Thirteen Moons Read Online Free PDF

River. Put your impress on the land and see if you could force it to stay how you had decided to call it. The white landscape ahead was apparently open to considerable suggestion.
             
    I HAD FEARED this moment of the journey since the first time I saw the map, five days before. The whole month previous, I had known something worth dreading was about to happen.
    My aunt had begun acting coolish toward me. And my uncle, my dead father’s brother, started cursing unrestrainedly in my presence as if I were suddenly a grown man. They had bought a rather fine young horse, new to the saddle. He was bay and had a beautiful narrow head and big quick eyes. At the trot he was fancy with wonderful suspension and hardly a break at the knee, but he was so newly broken to saddle that he often forgot his manners and went sideways if a leaf blew in front of him or a bird flew from a tree. He was full of his own opinions and paid little heed to the suggestions of others, in particular his rider. The tack that came with him was poor. The saddle was dried out and cracked and not much bigger or more comfortable than the hull to a big mossbacked snapping turtle. And also a pair of rush panniers and a leather budget as if someone were preparing for a trip.
    Then, one unseasonable warm day, a man I did not know came riding up in a two-horse wagon to visit. He sat a long time talking with my uncle in the parlor. After a while he came out to where I sat under a budding apple tree trying to read a book in Latin, specifically Virgil, and I was to a particularly admirable line about the sun slanting and winter falling. The man had some years behind him. He looked as if he had fought at King’s Mountain in the Revolution and still attired himself in the old style, at least as far as knee breeches and dingy stockings. Of course he wore his own thin white hair and not a powdered wig, and his hat was slouch-brimmed rather than tricornered, and he just had on regular low boots instead of the buckled shovel-nosed footwear in illustrations of the Founders, but still he carried about him a strong whiff of those old days, of Washington and Franklin.
    The man reached out and shook my hand like I was a man. He asked questions about my schooling and said he had heard I was quick in the way of words.
    I just said, Yes sir. There was little point denying it.
    Then, out of nowhere, he said, Some people, if they saw an Indian in the woods, would be mighty scared.
    I said, Not me.
    And then, without further reference, he started talking about Indian country. The Cherokee Nation, where they still ruled. A sort of hole in America, bigger than most states but small in comparison to their old homelands.
    The man said, There’s every style of Indian out there. The most isolated and backward and ignorant fraction of their kind are mostly full-bloods, skin almost as dark as a buckeye shell. They don’t know English from turkey gabble, and even if they did know it, they would disdain to speak it to you. They do the old dances and work the old spells and carry on like they still own the world. Come the dead of winter, they crawl in little mud huts not much taller than a clay bake oven, and they don’t come out of their dens in spring till the bears do. Jesus is nothing to them, and the women run everything except for hunting and fighting. Their only law is eye for eye. They’re so casual in the regulation of reproduction that all the parentage anyone can claim is the obvious matter of who their mother was. They don’t even know there’s seven days to a week and twelve months to a year. For them this wouldn’t be March, it would be the damn Wind Moon.
    And furthermore, the antique gentleman said, from old-fashioned Indians like that, they vary in every degree all the way to ones you can’t tell from white men. Some of them have as high as nine parts in ten Scots blood, and might as well take to wearing plaid skirts and honking on the great pipes. Those