned from the soldiers who came to Yellowhammer to play cards and drink whisky. He turned and touched his own nose. “Horseshoe Bend?” he asked.
    Little Horn poked him in the side. “What do you know of that place?”
    “I heard that the Americans took noses to count the dead.” In fact he had seen a glimpse of them once, a sack of some six hundred shriveled scraps of flesh. The soldiers had gambled with them as faro checks.
    “So they did.” Little Horn wiped away the snot that had collected above his lip. “I have seen the whole of the war between my people.”

    They rode on and Little Horn began to speak of his life and his battles. The redstick had been in Tukabatchee five years earlier when Tecumseh came down from the icy lands in the north, splitting the Creek nation with his calls for war and a return to the ways of the ancestors. The Shawnee chief showed them a comet and then promised an earthquake—and when the village shook that same autumn Little Horn took up the war-club of the redsticks, fought for the prophets at Burnt Corn and Fort Mims, Tallushatchee and Talladega. The war ended at Horseshoe Bend. Little Horn was left shot and unconscious in a tangled carnage field when they came for their cut count. He awoke with a young soldier sitting on his chest, and after the boy had finished with his sawing Little Horn took hold of the knife and killed him. Blood of Indian mixed with the blood of the boy, and as the stabbed American screamed all eyes witnessed the quickening of the dead redstick in the slippery gore. General Jackson himself ordered the dirty goddamn heathen devil killed at once, but Little Horn survived the hacking gauntlet of soldier and militiaman and Lower Creek and mercenary Cherokee. He threw himself into the river like a diving mink, and when he surfaced on the other side of the Tallapoosa this time all shots missed.
     
    BLOOD GIRL MANEUVERED her chestnut stallion alongside Little Horn and held out a canteen. “Water for the child of the master of breath?” she asked. Kau’s own canteen was empty and so he accepted. He drank and stared back at her, listening as she started up a chant that told of the creation. How at one time the entirety of
the world lay underwater, the only land a hill. On this hill lived the master of breath, and from the clay of the hill the master of breath molded the first people. A man and a woman.
    Kau grunted and Blood Girl sat sideways on the bare back of her red horse. “Is that what your people believe as well?” she asked. The pioneer woman’s blue dress was gathered around her young hips and he saw that it was trimmed with lace. She pulled it over her head and let it fall from her fingers. Beneath that dress she wore another. This one made from the finely woven fibers of some plant or tree. She was pretty and seemed strong and able—perhaps the closest thing he had seen in this second world to the wife he had lost in the first.
    “No,” he said finally.