The Eden Hunter by Skip Horack Read Free Book Online

the clearing. The pale legs of the bull rose like columns in the moonlight, and through these columns Kau passed. He drove a short mahogany spear up into the elephant’s gray belly, piercing its bladder with a succession of quick jabs, then ran back into the forest as from behind him came a bellowing song of sadness and pain and rage.
    It was another night before the crippled bull finally bled out, yet another before Kau found his way back to the camp. He was clutching the severed tail of the bull, and news of this great fortune was taken by the elders as a sign from the forest. It was agreed that they would never again trade with the village of Opoku.
     
    THOUGH OF COURSE the meat of the elephant was one day exhausted, the forest continued to provide, and among the band this time in isolation was a period of great comfort and plenty. Fifteen full moons passed before Chabo’s taste for honey won over and he relented. The Ota were joined in their camp by a delegation from
Opoku, and a terrified woman was presented to Kau. “This is the wife of the farmer,” said a Kesa warrior. “She is yours to have until morning.”
    Kau looked to his own wife Janeti. Her eyes were wet but she nodded to him.
    Although many within the band argued for the acceptance of the Kesa woman, in the end Kau would not take her. A man often thirsts for that which he is never meant to have, yet Kau felt the pull of something even greater. Pride. The woman was sent away, and ten nights later the Kesa attacked the Ota camp.

IV
    A teeth cutting—A return to the Mississippi Territory—The remains of a buffalo—On black panthers
    T HE NEXT DAY the redsticks revealed to him what they knew of the highwaymen. They had learned of these white thieves two months earlier—from a muleskinner captured north of the port city of Mobile. Facing death, hoping to save his life, the man had told them a tale of land pirates and treasure.
    The highwaymen had laid claim to a cave near the Conecuh River. Assisted by men seeking commissions—collaborators like the muleskinner himself—they targeted wealthy travelers along the federal road. In his own broken Creek the desperate muleskinner had convinced the redsticks that he knew the exact location of that hidden cave, describing a cleft in a particular broken hillside so well that he made his own survival irrelevant.

    Kau sat sweating on his horse blanket beside a dying fire, watching as the redsticks prepared to depart that safe camp for another distant blood field. A company of cursed souls doomed to spend their days cutting warpaths across borderlands, a back-and-forth revenge life of ambush then pursuit. The night before, Little Horn and Blood Girl had both asked him to join them. His answer had been no, but now, studying on the redsticks, he was less certain. In a way he envied their lives of purpose, their forever war. He himself had felt nothing at all since the killing of the boy, nothing save the blank hope that if he continued pushing across Florida he would someday find a silent corner of forest that reminded him of his home, a place he could come to treasure as much as all that had been taken away from him.
    The stallions were freed from their hobbles and Little Horn asked him again. Once more Kau explained that he intended to strike out on his own, and Blood Girl stepped forward. “You are not listening,” she said. “Morning Star believes you must come with us.”
    Kau looked over at Morning Star. The prophet was standing beside his horse, and the old gray was refusing to eat oats from the flat of his hand. Morning Star nodded, and Kau turned to Little Horn. “I have no choice?”
    “No,” said Little Horn. “In this you do not.”
    Kau knelt and began to slowly place his things into his saddlebags. He could smell a coming rain. So, he realized, it seemed that he had somehow become a slave again.

     
    IT WAS DRIZZLING when the redsticks finally broke camp and rode off west to kill the