The High Missouri Read Online Free PDF Page A

berries,” said Morgan. “Best winter food there is.”
    Buffalo meat. So Morgan Bleddyn, called Dru, was a beaver man. Well, said Dylan to himself, when you sleep in barns, you fall in with a low crowd. He looked up into Morgan’s one eerily bright eye.
    Dylan put out his hand for another chunk. The buffalo stuff was good. He’d heard his father’s tales of voyageurs surviving on it for entire winters. Lies, no doubt, considering the source.
    “Why are you called Dru?”
    “Short for Druid,” Morgan said. “They call me that because I’m Welsh. And other reasons.”
    “How did you know my mother?” he asked Morgan.
    “Everyone knew your mam, laddo. She was a beauty.”
    “I’ve never met anyone who knew her… who could tell me anything about her.”
    “Is that right, laddo? Withholding of your birthright, that is. Has your father been raising a fine Welshman as a bloody Scot?”
    “I’m Welsh and Scottish, half and half.”
    “Not from the look of ’ee, laddo. You’ve your mam’s eyes, truly, and her brow. More, you’ve got the Welshman’s long head and dark hair. A thorough son of Cymru, I’d say.”
    “Koom-ree?” repeated Dylan phonetically.
    “Aye. Our word in our own language for what the bleedin’ Br-r-itons”—he exaggerated this word sardonically—“call Wales. And our people are called the Cymry. That’s thee and me, laddo.” He paused and eyed Dylan. “Would you say you’re more poet or merchant, laddo?”
    Dylan didn’t hesitate. “Poet.” His father was the bloody merchant.
    “Welsh, then, you see, not Scots.”
    Dylan shrugged. “Welsh, Scottish, British—what’s it all come to, anyway?”
    Morgan Bleddyn turned on Dylan his strange eye, like a blue lamp.
    After a moment he said, “Well, laddo, long as it’s yet winter, and we’ve got a fire, perhaps you’d hear a story of the ancient Cymry.”
    Dylan affected not to be too keen.
    “Have you heard of Madog ap Owain Gwynedd, laddo?”
    Dylan shook his head. The oily rag was burning low now. The lamp eye of the Druid creature seemed to shine a brighter blue still.
    “Madog, son to the royal House of Gwynedd, is the true discover of this continent, boyo, whether you call it North America, like the white people do, or Turtle Island, as the red people do.”
    “Oh, there are wild tales that credit Norsemen and Irishmen and mystic monks as well,” said Dylan in a lightly scoffing tone.
    The storyteller recognized a challenge and took it with a glitter of aquamarine eye. Strange, how plain the other eye was. “All true, laddo, all true. All the old tales are true. None but tells us something of the human heart. The old tales of the Welsh, our bardic epics, are the stuff of the truth stone. You know the nursery stuff, the King Arthur legends. I’ll tell ye some of The Book of Taliesin one day. Know ’ee not that ‘tales’ rhymes with ‘Wales’?
    “For tonight, Madog. He’s ours, for us Welsh of Turtle Island, our true forefather.
    “He left Wales with thirteen ships in the Year of Our Lord 1170. He left fleeing the arguments of his father the king and his brothers. We Welsh are great and foolish arguers when we mischannel our gift for words. He came to these shores—not Iceland, like your mystic monks, or Greenland or Nova Scotia, like your Norsemen. No, to the shores of the Carolinas, laddo, no man knows just where. Some say otherwise, true, the American state of Alabama, perhaps even Mexico, but these are the corruptions the word is heir to. The Carolinas. And there he founded the first colony in the Americas and claimed the entire continent for the king. Not the upstart king of England, mind you, the king of Wales, his father. All this is ours by right, there is truth it is.”
    The Druid swept one hand wide. To Dylan its compass was not North America, just the close barn walls in a French-English city.
    “He went back to Wales, did Madog, some twenty years later. He and his men had befriended the