raised Tink’s head so he could look into the dog’s sad, watery eyes. “But you can’t go with me this time. This is something I gotta do on my own, and you’re better off here. Don’t know what’s out there, so it’s safer for you here.”
Then he finally stood, gazing back at the cabin where a thin streamer of smoke from last night’s fire lifted itself from the stone chimney.
“G’won, Tink. Get.”
The hound looked up at the youth with a bewildered expression, cocking his head to the side.
“I said, get. We ain’t hunting today.” He pushed the dog toward the cabin. “Get.”
More gray was seeping into dawn’s coming. He felt anxious to be gone before his father arose and stoked the fire as he always did before moving out to the barn to begin his day.
He shoved the old dog again, and Tink finally loped off twenty feet, then stopped and looked back at Titus— as if hopeful this was just one of the games they had played when the boy was younger. Many, many years gone now.
“Get! I can’t take you with me.”
Then Titus realized his eyes stung, and that made him mad, mostly at himself. “You gotta stay and look after them others now. G’won—get! Shoo!”
His head hanging morosely, the hound turned away from Titus and plodded one slow step at a time toward the cabin, as if being punished. Halfway there Tink halted one more time and looked back over his shoulder at Titus.
He waved both hands at the hound, to keep him moving.
By the time Tink got close to the porch, Titus was crying. And that made him madder than anything.
Angrily he squatted, scooping up the new shirt and the biscuits, retying the arms around an end of the rolled-up blanket with the rest of his necessaries before he unknotted the thin strip of leather he had used to secure the boots to the bundle. These he pulled over his bare feet, then dragged a hand beneath his drippy nose.
Looking one last time at Tink as the old hound clambered up onto the porch, turned, and lay down with his muzzle between his front paws, Titus was almost certain he heard the dog whine. Mournful.
A dove called out from the canopy being brightened by day with more and more of autumn’s fire.
Swiping a shirtsleeve under both eyes, Titus took one last, lingering look at the family’s place, that cabin where the rest would live out most of their lives. The barn where his father’s animals were kept, critters that helped Thaddeus in the farming. The hog pens. The summer kitchen and the smoke shed.
He didn’t belong here, he knew. So why was he crying?
Swallowing down the sour taste of his empty belly, Titus turned from the glade, stepped into the timber, and was lost among the shadows and the game trails, all those sounds of the small things up and moving to water that dawn.
He didn’t fit in here no more, he had decided. Knowing it was now up to him to find someplace where he did.
6
He kept moving that first day. Not once did he stop any longer than it took to lay the longrifle down atop his small bundle of possibles and stretch out from the bank of some small creek or stream, his upper body held over the trickling flow to immerse his face and slake his thirst. Renewed and refreshed, he moved on at a trot, reaffirmed in the rightness of his quest.
If his pap came looking after him, he wanted to be far, far ahead. Mindful to leave as faint a trail as he possibly could. Titus wasn’t so sure how a man accomplished that. As he brooded on it throughout the morning and into the short afternoon, he decided a hunter was always able to find game by following the game trails, by looking for the spoor of his quarry: antler rubbings, tufts of fur torn loose against brambles, piles of droppings.
So it was he was mindful not to let his rifle’s stock rub against the bark of trees, taking care not to allow the brambles to snag and catch at his pitiful few belongings wrapped in that roll of wool blanket. And the one time he was forced to stop for longer than stolen moments, Titus made sure he found a patch of old undergrowth where he could kick the vines and creepers aside, pull down his leather britches before squatting to do his business, then kick that undergrowth back over what he left behind. Unlike the deer or fox or even the bear, he was not about to leave as plain a sign of his passing.
“Damn well smarter’n that,” he had told himself as he set off once again at a trot.
But more than anything else, Titus Bass made sure not to stay with the game trails as did the other animals. Heavy with the scent of the hunted as well as the hunter, such faint and narrow paths crisscrossing the forest plainly would be the way his father would come looking for him. Instead, the youngster kept to the heavy timber, crossing the trails but never using them as he hurried north to the river, then turned west.
For something longer than a moment that dawn, Titus stopped at the edge of the trees and looked down from the rocky bluff as the autumn sun paled the sky in the east. Back yonder—upriver it was—sat Cincinnati. A seductive place, that one. A town grown big enough to be called a city—and thereby luring to a man. Even if one weren’t quite yet a man.
But that would be the first place they’d likely come to find him; at least to learn word of him.
No, his best bet lay downriver, where he wanted to go anyhow. East and upriver—why, that all represented the past. West and downriver—now, that carried with it the promise of the future.
He looked down the sixty or so feet of adamantine slate dotted with brush and trees sunlit with the fires of the season at sunrise, gazing down at the slow, rolling current of the river. And turned his face to the west. No matter that he knew not how far west his intentions might take him this winter. Or the next. Maybeso only to Louisville. He had heard of Louisville. Just someplace down the Ohio before another winter grew old. How little it mattered. Only that he was moving west step by step, following the river for as long as it would let him.
“
O-ee-o. Long ago some white man had garbled the Iroquoian name for the waters moving past his rocky bluff.
Which got him to wondering on the Indians west of him. Over there, after all, on the north bank of the river sat the place named for them—Indiana. This all was country to the Miami. Seneca. Shawnee. And Mingo. All the whole damned Iroquois confederation. They had been England’s Indians during the war with France to determine just who would rule North America. Soon enough England had set those very same Indians down upon her colonists west of the Alleghenies when it came time for herdsmen, and farmers, and cottage craftsmen to tear themselves away from the crown.
Titus scratched and scratched at his memory throughout that day, wary of every new sound from the forest —afeared it be a black bear or a roach-topped Seneca—yet he could not come up with a recollection one of any recent troubles with the tribes.
“Moving on west, they are,” folks had said with no small gratification.
As the upper Ohio Valley was slowly settled, cleared, surveyed, and mapped, the wild creatures were pushed on. Bear and elk, lion and Indian too.
“It’s the way of civilizing folk,” Thaddeus Bass had repeated many a time. “As the hand of man crosses the land, the godless heathen and the beasts are driven before him.”
In the end maybe that was the reason Titus had sneaked out that morning, so he told himself while he cleared a small ring of leaves on the forest floor as night fell quick and cold about him. He scratched at the bottom of his pouch and pulled out his fire-steel and flint, struck it to catch a spark on the charred cloth. Blowing against it to keep the cloth glowing, Titus laid it in a small piece of old bird’s nest about the size of his thumb, then blew gently some more. With the tinder caught, he set it upon the ground, where he began laying slender twigs on the single struggling flame.
As he watched the tiny dancing tongues of blue and yellow catch hold, Titus remembered the only stop he had allowed himself that day. After trotting less than five miles downriver from the young settlement of Rabbit Hash, he tarried long enough to see one last time what drew the common and uneducated rivermen to land and go
