ashore for more than fifteen years already. As time went on, word spread of the Big Bone Lick where the
Gazing down at those partially unearthed bones of some creature once as big as his folks’ cabin had given Titus the shivers. He trembled again, thinking of the size of such a monster. Wondering if there were any animal at all in those western territories where Levi Gamble had gone that could rival such beasts.
As he shivered again now over his tiny fire, Titus told himself such stories were nothing but hokum. No creature could ever grow to be that big. Those bones had to be nothing more than rock.
Night came down quickly. It grew cold. And he lonely. Even more lonely than that night he’d spent in the barn, locked out of the cabin. Titus chewed on a biscuit and washed it down with the small tin cup filled with creek water. It tasted good, this long, cool draft of freedom. So each time he grew lonely, or anxious at some sound come to him from the dark, Titus took a drink. Savoring its taste upon his tongue. Telling himself he had done right.
For every man there came a time to leave home. A time to try out his wings before he beat himself to death with them struggling against the confines of his parents’ nest.
The water had never tasted so good as it did that night.
He kept his little fire going through the night more for companionship than for warmth—although he was cold, chilled through that single blanket he found crusted with frost when first light seeped across the glade to touch his stand of gum trees. It had been the coldest he had ever been. Surely the coldest night he had ever spent. Then he realized he had never slept in the forest before.
As much as he hunted, as much as he had haunted the forest, he had never once set off and slept out on the night’s own terms. All of his journeys, all of his hunts, had found him back to the cabin at night. So he congratulated himself as he arose within that crinkling, frost-laden blanket and carried the tin cup over to the creek, where a layer of mist hung across the bank like a wispy fragment of Amy’s petticoat. He dipped the tin into the cold water, the creek rimed with a thin layer of ice—sensing the warmth her remembrance brought him. It was as easy as closing his eyes there on that streambank, in the overwhelming silence of that forest, to remember the feel of her beneath him.
That served only to make his mouth go dry, causing his heart to hammer all but uncontrollably. Titus opened his eyes and stood, feeling the cold once more, remembering he was alone. Cold and alone by his own choice.
Laying some more twigs on the embers of his fire, he dragged out another biscuit and sat eating it, feeding wood to his smoldering, sputtering companion. Besides being cold and frosty, the air was damp. The wood struggled to catch the flame, more often than not only smoking without real heat.
It was his own stupidity, he cursed himself.
From now on he’d simply have to learn better to protect some wood from the dews and damps if he intended on having himself a morning fire. That’s how it was for a man, Titus convinced himself. A man had to teach his own self. No one could do it for him.
After lashing everything together into a tight bundle he could loop over his shoulder, he retied his crude moccasins. He hadn’t walked long yesterday morning in his hand-me-down boots before yanking them off and putting on the moccasins.
Like most folks who had settled on the borderlands, he preferred the softer, conforming footwear. Besides, most frontier settlers simply did not have what it took in the way of money to purchase shoes and boots for expanding families. No matter—they were stiff and cumbersome, simply could not take the soakings you could give moccasins. A lot simpler to patch up the sole of a moccasin, laying in a new piece of leather. He had two extra pair in his possibles, older ones, some he had almost outgrown. But Titus figured he could always put them on, get them duly soaked, and thereby stretch them out to wearable if need be.
That second morning of his journey, he felt no pressing need to worry on his feet. Surely there was plenty of time for him to shoot a deer to fill his belly—which would as well provide a hide he could soon learn to cure, just the way the tanner back in Rabbit Hash did with the pelts and skins brought him by the settlers in surrounding Boone County. The place had stunk, smelled to high heaven of death or worse still, what with the pelts stretched out and nailed to every wall of the tanner’s sheds or lashed inside great rectangles formed from elm saplings. All manner of skins cluttered that tanner’s place at the far edge of town, every hide to one stage or another scraped free of fat and loose tissue.
Titus set out at a walk this day, the sun rising at his back, intending to bring down some meat before that sun would set. Perhaps even that morning, as the critters moved out of their beds and went down to water, went in search of graze. This would be the time of day to keep his eyes open for sign, his ears alerted to any sound the cold breeze might bring him. If nothing presented itself this morning, then he’d just wait—evening would be the next- best time of the day to run across game.
His belly’s angry, rumbling protest convinced Titus he shouldn’t wait until the end of the day.
With cold, wet feet and a belly filled only by the last of his mother’s baking-soda biscuits, shivering within the linsey-woolsey shirt he wore beneath the thick wrap of a leather jerkin, he strode on into dawn’s mist tumbling over the great river. He promised himself he’d buy a needle and some thread once he reached Louisville. Already he felt one of his long stockings wearing thin across the toes. If he walked all the way to Louisville—why, surely, his stockings would be in sore need of repair after all those miles.
Morning passed without so much as a chance for a shot. Not that he didn’t see a few deer. But they were too far off, or bounded away too quickly, or he simply knew no more of them than the sound of their flight through the forest that swallowed all trace of them. The forest denied him all morning long.
Near midday he came across an outcropping of slate that hung some two hundred feet or more above the wide river. As it tracked low in the southern sky, the autumn sun graced the rock with a sharp slant of light and, so he hoped, with warmth. Clambering up to the flat shelf, Titus shed his blanket and shooting pouch before leaning back against the gray rock. He turned his face toward the sun, soaking up the warmth from above, greedily drawing in what heat radiated off the slate beneath him. The river below lay twisted, a great tawny road that snaked its way almost due north toward Cincinnati in this, the great bend of the Ohio.
Off to his left the river flowed. Yonder to the unknown. Away to far places he could only dream of—for no man he knew could lay claim to setting down tracks out there.
Oh, like so many others in Boone County, Titus had heard tell of a band of his nation’s explorers setting out for the far western sea, returning three years later, taking that long to cross everything in between. There had been lots of wondrous talk about that journey at the Longhunters Fair every summer the last few years. Fragments and shreds of speculation and legend, rumor and fable: the size of the animals, the sheer number of the beasts, those high mountains one had to cross, heights where the snow never melted … and the Indians. Yet what stuck more than anything else in his memory of such talk was the description of the land. The sheer immensity of it. The way some folks claimed a man must feel all but swallowed up by the land.
Too, some spoke of the way a man could see much, much farther than he could in this closed-in country, could look back behind him all the way to yesterday … look all the way ahead into day after tomorrow.
Titus closed his eyes. Trying desperately to imagine. Struggling to picture just such a land. Hoping to capture a glimpse of it somewhere in his mind, if not his heart. Perhaps one day. One day in the years to come, when he was finally ready to look back into all his yesterdays, ready at long last to look ahead into all his tomorrows—then he would find a way to take himself toward that unknown land.
But for now he sat at the edge of what was frontier enough for most any man. Behind him lay most of what passed for civilization. Ahead stretched a wilderness dotted irregularly with little sign of the white man save for outflung settlements huddled by the river, separated by many, many miles of thick forest still dominated by the beasts and the Indians.
He sighed behind those closed eyes, conjuring up an image of an Indian. Not the sort he had seen a few times back on his one trip to Cincinnati years before, or on those annual treks to Burlington’s summer fair. A handful of Indians always showed up with squash and other crops to barter. But he imagined they could not be real Indians—not the way they had taken to wearing the white man’s shirts and vests and tricornered hats. Seemed just about all the Indians Titus had ever laid eyes on took a real fancy to the white man’s headware: poking feathers and birds’ wings or some other totem into the tricorne’s folds for decoration.
No, he decided as the sun’s warmth cradled him: those Indians upriver simply couldn’t be the real thing. Downriver—that’s where he’d find some wild Injuns. But, then, he knew nothing about anything downriver. At the same time, he was certain his pap and the other men of Boone County knew something of what lay down the Ohio.
