do.
Chickory hummed as he walked. He kept his hand on the hilt of the knife Shakespeare McNair had given him. Now there was a strange person, he reflected. Half the time, he had no idea whatsoever what that white man was talking about. It was all that Bard stuff. Chickory had never heard of the Bard of Avon; he didn’t even know what a Bard was. Or an Avon, for that matter.
It had surprised him, the old man giving him the knife. He’d never imagined white folks could be like Shakespeare and Nate King. The whites back at the plantation had either bossed him around or looked down their noses at him. It was…Chickory thought hard for the right word…it was
Chickory looked down at himself. His skin might not matter but his size sure did. He was too skinny. All lean muscle and bone. His pa said that he would fill out as he grew, but that could take a while. Chickory wished he would fill out now. He wanted to be big and strong, like his father.
It didn’t help that he had lost a lot of weight when he came down sick at Bent’s Fort. No one could figure out why. One of the men who ran the trading post, Ceran St. Vrain, had pestered him with questions. Had he drank any stagnant water? That was the word St. Vrain used: “stagnant.” Chickory had to ask what it meant and St. Vrain said it meant water that had been standing a long time and maybe smelled funny or was brown or some other unusual color. Had he been stung by mosquitoes? St. Vrain wanted to know. Land sakes, Chickory had been stung by an army of them. Had he been bit by any spiders? Chickory remembered one he found in his blankets when he woke up, but he didn’t recall it biting him unless the spider bit him in his sleep.
The crack of a twig brought Chickory out of himself. He stopped and tightened his hand on the knife. If there was one thing he’d learned about the wilds, it was to be cautious. There were bears and those big cats to watch out for, and Nate King had said there were buffalo in the mountains, too, although not nearly as many as down on the prairie.
The brush rustled and out stepped a doe. She was young and small and took short, timid steps, her ears pricked, her nostrils quivering. She had caught his scent but was unsure where he was.
Chickory grinned. He flapped his arms and said, “Boo!”
The doe’s tail shot up and she fled in great bounding leaps, her legs tucked together. Within moments the vegetation swallowed her.
Chuckling, Chickory walked on. He liked the woods, although they sure were spooky. He hadn’t said anything to anyone, but he was particularly scared of being eaten. He kept having dreams, or rather, nightmares, in which a bear or one of those cats or once a critter McNair had called a wolverine, caught him and ate him. In his nightmares he always screamed and tried to get away as their teeth and their claws bit into him. One night he woke up in a cold sweat, afraid he had cried out in his sleep, but the rest of his family slept blissfully on.
Chickory swallowed the memory. No, sir. Being eaten wasn’t a good way to die. Although, now that he thought about it, he couldn’t think of a way that was good. He liked being alive. The world was a wonderful place, and there was a lot of it he had yet to explore. His folks seemed to take it for granted he would live there the rest of his days, but he had other ideas. In a few years he was going to leave the mountains and do some traveling. Maybe he would come back, and maybe he wouldn’t.
Chickory hadn’t told his parents. His pa would likely understand, but his ma would blubber.
Presently the pines and spruce and the oaks thinned, and Chickory came out into an open area near the bottom of the hill. Above him flat rocks and jumbled stones were dotted by a few boulders.
Large round stones, Nate King had said, so that’s what Chickory looked for. He started up and glimpsed movement. Something had darted under a rock.
A lizard, maybe, Chickory thought, or possibly one of those chipmunks. It wasn’t long enough to be a snake. He found a rock he reckoned would be suitable and carried it down and deposited it at the bottom and went back up for another. They were heavy, and after half a dozen he stopped and ran his forearm across his sweaty forehead.
In the trees a pair of birds flitted from branch to branch. One was yellow and the other a dull gray. They alighted and the yellow one broke into marvelous song. Chickory wondered if they might be finches. He wasn’t good with bird names, but there had been finches back at the plantation and these reminded him of a lot of them.
Chickory went on gathering rocks. He would need help getting them all back. He bent and tried to lift one but it was firm in the ground. Prying with his fingertips, he got his fingers underneath, and pulled. The rock rose an inch. Gritting his teeth and flexing, Chickory tried again. This time the rock came off the ground. He raised it to his knees, and stopped.
From under it crawled a snake.
Chickory didn’t understand how a snake could have been under there, as embedded as the rock was. He went to straighten and his breath caught in his throat. The triangle of its head, the pattern of its skin, the segments at the end of the tail—it was a rattlesnake. No sooner did he realize it than the snake coiled and raised baleful eyes in his direction.
Chickory stared back. His ma had told him that the Lord had set mankind over the beasts and that nine times out of ten a person could set a beast to running off just by looking at it.
This must be the tenth time. The rattler stayed where it was.
Chickory didn’t want to get bit. He stood still, his arms starting to hurt from the strain of the heavy rock. The snake went on staring. Its eyes were scary. They weren’t like the eyes of anything Chickory knew. He didn’t like how its tongue kept flicking out at him either. And what a tongue, forked as it was.
Chickory swallowed. He couldn’t hold the rock forever.
The snake stopped rattling. It lowered its head and slowly turned and began to crawl off.
Chickory raised the rock higher—and threw it at the snake. He jumped back as he did, and whooped with glee when the rock thudded down right on the reptile. The head and some of the body poked out from under and it began to hiss and twist and turn. Chickory picked up another big rock and dropped it on top of the flat one.
The rattlesnake went limp.
“Got you, did I?” Chickory gloated. “That’s what you get for spookin’ me.” He kicked at the rocks, but the snake didn’t move. Careful as could be, he slid the rock off. Most of the snake was crushed pulp.
Chickory laughed and smacked his thigh. “I done did it. Killed me a rattlesnake. All by myself.”
Chickory hadn’t had to kill much growing up on the plantation. A few frogs and birds and snakes and that was it.
When his family and the Kings were crossing the prairie his pa had let him shoot game a few times. He would have gotten more, except deer and the like were hard to find and he wasn’t the world’s best shot. Fact was, he was lucky to hit the broadside of a tree from twenty steps away. But he was getting better. Give him time, Nate King had said, and he’d be able to drop a deer at a hundred yards.
Chickory couldn’t wait.
Deep in thought, Chickory carried the gore-spattered rock to his growing pile and was about to set it down when he changed his mind and cast it aside. His mother wouldn’t want no gory rocks in her fireplace. He went back up the hill. Again he thought he saw something dart away.
Chickory came to a hump and couldn’t believe his eyes. Above him were enough flat rocks to make half the fireplace—and rattlesnakes were coiled on a good many of them, sunning themselves. None rose up in alarm or hissed or rattled. Maybe they didn’t realize he was there. He began counting and stopped at eleven. He’d never seen so many rattlers in one place at one time. There were big ones and not so big. All were ugly as sin. It gave him nervous twinges to look at them.
He was lucky he had spotted them. If he hadn’t, he’d have blundered into a nest of fangs and been bit so many times, he’d have been dead before he could turn around.
The smart thing was to get out of there, but Chickory stayed. He was fascinated. Here was another part of why he liked the wilderness so much.
There was always something new, something unexpected, like those buffalo on the plains and that raccoon they caught in their camp and the black bear that came sniffing around one night.
A rattler stirred. Its head rose a few inches and it looked around and then twisted and crawled off the flat rock toward another flat rock that already had a snake on it.
Chickory thought they would fight. He watched in breathless wonder as the first snake reached the second snake and crawled up over it and lay with their bodies touching. That was all. No hissing or rattling or biting or
