Thirteen Moons Read Online Free PDF Page A

a narrow trail through mountain wilderness. He was alone, and rain blew nearly sideways. He carried a long knife at his belt and went with his trousers tucked into his boot tops, affecting the look of a seasoned traveler set out on the open road for a far and uncertain destination. This orphan knew stories, tales of a like-abandoned boy named Jack. As a little child he’d many times heard an old teller, a folk-sayer, some greybeard grandfather on a farm down the road, recount Jack’s Tales with laconic expressiveness to bunches of little fireside children. The boy still remembered some of the lines, and he declaimed them aloud to the landscape around him like a poem or a prayer, for he took comfort in the fact that Jack too was often a wanderer.

    Well, he put a little budget on his back,
    and he set out.
    And days passed,
    and nights passed,
    and weeks passed,
    and months passed,
    and he traveled along the road.

    The young voice trailed off into the green woods to no response, not even an echo.
             
    THIS BOY I’M SPEAKING of was a version of me, an early incomplete draft. I still have some of his teeth, and we share an inch-long scar—a deep cut from a horseshoe nail—just below our right anklebone.
    The trail ahead forked at a big poplar tree, offering simple choices. Left or right? It was a simple time. But I knew even then that you could not just set out in one direction and necessarily get somewhere. You lived in the mountains as if cupped in a puzzle of unclimbable blue ridges and uncrossable black gorges. To travel through that place, you needed to know not only where you wanted to go but also that roundabout was often the only way to get there.
    I pondered the choices. Each journey has two possible motions, two directions. Toward life. Toward death. It was like that for me, or at least it seemed so then.
    I dropped the reins. The colt I had recently named Waverley in tribute to my favorite Walter Scott novel reached an unsupervised halt, hooves sucking into the mud. Rhododendron grew close on either side of the trail, and the wet glossed leaves nearly met overhead. When I looked up, water from my hatbrim ran down the back of my neck and onto the oversized wool coat my uncle had handed down to me. I pulled a map from my coat pocket and spread it open and rested it across Waverley’s withers and studied the markings closely. Raindrops fell on the map, and I bent over to shelter the paper. My forefinger traced the way I thought I had traveled and stopped at the place I thought I had reached. The map was a real map, from a printer’s shop, the result of a survey commissioned by some variety of government that claimed sovereignty hereabouts. My favorite part was a little box in one corner labeled LEGEND where the symbolism of the thing, its intent, lay revealed in pictographs. I had opened and closed the map so many times in the rain the past three days that it was already coming apart at the creases, and I rubbed at the rent places with my finger as if I could mend them back with a magic touch.
    The land I had already traversed was displayed in fine detail regarding state and county lines, towns and turnpikes and traces, mountains and rivers. But westward, at a point about where I guessed I was, the map turned abruptly white and all the geographic opinion it ventured further was the words INDIAN TERRITORY, lettered rather big. No fading or tapering off. Everything halted all at once. So the lesson the map taught was that knowledge has strict limits, and beyond that verge the world itself might become equally unspecified and provisional. In my mind, the place thus rendered could be contained within no state and could contain within it no counties or towns. What mountains and rivers the geography held would lack official name and be whatever the few people living there chose to call them day by day. Brown River when you crossed it one time, Green River the next. Or just give it your own name, Will