Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier Read Free Book Online Page B

woods.

2
    I ’M LOOKING FOR A BAY COLT, I SAID. HE’S GOT AN INSIDE CALKIN broken off his right front shoe. I’ve been following after him for some time, but I can’t see him here. I gestured to the cut-up roadway. Have you seen men go by with a string of horses?
    —Might have, the girl said. A day or two ago. Might have seen them going up the river to where they always run their horses.
    She squatted in the road drawing pictures with a sharp stick in the dirt, her dingy skirt draping about her feet. The girl did not even bother to look up at me, so about all I saw was dark hair falling to either side of her face from a strict white part. Scratched in the dirt around her were the heads of horses, their flowing manes and flared nostrils and arched necks thick with cords of muscle.
    —I’m not to go there, she said. You’ll have to find your own way.
    —I didn’t ask you to guide me, I said. Directions is all I’m wanting.
    —It’s pony-club trash stays there.
    Everybody east of the Nation despised the pony clubs, which had been going on since shortly after the Revolution. It was what the young Indian men did when war became something they were not allowed to compete in anymore. They’d steal horses east of the boundary line and run them across the Nation, where their own law applied, and then sell them out in Tennessee or Alabama or Mississippi to white people not inclined to ask very many questions about the provenance of a fine horse offered for sale at a bargain price. At that point, the pony clubbers would steal some more horses and run them back in the other direction.
    —How do I get to this place? I said.
    —Three turnings from here. Left at a fork in the road, right at a bend in the river. Then start looking for a old track commencing next to a big hemlock and running hard uphill.
             
    THE CABIN WAS set all around with mud and stumps. Set picturesquely atop a bluff overlooking the midsized river and a distant range of mountains. It was nothing special, an unpainted one-room dwelling lidded with curling grey shakes. At one end, a chimney of smooth stones hauled all the way up from the river.
    Out in front, a man was digging a hole. He had been working some length of time, for he was in so deep all I could see was the top of his bald head. At rhythmic intervals, the metal end of a shovel sent sprays of red dirt flying onto a conical pile. I could hear loud voices and laughter coming from inside the house.
    I walked up to the hole and looked down at the man. In there with him, he had a ladder of peeled poles lashed together with rawhide strips.
    —Hey sir, I said.
    The man stopped digging and turned his face up to me, but he didn’t say anything. His face was round and white looking up out of that dark hole.
    —I’m trying to find a colt that got away from me, I said. A bay, name of Waverley. Can any of you here help me?
    —They’s a bay colt around back, the man said. But I don’t exactly recall him saying what his name was.
    I walked around the house, and there was a stock pen with a dozen ill-sorted horses standing hock-deep in black mud. There was not the first sign of fodder, and the horses looked to have given up hoping for any. Waverley stood with his head hanging over the top rail looking at me. I went to him and started to scratch his ears but he pinned them back and wouldn’t commit to recognizing me. I stood awhile figuring what to do, my eyes unfocused, looking toward a slatted springhouse beyond the pen and then off across the valley to the mountains. I went back around the house.
    The man was digging again, and I stood at the lip of the hole and said, That’s him. Who do I talk to?
    The man stopped digging and climbed out of the hole, and when he did I could see that he lacked a part of one leg. Foot and shinbone gone. He walked on a wood peg fitted to his stub with a cup of leather and ties of rawhide strips. His good foot was stained with clay up above the