Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier Read Free Book Online Page A

Wait ever again, I said to the night.
             
    A HARD RAIN fell during the early morning, driven on a high wind. But it blew from a favorable quarter, and the shallow ledge kept me dry. I slept many hours after the first grey of morning. When I stirred shivering from under the blanket, I found a blue day already under way and Waverley gone and my panniers as well. My budget, still tied to the rope, lay sodden on the ground, pasted with the blown petals of dogwood blossoms.
    I rushed around all in a panic, looking in the brush for the colt or for a great bloody pile of wolf kill. But nothing presented itself.
    And then I went looking along the trail for tracks and the story of theft or abandonment they might tell. But again, nothing was revealed. Any marks of hoof or paw or moccasin that might have been were all washed away. I remember having a great desire to yell at the top of my voice.
    Help, I suppose, would have been the word. But I swallowed that impulse back into my chest and instead put two fingers to the front of my mouth and whistled loud and long, hoping the colt would whinny from down the trail and come trotting back. I did it again and again until my lips and cheeks were numb, and then I stopped and sat amid my bedding and looked at the white ashes of the fire, still smoldering and smoking.
    I sat thusly through much of the afternoon. I cried some, thinking that if the normal ties and accouterments of human beings kept falling away from me at the rate they had been doing lately, I’d soon become not much different from that little bear out wandering alone in the woods. I came to the conclusion that I was too old to throw myself on the mercy of the wild and become a wolf child. There’s a time in infancy when they will take you in, offer up a dark teat to your human mouth and raise you in accord with their own lights, which would be both lovely and brutal. But I’d long since passed that time. Now wolves would give me a hard look, allow me one step to turn and run, then come charging to bring me down.
    I looked through the gap in the trees and studied the view west. Little tatters of fog hung on the mountainsides here and there. The air was damp and fresh. It was a big green world, brightening up for spring. Another country lay out ahead of me. Blank as could be.
    I spread what was left of my kit before me on the ground. I had my budget, the map and key, my long wool coat, my bedding, and the kettle and nearly a pound of coffee grounds that I’d kept out of the panniers the evening before. Some oats and two books wrapped by my own hands in an oilcloth bundle. A collection of Arthur tales and
The Aeneid.
    I looked around and all there was to add to this pathetic array was the sorry little turtle-hull saddle. I went and threw it off into the brush and figured the porcupines were welcome to eat it for the salt of horse sweat if they cared to.
    That would have been a fine time to meet up with one of those magic beggars from the old Jack stories. Little wizened men who, if you give them a penny or a crust of bread instead of a clout on the head, will hand you an item—a basket or tablecloth or bowl—that produces a lavish spread of food on request. Like a big portable Sunday dinner that never ends. Fill Bowl Fill. But no such beggar presented himself.
    As I’ve said, it is so often the case in life that you have but two choices before you, or at least that’s all I’ve frequently been able to see. That day, it came down to these two: keep going and hope to hit the trade post before I starved or go back to the farm.
    The farm was several days of backtracking away, and in the end I’d fetch up on my aunt’s front porch. But it was not as if I could take back my old life. That was over. She’d just run me out into the woods again. So I spent one more knifepoint night under the ledge, and then the next morning I put my budget on my back and kept going west, hoping to find a way through the