The Black Rifle (Perry County Frontier series) Read online

  In the first instance, Elan hungered for moral justification of his family’s murders, asking why this should be? How could the loving God of Christianity allow such abominations? Jack knew his question could not be new, and he doubted anyone had ever found satisfactory explanations.

  During his solitude, Elan studied his thoughts seeking justifications for inexplicable cruelties among humans, but he found no answers that seemed adequate.

  Inevitably, his reasoning smashed ineffectually against the great mystery of divine illogic that theologians and scholars alike have, since time immemorial, sidestepped with shallow profundities. That “The Gods moved in mysterious ways” or “The ways of the Lord exceed human understanding,” Elan found excruciatingly inadequate.

  Elan examined the Christian concepts of humility, compassion, and elementary justice. On a frontier where the combatants observed different rules, he found them wanting. In the face of tomahawk and scalping knife, turning the other cheek or loving thy enemy were blatantly absurd.

  Elan had moved to the frontier possessing a sort of blind faith that, if one minded his own business and met others with good will and peaceful intentions, most, including the savages, would reciprocate in kind. He had accepted that men, whatever their backgrounds, were basically honorable, kind, and tolerant.

  Belatedly, he could see the naiveté of expecting a primitive race to observe moral codes of which they had never heard and that were foreign to the harsh reality in which they lived. Indians practiced strict codes of honor. Blue had explained them, and those honor codes did not parallel Christianity. Toquisson’s loyalty to his codes might bring him into Elan’s rifle sights.

  Elan could only conclude that civilizations’ religious preferences fit only an ordered and structured society, within which all agreed or were forced to obey the preferred, or at least similar, teachings.

  Jack decided that mercy and tolerance were not conditions natural to mankind. They were products of Christian education. Too late, he could see that honor and courage could be measured by standards diametrically opposed to those held correct in the east.

  For the Shawnee, Toquisson, to devour his enemy’s heart was for him a courageous act. For the mighty Warrior, to run among his enemies touching them with his empty hands was a feat of courage and honor admired throughout the tribes. Civilization would label the feat foolish.

  Elan found the humble, cheek-turning passivity of his own people lacking. He recognized that when dealing with hostiles, survival depended on getting in the first bullet. Jack put the teachings of white religions aside, but in that, he found no satisfaction.

  Even as he decided Christian teachings had no place until order prevailed, Elan found himself studying God’s tolerance of undeserved suffering and violent death. He looked at the world around him, a land little changed by mankind’s encroachment. At every hand, violent death appeared. There were no exceptions. Everything was preyed upon and pulled down by something stronger. Surrender to the more powerful brought no mercy, only quicker death.

  It appeared to Elan that man was no exception to the rules of violence. The strongest survived. The weaker were brushed aside. For the most part, man killed for his food, and when he desired and believed he could get away with it, he might kill his neighbor. What sort of God would condone, much less create such a harsh and brutal environment confounded Jack Elan. Unused to introspective thought, he struggled to give direction to what he saw.

  Fortunately for his need to reason to some conclusions, Elan had time to think. He could ponder and evaluate through long days without human voice to interrupt or intrude.

  As he rejected a persistently recurring itch that there might not be any God at all, Elan also cast aside the belief in a God that saw or cared about every sparrow’s fall. Far too commonplace was the falling of all creatures from earthworms to soaring eagles.

  He ignored the possibility of no God because it was plain to see there was some sort of plan behind it all. Everything that he could comprehend fit into a scheme of things. Each had its place, and its reason for being. Even pestiferous mosquitoes fed fish and frogs.

  Except man, of course. Elan could not comfortably or logically fit humans into any plan.

  Along toward fall, when he kept close watch on the maturing corn, Elan settled on a concept of God that he thought pretty well fit the way things were.

  Jack pictured a God that was in charge of keeping a huge field of grain. The keeper did what was good for the field as a whole. When he fertilized, he might get a little too much or too little on some plants. While spreading his fertilizer, the God stepped on and crushed some corn, but the whole always profited. When he put his scythe to work, he sliced off the entire harvest, even if some stalks were too young.

  Elan guessed that humans were like stray plants growing in the big field. Sometimes the harvest cut them off just right, but a lot of the time, it did not. Elan could accept a God like that. It fit into what he saw around him.

  If his rationalizations were less than conclusive, Jack Elan found satisfaction in his increasing knowledge of the land and the creatures with which he shared it. He had learned so much about animals and their habits that he amazed himself. Before the massacre, he had plodded the hills and valleys hoping to stumble across deer. From Rob Shatto and his new experience, Jack now knew how wasteful his efforts had been.

  Deer were rarely found in big timber. There was nothing there for them to eat. At dusk and dawn, hunting was best. Then, deer browsed at clearing edges. During the day, deer usually bedded on slopes above favored pastures. They lay looking away from the breeze so that their sensitive noses could catch danger from behind while their eyes saw ahead.

  Elan had known that turkey flocks traversed regular routes that lay among nut trees. Now, he could successfully imitate a calling hen and knew where to patiently wait for a flock’s approach.

  Rob Shatto had told him that animals rarely looked up. The panther knew this and often struck from above. So did Jack Elan. He located convenient trees along heavily used game trails and waited among the branches until his quarry appeared. Elan considered choosing a high place and waiting for the Heart-Eater but immediately discarded the idea. From a tree, there was no retreating from an attack nor could he attack without long delay. The Eater was no game animal, and he might look up.

  Shatto taught Elan to ignore both the opossum and the porcupine as game animals. If things got desperate, those animals could be knocked over with a stick. So, it was wise to let them be until they were sorely needed. Occasionally, Jack thought how thankful he would have been to have regularly encountered either animal during his escape from the Shawnee. In the winter cold, the animals had been warmly curled within their own burrows, and he had gone hungry.

  Rabbits, Elan found, were best taken by snares. Rabbits rarely left protecting undergrowth, and they offered little more than a blur of movement for a marksman. Occasionally, Jack sought them as demanding targets.

  Jack did not trap near the clearing as it took no insight to imagine the Eater patiently waiting for the trapper to return to his snares.

  There was a thick patch of brush along Sugar Run that looked alive with rabbits. When the summer got by and the rabbits were healthy, Elan set snares and thoroughly enjoyed their tender meat.

  The black bears in the bear ponds afforded both meat and profit. When he became thoroughly familiar with the ponds, Jack found concealment from which he could watch the bears and study their habits. He liked the big animals and found them almost human in their lazy enjoyment of the marshy wallows. Like humans, younger bears wrestled while the older animals scratched and dozed in sun or shade rousing only a little to growl and grumble at one another. Sows and cubs lay in family groups, but the less social boars roamed and loafed alone. Boars did not even seem to like each other.

  Elan shot bear with some reservation. The animals were not numerous. Rob Shatto claimed there had been moose in the valley when he was a boy, but all Elan had seen were l
ong discarded antlers, mostly chewed away by rodents. He could guess that the bears could go the same way. One day, there would be quite a few around, but the next they would be gone, and there would be no bringing them back.

  Elan took a few, though. The bear meat was fat and succulent and he owed the Robinsons for salt and powder and ball.

  Lugging even a boned-out bear clear to Robinsons was a chore, but the settlers at the fort made it worth his while. They treated the bear as if it were something special, which Jack guessed it was. The fort had hogs, but they belonged to a cantankerous raiser who fouled their water, rooted their grain, and chose not to share. Robert Robinson regularly brought in hog meat from animals that he claimed he had found running wild in distant valleys. Ephraim Shcenk, the irascible hog man, complained bitterly and accused Robert of stealing. Shcenk complained only when Robert was absent, because the youngest Robinson would have thrown him into the creek.

  The bear supplemented the hog meat, and if Robert had successfully hunted pigs (in a distant valley) Jack was usually rewarded with some fat back for himself.

  Thinking about the bears being shot out or chased away left Elan considering the fate of other animals once people began moving into the valleys. He had seen how game left a place when people moved in thick enough.

  Farming might destroy most of the small animal cover, and rabbits and such would no doubt become scarce. Squirrels would last longer, probably as long as the nut trees, Jack figured. Turkeys would get thin swiftly. Farmers would surely shotgun those fat birds almost out of existence.

  Buffalo had once roamed the valleys between the mountains, but they had been gone so long that their wallows were grown up, and their trails were often indistinguishable from Indian paths. Elan had never seen a buffalo, but Rob Shatto had hunted them in the vastness of the Seven Mountains to the west. His descriptions of the shaggy bison made Elan wish they were still around.

  It saddened Jack to think of a place changing that much. He was not sure he would like it with the valleys all settled up—with people stomping everywhere.

  Recognizing how less than a year had changed his thinking made Elan shake his head in wonderment. Once, he and Ellie had hoped to someday have a lot of neighbors living close to hand. Now he wished that very few would even cross the mountain.

  He had greatly changed. Elan wondered if he was smarter now or just a lot different.

  Chapter 20

  The Eater’s Sign

  When the corn grew tall and young boys guarded against night animals, the Shawnee, Toquisson, made himself ready.

  When Toquisson had spoken of his intent to take the war trails toward the rising sun and to kill the white calling himself Deathgiver, no eyes flashed fire or lifted to meet his. Seething with frustration, Toquisson had stalked from the council, and no one rose to follow.

  Only one other chose to accompany the Heart-Eater on his journey. When the Eater’s rage had subsided, the young warrior who had remained a companion came to the lodge of Toquisson and placed his stone club beside the Eater’s iron tomahawk.

  Toquisson held the youth in little esteem, but the trail was long, and his scheme needed another. The Eater grasped both weapons and held them aloft. He blew smoke in the four directions, lifted his eyes toward the sky and chanted to his gods a promise of vengeance and death.

  The young warrior was duly impressed, and when the Eater sank deep into his thoughts, the youth slipped way.

  Of late, it had come into the mind of Toquisson that his manhood would be restored when he killed and devoured those same parts of his enemy. The thought had grown, and his desperation and madness had nourished it until Toquisson, the Heart-Eater, believed implicitly that in the death of the white eye lay his cure.

  Before the corn was ready, Toquisson shouldered his blanket, seized his weapons, and with the youth hurrying to catch up, he strode into the morning sun.

  Across the river called Juniata, near the end of the mountain Tuscarora, rose another mountain. As this mountain resembled the hump of a buffalo, it was called “The Mountain of the Buffalo.”

  Buffalo Mountain rose sharply from the river, and because it was easier to go around the mountain than over it, few travelers climbed its steep slope.

  Those who reached the summit of Buffalo Mountain usually made the climb to speak with the aged squaw, Oonasa, who many believed held the power of prophesy.

  At the base of the mountain, the Eater cleansed himself in the river shallows. He scrubbed his body clean from many suns of travel using his loincloth and fine gravel until his skin felt raw and alive.

  The young warrior applied vermilion and white paint in fierce stripes to the Eater’s face and drew a strong blue band across the Eater’s heavy brow.

  The Eater sat naked and, as always, the young warrior carefully kept his eyes averted from Toquisson’s crushed loins lest the Heart-Eater’s fearful madness be aroused.

  Cleansed, the Eater donned his loincloth and his tomahawk and climbed the dim trail toward the mountaintop. In days past, he might have approached unarmed, but since the coming of white men, there was little safety east of the Allegheny River.

  Hatred of whites flared in Toquisson’s mind, and as he climbed, he offered vows to certain dark spirits that he preferred.

  Toquisson came to the mountain to hear the seer, Oonasa, proclaim his certainty of a cure to be a true vision. He sought confirmation that would further feed his hunger to kill the Deathgiver. The Eater entertained no doubts that the woman would declare his own thoughts.

  It was said that the ancient crone dwelt in a cave and existed solely on nuts and berries she found on the mountain. Looking about, the Eater thought her spirit must indeed be strong, for he saw little to sustain life.

  He saw small human trails and trees beneath which nuts had been gathered. The Shawnee wondered where the seer found water and why she chose to live in such barren solitude.

  He came to the cave without warning. Dead limbs had been heaped over large boulders to form a crude shelter before a shallow half-cave that by itself would have given little protection. The entrance was littered with mounds of nut shells, and scattered where they had fallen were fish bones and rotting corn cobs.

  The woman Oonasa lay dead at the entrance to her shelter. Her skin was warm and her limbs moved easily. The Eater judged that she had been dead barely long enough for the sun to move. Realizing that the seer had died even as he began cleansing in the river water, Toquisson sweat in awe,

  The omen was powerful! It lit fires in the mind of Toquisson. Even the oracle had faltered and died before him. Struggling with a fury of newfound power, the Eater rushed to a cliff edge and let the sound of his triumph tear from his lungs and scream maniacal warning across the valley and along the river.

  Waiting far below, the young warrior shivered as the shrieking reached him. He wished himself far beyond the Heart-Eater’s madness, but he had offered, and Toquisson had accepted. He was committed.

  The youth wondered what had happened on the mountain to send the Eater so far into fury that his cries drove eagles from their nests and silenced the surrounding forest. He doubted that he would ever know.

  Fear of Toquisson’s madness grew within the youth, but they were near the end of their journey. The corn was ripe, and within days Toquisson would kill the white who had wounded him, and they would return in triumph to their village.

  Chapter 21

  The Deathgiver

  The corn ripened with long tassels and fat, healthy ears. Nights grew cold, and the days were crisp and sharp.

  Elan abandoned his training and the breaks he had taken from it. Now, he hunted! With hatred banked, he lurked and scouted, for the Shawnee, Heart-Eater.

  Days dragged without sign of the Eater, but Elan felt no anxiety. Heart-Eater would come, Jack could feel it in his bones, his sinew, and his nerves. When impatience rose, Elan used its sly temptations to increase his caution and sharpen his vision. When the moment came, he wished to see Heart-Ea
ter first. The thought of that meeting roiled about in his mind, and the tapping drumbeat required attention.

  One late morning, he climbed the ridge where he had hunted turkeys on the day of the massacre, and with a clear view of his ruined home site, Elan hunkered comfortably, rifle across his knees.

  The overgrown clearing lay still in the sun. A pair of rabbits hopped and nibbled within the rank undergrowth, and one paused for a moment on the mounded grave.

  Elan studied the valley closely, remembering the work they had done there and conscious of the tempo beating deep in his mind. He drove the memories away and turned his thoughts to the Heart-Eater.

  He let his eyes range the thickets around him and tuned his hearing to forest sounds. He had been still long enough for small creatures to have resumed their scurrying. Their activities sounded right, and he saw nothing to indicate another human presence.

  Blue Moccasin and Rob Shatto believed that, if he lived and was able, Heart-Eater must come. The challenge had been spread too widely for the Eater to ignore. Toquisson’s warrior pride passed arrogance, and to appear to fear the white settler who had savaged him would be mortifying, a disgrace known to all and beyond Toquisson’s bearing. Heart-Eater would come.

  Rob and Blue were equally certain that Toquisson would not come alone. Excepting honored message carriers and The Warrior, almost no one traveled alone. Forest dangers were many, watches must be kept, and hunting conducted. If they were long away from their kind,.loneliness and baseless fears struck at the spirits of even the most hardy

  It was doubted that the Eater would march with many, but an additional warrior might spoil Elan’s plan or block his escape.

  Jack shoved away the worries. He was as ready as he could be. He hoped Toquisson was also waiting, harried by his own doubts and confusions. Elan listened to the tapping in his mind. Then he exerted control and made it distant. Each day, reason must rule emotion, or the Shawnee would surely devour Jack Elan’s still beating heart.