No Resting Place by William Humphrey Read Free Book Online Page B

days: white blood, red blood, full-blood, half-blood, mixed-blood, and all his life long, even into extreme old age, he would retain some measure of his childish wonder that his, when let, ran red. He expected it to be pink, barely pink, nearly white.) On Saturday afternoons the horse was harnessed to the surrey and his father and mother rode in it while he, in his moccasins, his turban and sash, rode alongside on his pony and they went out to the farm to visit his father’s people. Being Noquisi on Saturdays was no holiday. He had as much to learn as did Amos Ferguson. At school Amos absorbed his indoors education; around the farm, in the woods, along the rivers and, like this, listening to his grandfather, Noquisi absorbed his.
    To accompany almost everything Indians did there was one of the old tales for a man to tell and retell, a child to listen to and listen again. Giving Noquisi lessons in the art of chipping arrowheads (Never mind that they had guns now. Guns were fine but the bow too still had its uses. While a white man was measuring and dispensing powder from his powder horn and fumbling for a patch and ramrodding it down the barrel of his rifle and finding a ball and ramrodding that and fitting a cap to the nipple and shouldering his arm and taking aim, an Indian could loose a dozen arrows. Besides, a gun made a hunter out of anybody; with a gun any fool could kill game, even a white fool.), his grandfather told him about Flint. Of how all the animals hated Flint for his having caused the death of so many of their kind, but only one, that wily little rascal Tsitstu , the Rabbit, had the courage to approach him, the cunning to undo him. Of how Tsitstu had inveigled Flint into paying him a visit, had dined him to such satiety that he dozed off, whereupon Tsitstu drove a stake into him, causing him to burst into pieces (one of which, striking Tsitstu , cleft his nose), and that is why we now find pieces of flint scattered everywhere, yours for the picking up. Actually it was as though Flint had burst into finished arrowheads, so many were there to be found scattered everywhere, yours for the picking up: the legacy of generations of Cherokee hunters, warriors. Like every boy, Noquisi had a basketful of them.
    That was last year when on Saturdays out at the farm Grandfather was always to be found in his toolshed at work on the bow and arrows which he had been taken with the notion to make.
    â€œGetting ready to go on the warpath, Agiduda?”
    Under the present circumstances it was not very funny even to the boy’s father, who had asked it. To the old man it was not funny in the least. He responded with his most Indian grunt.
    It was plain to see from the care going into its making that this was to be the bow to end bows—or else to bring them back. Grandfather turned out to be an expert bowyer. The wood was seasoned Osage orange, but the Osage were traditional enemies of the Cherokees and even now were harassing those of them who had given up the struggle and already gone west, so better call it by its other name, bois d’arc: wood of Noah’s ark. Close-grained, almost unworkably dense it was, so that the shaping of the stave with drawknife and spokeshave took weeks. Perfect symmetry of the two limbs was the goal, thus their tapering proceeded simultaneously, cautiously, with almost imperceptible progress from week to week—wood once removed could not be replaced. When shaped, the limbs were tillered: balanced so exactly that, when drawn, the bow bent in as perfect an arc as the crescent moon. The final finishing was done with the cutting edge of a piece of broken glass, the shavings as fine as eiderdown. Endless hand-rubbing with oil made the yellow wood gleam like gold. The bowstring was plaited of gut, the handle woven of leather, the tips carved of antlers. A dozen arrows, each requiring days to true up straight and fletch with feathers all from the same side of the bird, in a quiver of