Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier Read Free Book Online

sleep, colored and patterned in brown-and-tan shades of old leaf fall, jacked its front end off the ground and struck at my hand. Its mouth flew open as if on hinges, like flinging open a valise with a pale-pink satin lining. The motion of the strike was a jerking lurch, more awkward than I would have guessed. When the snake saw it had missed its mark, it turned across itself and went flowing across the forest floor in retreat.
    On idiot impulse, with no prior thought whatsoever, I did as I had seen an older boy do with a blacksnake. I grabbed the copperhead by its tail and cracked it like a whip. Its head flew off and hit the trunk of a redbud tree twenty feet away with the sound of a knuckle pecking on a door. I stood amazed. As I carried the snake back to camp, holding it near the bloody stub of its neck, the body kept coiling about my wrist.
    Oats don’t make much of a supper, so I gutted the snake out and skinned it and draped it across a green stick over the fire. And even then it still moved while it first cooked, coiling and twitching. When the meat fell still and became done, I cut it into pieces about corncob length and ate the white meat off the backbone and the keen ribs, thinking this: People say snake tastes like chicken and, by damn, it does.
    Just before full dark, when it had chilled off enough to put on my uncle’s wool coat, I went to piss by a thick stand of huckleberry bushes. I stood there unbuttoned with myself in my hand, all relaxed, eyes vaguely taking in the scenery. Out of the bushes twenty feet away erupted a young black bear. It was skinny from sleeping all winter and was only a few months past following its mama around and probably as scared as I was, but it came forward all in a rush, bouncing along, huffing air and grunting, and it looked much larger than the space it occupied. In mid-flow as I was, I could do little but hold out my left hand, palm foremost, and say, with a note of considerable urgency, Wait.
    And, oddly enough, the bear did wait. It came to a skidding halt and stood still, looking confused in its expression like a dog justly chastised for bad behavior. I dribbled to a conclusion and went running back to camp, fumbling with the buttons of my britches as I fled, coattails dragging the ground behind me. The bear chased me a few strides and then lost interest and eased back into the brush and was gone.
    At that point, sleep did not seem a possibility. I guessed that in this landscape the varieties of threat were likely not to fall entirely within the bounds of reason offered by rock and snake and bear. I had kept some coffee grounds and a tin pot out of the panniers, and I sat up most of the night drinking coffee, feeding the fire, watching the edge of dark for movement, and listening for the approach of killers and wild animals and the malignant supernatural forces said by many cultures to inhabit the wilderness. There was every kind of noise out in the woods, but mostly just the colt shifting about and taking deep, sighing breaths. I jumped every time he moved and expected to see a shape form up out of the darkness and loom and then come at me, and the least threatening thing I imagined was the young bear. I tried laying my father’s knife naked-bladed on the ground beside me and practiced reaching to its elkhorn handle without looking. More often than not, I grabbed a handful of dirt. So I just took the knife up and held the handle tight and pointed the upcurved tip of blade at the dark.
    Shopkeep, I thought. And maybe I said it aloud.
    There were a right smart of boys my age sleeping in houses under a big pile of quilts with a mother and father bedded nearby. A great majority of boys were not squatting alone in the dark with a knife in their fist, without a soul in the world much concerned whether or not they made it alive until dawn lit up the east. I told myself that I would bury the knife deep into whatever crossed the edge of firelight.
    —There won’t be any call for