Orenda - Chapter Two

CHAPTER 2

Pierre Twofeathers huddled close to his small fire. He stared steadily into the glowing embers. Something about the fire pulled and held his attention. It had always done so, through the countless fires kindled in his eighty-two years. He watched untiringly the ebb and flow of heat in the coals; brightening in one spot as a slight breeze fanned it; dimming in another as combustion slowed. It was as the ebb and flow of strength in his body; sometimes fiercely glowing; other times dwindling to the very edges of cold, black death. Staring into the fire, he forgot the trials of this world, and joined the pulsating, eternally changing one of energy.

Although he had spent eighty-one of his years in the bleak grayness of northern Ontario, Canada, his body was no longer able to keep the cold at bay. Icy tentacles snaked through his skin, weaved their insidious way around and through his aging muscles, and insinuated themselves into his joints. From the beachhead of his joints, they wrapped clammy fingers around his skeleton, fanning out in all directions, as a vine will grow upon the branches of a tree. Pierre shivered, and stirred at the glowing embers with a charred stick.

The cry of a hunting owl called his eyes to the small window set well up in the wall of his shack. Through the groping, leafless branches of a Maple tree, he saw the gibbous moon of October. He knew that soon, in a few more days, the bluish-white ball would swell to its full rotundity, and would cast bright reflections off the pre-dawn frost.

Before the moon became fully inflated, Pierre would be faced with a great task. Twenty years before, it would not have been such a challenge, but now, with his once hard strength hobbled by the enfeebling tentacles of old age, he worried. He was not certain what the task was yet, but he was certain that the demands it would make on his aging body might be too great. He hoped that he could draw strength as well as heat from the tiny fire.

Night sounds of the winter woods closed in upon him, and Twofeathers drew it to him like a city dweller might pull an extra cover over himself on a cold, lonely night. The familiar noises warmed him and brought a sense of security. He wrapped the sounds of the night about him like a cocoon. The forlorn, soulful moaning of an air horn out on the interstate highway drifted on the cold north wind, but so naturally did it fit into the sounds of the forest, that it did not shatter the security Pierre felt. Rather, it caused him to pause in his reverie; calling forth memories of Ontario winters, when hunting wolves would call to each other across the frozen miles in just such a mournful way.

This land was much like Ontario, only much warmer for this late in the season. Pierre felt the arctic blasts, and knew that these same cold winds had passed over the land of the Algonkian, from whence he came, many days before. He tried to smell the familiar odors of the land he had spent his entire life in, but the howling winds had been scoured clean of them, and he could detect only the harsh arctic briskness in the air.

He did not fully understand the silent call which had brought him here, where he had had to build the rickety shack he occupied, in the small clearing he had had to clear, on the vine covered banks of the ancient river that had been the homeland of his forgotten people. Perhaps he had heard their souls crying in the strong southerly breezes of Canadian summer, or sensed their unease in the fog which floated off Lake Huron each morning when the sun rose. He simply did not comprehend how or why, but he had been summoned to this place of anguish.

Perhaps the vision he had seen of `He who moves from place to place', known to the white man as Tecumseh, had been figments of an old man's imagination. Perhaps his mind was weakening as was his body. But it had been so vivid, and the message the spirit conveyed so compellingly real, that Twofeathers believed it was a true visitation from the spirit world.

Sometimes he feared that his mind was simply traveling backwards in time, and calling forth old memories implanted by his forefathers. Was he merely an old man who wanted to visit, just once, his ancestral homeland, and then die? The last Tuscazoaran, perhaps, wanted merely to rest in the land of his forebears.

Twofeathers had spent his entire life among the Algonquian. He had eaten the same food as they, lived in the same type of dingy shacks, and wore the same type of clothing. Their diet was hardy, and consisted of many nuts and roots flavored with the flesh of various animals and fowl which thrived on the upland plains and lower forest lands of the vast reservation. Salmon fish was a mainstay, and Pierre found most other meats bland compared to the flavor of the rich, red meat.

The two room shacks erected by the white men were woefully inadequate by the standards of the builders. But to the North American aborigines, they compared to an earthen floored wigwam or longhouse as a Beverly Hills mansion compares to an Appalachian coal miner's shanty.

For reservation Indians of North America, the dress was nearly universal, consisting of brightly checked flannel shirts, faded blue jeans, and hiking boots. Pierre had worn these things all his life, and felt uncomfortable in anything else.

Never had Pierre's toes flexed in the comfort of the soft doeskin moccasins of his people. Not once had he tied a deerskin breech cloth around his waist and enjoyed the freedom of movement of legs unencumbered by trousers. He had never spent one night in a wigwam, watching the stars slip by through the smoke hole in the top. He did not yearn for these lost things, because he had never known them.

He had gained a rudimentary education in the one-room school house on the reservation. Although his education was basic, he could speak Algonquian and English fluently. Pierre was also the last human being alive who knew the Tuscazoaran tongue. He had not learned it at the reservation school. His great-grandfather, his grandfather, and finally his own father, had hammered the language, lore, and culture of their decimated people into the unresisting youth.

Although all three of his remembered ancestors had taken Algonkian wives, they had not allowed the influence of their host people to override their strong desire to keep the culture of the Tuscazoarans alive. This had marked Pierre as different to his peers, although in actuality, he was more Algonquian than Tuscazoaran. But his forefather's firm refusal to totally assimilate into the Algonquian culture set them apart from their neighbors.

Consequently, they were called `Two Feathers' by the Algonkian, meaning they were of two tribes. This delineation did not bother the family, as they needed a surname for the white man's world anyway, and Twofeathers did as nicely as anything else.

As a youngster, Pierre was rowdy in school, and a French-Canadian schoolmaster had tagged him `Naughty Pierre'. The name stuck, and he was known to his school mates as Pierre Twofeathers. His given name was Terokado, which he was called at home. Terokado was a Tuscazoaran name, and as odd to the Algonquian as Pierre, and even harder to pronounce. After his father died, Pierre did not hear the name Terokado for over forty years. When the visions began, however, the spirits called him Terokado.

Pierre had gained his real education during weekends, holidays, and the short Canadian summers. This time was spent on the banks of the Sturgeon River, or in the meadows and uplands of the reservation. He caught Salmon, and dried the rich red meat for consumption in the winter. He trapped beaver, mink and rabbit; ate the flesh and sold the furs to the white traders who visited the reservation regularly. Perhaps he was not able to comprehend Algebraic formulae, but Pierre Twofeathers would always be able to eat.

If it had not been for constant reminding of Pierre that he was Tuscazoaran rather than Algonquian, he would never have known the difference. He would, in fact, have been Algonquian. Even with the insistent teaching and haranguing about his lost heritage, Pierre could have been quite happy, although somewhat an odd ball among his peers. When his patriarchs forced him to begin learning the dead Tuscazoaran language, however, he was set apart forever from the other children of his generation.

At first, he had taken pride in showing off knowledge that the others did not possess. This ego-centric display brought him attention and interest from the others; but it soon turned to jealousy on their part, and he was slowly ostracized even more from his peers. This treatment embittered the proud young man, and put him on the defensive. Finally, he retreated from the increasingly hostile taunts of the group, and whole-heartedly embraced the dead Tuscazoaran culture. He began to spend more and more time with his grandfather, huddled over the oil cloth covered table in their dirty kitchen, listening to the tales and legends of his lost people. Inevitably, all his playmates had vanished, and Pierre was left alone with only the memories of an aging ward of the state who had once been a Tuscazoaran warrior.

After his grandfather died, Pierre's father took over the task of educating him. His stories were not as colorful, nor his lore as complete as the older man's, but by the time he passed into the next world, Pierre knew the entire oral history and language of the Tuscazoaran people. Had he realized the value of this knowledge, or had a scholar sought him out, the entire culture of his vanished race could have been preserved. As it turned out, there well be only snatches and footnotes to remind the world that once a thriving aboriginal culture lived along the banks of the Tuscawarus River.

Pierre stayed among the Algonquian for only a few months after his father's death. There was nothing for him there any longer, so he ventured south, to the white man's city of Toronto. He found some success in the white man's world, and had been well paid for working the high steel on the never ending construction of skyscrapers in the growing metropolis. He got along well with his co-workers, who admired his fearless conquest of the high girders. He felt more accepted and secure among the whites than he had among the Algonkian.

He had noticed the lithe, blond daughter of his foreman bringing lunch to her father every day during the summer months. Slowly he built up his courage to speak to her, and finally began by saying hello to her each day. He made it a habit to be near the foreman when lunch time rolled around, so that he could get the chance to talk to her. She was pleasant, and always smiled at him cheerfully. It did not seem to matter to her that he was Indian, and she white. Soon, their exchange of words passed beyond one word salutations, and they would engage in earnest conversation whenever the chance arose. She got in the habit of bringing him a sandwich, or a piece of pie, or whatever else she brought to her father. Finally, it got to the point that she was on his mind night and day, and he began to live for his lunch breaks, when he could be near her.

Pierre was in love, and in his euphoria, did not notice the different manner in which the foreman treated him. He did not notice the hard looks when Lilly would hand her father his small brown bag, and with barely a word, make straight for Pierre. On the job, Pierre took it as a compliment to his ability that the foreman assigned him to all the dangerous tasks. He performed them with gusto, for he wanted to impress the man who had fathered his dream.

Nearly every evening he would meet Lilly in the small park located near her home. It was in this park, among the cloying fragrance of honeysuckle, that Pierre first made love to her. He had never known such ecstasy in the arms of the skinny Algonquian girls he had had sex with in the past. Of course, he had never been in love before. He hesitantly asked Lilly to marry him.

She agreed, but wanted to get her father's blessings first. She wanted to marry Pierre properly, but decided that if her father objected, she would run away with her handsome, muscular lover. She promised to approach her father that very night.

The following morning, Pierre arrived for work an hour early. He had not slept at all the night before, and paced nervously back and forth in front of the foreman's shack. When Lilly's father arrived, he did not look at Pierre, nor order him aloft into the high steel. Instead, he motioned him into the shack.

Pierre stepped into the shack, and stood with his hands behind his back. He felt as if he would burst from anticipation, and sweat popped out on his forehead. The foreman completed assigning the crew to their tasks, and walked into the shack, closing the door behind him. He walked around in front of Pierre, and without looking into the Indian's eyes, said, "Pierre, you're fired." He made the statement calmly, his gravelly voice soft.

Pierre staggered as if stricken, and his jaw dropped open limply. He stood mutely, his mouth hanging open.

"What's more, I ever see you hangin' around my Lilly again, I'll skin yore red hide!" His voice was still calm, which seemed to heighten the threat of his words. "She ain't gonna' marry no stinkin' injun. . .not's long as I'm alive."

"But. . .but, she loves me. I love her. . ." Pierre's words trailed off into silence.

"Lilly's too young to know about love. She don't have no idea what love's all about, and you damn sure ain't gonna' be the one to teach her!" The foreman's voice took on strength, and he looked squarely into Pierre's eyes. "She's white, and she's gonna' marry white. . .a man with a education. Not no stinkin' reservation injun."

Pierre wanted to strike out at the man, and Lilly's father saw the fire kindling in the brown eyes. He tensed himself, waiting.

"Don't even think about it, injun! You take a poke at me and I'll cut yore balls off." The burly man moved a step closer to Pierre, then called over the Indian's shoulder. "Barney! Joe! Git in here he'p mista' red ass injun here off'a the premises." He glowered directly into Pierre's eyes, as if daring him to take a swing.

The two burly men pulled the door open immediately, and Pierre knew that they had been waiting outside during the conversation. "You need some educati`n, injun?" The larger of the two asked. "Me and Barney here'd be glad to oblige."

Pierre's shoulders slumped, and he turned silently toward the doorway.

"Don't bother lookin' for no more work aroun' here." The foreman said, "I'll see to it that nobody hires you. Go on back up to the reservation where you b`long."

Pierre stumbled to the doorway of the shack. He did not know how to react. He did not want to fight with the three; he was not afraid of them physically, but their derisive words and attitude had crushed him mentally. There was no fight left in him, and he stepped into the doorway. Barney threw back his head and laughed, then planted his leather boot against Pierre's backside, and kicked him the rest of the way out of the shack. Pierre fell heavily in the dirt outside. Anguish washed over him like a cold shower, and hot tears of shame welled in his eyes. He stood and beat futily at the dirt on his clothing, and began to shuffle off in the direction of the park where he had fallen in love.

"Yellow-bellied fuckin' injun!" Joe called after him. "Scared to fight less'en you got twenty-five more bucks backin' ya up!"

Barney whooped with joy, and headed towards the retreating Pierre to land another kick on his backside. Pierre turned and faced the man, now removed from his accomplices by quite a few feet. He did not speak, but the glitter in his brown eyes warned Barney off. So as not to lose face, Barney shooed at the Indian with his hands, saying, "Go on, git off'n this prop'ty!" Pierre stared at the man, thinking how easy it would be to slit his fat throat. He had no knife with him, but in his mind he saw the sharp blade parting the flesh, the blood spurting out. He had slit the necks of countless animals caught in his traps. Slitting this taunting throat would be no different, except that this time it would bring him pleasure.

Barney saw the hate, the anguish, and the cold killing instinct rising in the red man's face, and took a step backwards. He blustered at the Indian, but no coherent words came out; only a stammering, fearful melange of meaningless noise. He took another step backwards. Joe and the foreman watched the scene from the doorway of the shack.

"Hit 'em, Barney!" Joe called. "Ain't scared of 'em are ya?~

Barney took another step back from the silent Indian, then another. Finally, he turned and walked back to the shack. Only then, from the safety of his cronies, did he turn and look at Pierre again.

Twofeathers walked steadily away from the construction site. He felt unclean, filthy; not from the dirt he had been pushed in, but from the degradation the whites had heaped upon him. He headed towards his one room apartment, where he hoped he could scrub the shame away along with the dirt. He would meet Lilly in the park tonight, and they would plan their escape together. She had told him that if her father did not agree to the marriage, then she would run away with him, perhaps to the South, to America.

He waited until nearly ten o'clock, but still she did not come. Pierre knew that if it had been possible, she would have met him. He made his way to her house, and stealthily slipped into the back yard. He saw her face, vision of a thousand of his dreams, staring out the back window. Her eyes were puffed, and he knew she had been crying. He eased closer to the window, and picked up a handfull of tiny pebbles from the ground. These he tossed at her window to get her attention. When she saw him, her eyes grew wide, and she shook her head violently. He did not understand, and moved closer, staring up into her tear-streaked face.

"Don't move, injun!~ The gravelly voice of her father croaked. Pierre felt the twin barrels of a shotgun pressing against the back of his neck. He froze, feeling the cold circles of metal distinctly.

"I figured you'd come sneakin' aroun' here! I warned you, injun, now yore gonna' git yore balls cut off. . .just like I promised," The voice hissed softly.

The two men that had assisted the foreman earlier with Pierre appeared out of the bushes lining the back yard. Twofeathers cursed himself for a fool. He should have foreseen this trap when Lilly failed to show up at the park. He should have been more patient; waited a few days to allow the foreman time to quit worrying about him. Each of the two men grabbed one of Pierre's arms, and twisted them cruelly behind his back. He grunted softly, but did not resist, for the pressure of the twin barrels pressing into his neck warned him that all the foreman needed was half an excuse to blow Pierre's head into tiny pieces.

His wrists tightly bound, the three men hustled him over to an old panel truck. They opened the rear doors and threw him face down on the floorboards. The smell of stale urine assailed his nose. Far in the distance, he heard Lilly hysterically screaming his name over and over, as if she were chanting it. Splinters from the rotten flooring gouged into him in a hundred places, and Pierre arched his back, pulling his face as far from the splinters and putrid odor as possible. Lilly's screams faded slowly in the distance as the truck chugged steadily out of Toronto.

Lilly's father drove, and Barney and Joe sat on either side of Pierre. Joe kept the shotgun trained on the back of his head.

"What's the matter, injun? Smell a little rough down there?" Joe asked, laughingly. "Ought to, that's where old Barney here keeps his huntin dogs." They both erupted in mirth.

Pierre almost gagged from the smell, but kept silent. He tried breathing through his mouth, but that only let larger amounts of the acrid scent in, making his nausea worse.

When they were far enough out of Toronto, Lilly's father piloted the bouncing truck onto a rutted dirt farm road. They drove slowly along it for perhaps a mile.

"This ought'a do 'er." The driver said, steering the truck off the roadway and into a field. He turned the motor off, and walked around behind the truck. Grunting loudly, he pulled the rear doors open.

"Give me a hand, Barney. Joe, keep the gun on him."

Each grabbed one of Pierre's ankles, and began sliding him out the back of the truck. The myriad splinters which had entered his body going in, now were jerked back in the other direction, and broke off in his skin. When they got his face to the edge of the floorboards, both held his feet up high, so that Pierre could not arch his face away from the rough wood. Then, slowly, with Barney cackling sadistically, they jerked his body the last few inches, and his face slammed down on the bumper of the truck.

Pierre felt the piercing pain as the cartilage in his nose cracked like an eggshell being crushed between powerful fingers. He did not realize that his two upper front teeth had also been knocked out, so intense was the pain of his crushed nose. He felt blood gushing over his face, and backing up in his throat. He wanted to scream with the agony, but resisted the impulse. Only a soft grunt escaped his smashed lips.

They flipped him over onto his back in the soft dirt of the freshly plowed field. The smell of rich humus mixed with the odor of his own blood in his nostrils. The song of millions of insects formed a humming backdrop to the dark drama being played out.

"Skin his pants down, Barney." Lilly's father ordered. "Where`st I can git at his balls." Moonlight glinted feebly off the blade of the long hunting knife he held in his hand. "Goin' to send you back to the reservation a squaw, boy." He croaked softly.

"Here, keep the gun on his head, Joe." Barney said, and started to hand the shotgun over Pierre's prostrate form to him. As the shotgun changed hands, Pierre lashed out with his right foot, and caught the barrel of the gun, knocking it sideways. Joe grabbed at it, and his fingers closed involuntarily about the jumping weapon, pulling the trigger. The face of Lilly's father disintegrated in an explosion of red, inundating Barney's face and upper torso with a gusher of gore.

"Jesus Goddamn! Joe swore, falling backward to the ground from the force of the unexpected discharge.

"Arghhhh!" Barney bellowed, swiping frantically at the dripping mess which had been the other man's head. He spit out a mouthful of the foreman's face, then vomited.

Pierre was on his feet and scrambling away into the safety of the night. His hands were still bound securely behind his back, which forced him to run with an awkward gait, but he was still well out of sight before the two survivors had recovered sufficiently to concern themselves with him.

"Fuckin' injun kilt' him!" He heard one of them shout angrily.

Pierre did not stop moving for the remainder of that night. When the sun began to brighten the eastern horizon, he took refuge in an abandoned hunting cabin. Here he rested all that day, working his hands free, and holding compresses of icy spring water to his battered nose and mouth.

He discovered that his front teeth were missing when he tried to bite into a strip of jerky he had found in the well stocked cabin. Although abandoned for the season, the cabin was left well stocked with food and firewood, as is the custom in the hinterlands of Canada. Pierre whimpered at the loss, for he knew that in the wild, a toothless animal is as good as dead.

Traveling only at night, he slowly moved northward. He did not know whether the mounted police were seeking him or not, so he took no chances on being seen. After many hard nights of hiking, he was once again in the land of the Algonquian. He did not approach the familiar landmarks with a feeling of homecoming; rather a sense of foreboding dread. He had left this rich land to find something better in the white man's world, and he now realized, that for him at least, there was nothing better.

He remained on the reservation for nearly fifty years. Alone, yet among, the Algonquian, who, some two centuries past, had bent to the will of their British mentors, and opened their hearts and their vast land to the survivors of the Iroquois Nation. Twofeathers did not take a wife from the Algonkian, although there were many willing maidens drawn to his tall, handsome visage. He had loved Lilly; truly loved her, and did not want his cherished memories tarnished by the sweat and groans of another woman. Ten months out of the year, he stayed celibate; spending his days hunting and fishing; his nights in solitary meditation.

During the frantic weeks of fall, however, Pierre felt stirrings within him. Strange yearnings, which began around the time of the first frost of each season, insinuated their way into his consciousness. Perhaps it was because everything about him seemed to be dying, withering, and falling to the ground. The great splurges of color held no joy or beauty for him, but brought a deepening sense of gloom. The mists rising from Lake Huron during fall mornings seemed to be saying something to him with their silent, softly swirling motions. The nights grew steadily longer, steadily colder. The sun rose lower to the south, and seemed to fairly leap across the heavens, leaving little heat upon the ground. All these things brought a mournful gloominess upon him, and he sought refuge from it in large doses of white man's whiskey, and the arms of Algonquian whores. These two months of fall, he shamefully rutted, for sex to Pierre was little more than the act of relieving himself, like going to the bathroom; a physical need which he must, driven by the waning season of life, satisfy.

When the rutting season passed, he would settle in for the long, lonely months of confinement. The short gray days would slip by, with little noticeable difference between sun-up, afternoon, and nightfall. The only joy Pierre found in life during these dismal periods was in his mind. The dull gray days, endlessly revolving, soon taxed his ability to fend off the boredom. The past two seasons, alone in his shack during those long nights, he had begun chewing peyote.

The dreams and vivid visions the drug inspired had at first been of Lilly, who never seemed to age in his mind. Gradually, however, they had changed; shunting Lilly slowly aside. He fought to hold onto her, but even against his will, the dreams and visions became those of his lost people. They became progressively more urgent, and Pierre found himself chewing on the bitter, dried cactus nearly every night. He found that the more he used the hallucinogen, the more vivid came his visions of the spirit world. He found that he could 'talk' to his ancestors.

Finally, he came to believe that a powerful spirit of the Shawnee, of which his people had been a sub-tribe, was responsible for displacing Lilly from his dreams, and was trying to contact him. Pierre shivered with anticipation, for this could not be real; yet it was.

During his waking hours, Pierre sometimes questioned the reality of the spirit world. It was a place of surrealistic vistas; a place of intangibles. Intangible as the northern lights which played across the Canadian sky was intangible; untouchable, unknowable, yet like the spirit world, undeniably extant. He wondered that if some way he could enter the northern lights, become a part of them, as he did the spirit world, if he would feel the same sense of reality that he felt when the peyote transported him to the resting place of his people. Would it be the same? Or, were the lights just wraiths upon the arctic wind, dancing and colorful chimera of an aging mind? Were the images he saw just the tricks of senility? He did not know the answer, for the images in his dreams, and the flowing aurora borealis, seemed as real to him when he viewed them, as the rock hard reality of his waking hours.

In the late summer of his eighty-second year, Pierre sold what few belongings he had acquired, and left again the land of the Algonquian. He did not expect to ever see it again. At the edge of the reservation, from a high plateau that was the southern border of it, Pierre looked back, letting his eyes travel slowly across the hills which he had roamed for most of a century. This time, he would miss this rich and peaceful land where, had it not been for a massacre two centuries earlier, and his forefather's refusal to let their culture die, Pierre would have been content to live out his time, then die among the Algonquian.

He hitch-hiked south, and rode through the city of Toronto in the back of a truck loaded with potatoes. He recognized some of the buildings he had worked on forty years before. He wondered if Lilly still lived here, and if she still remembered him as vividly as he remembered her. The truck deposited him on the side of the highway just south of Buffalo, New York.

Pierre trudged slowly southward. After many days of travel, he arrived on the banks of the Tuscawarus River. He wandered along the waterway, taking such food as he needed from its waters. Nobody bothered the man, for his stooped and slow moving gait signaled his advanced age, and he was not perceived as a threat. Had he been younger, he might have been detained for vagrancy, or run off the farms he had to cross on his trek. Those who noticed him, however, as they scurried by in haste, felt only a drop of pity for an old man on the road, alone.

The mental images Pierre's ancestors had planted in his mind were so thorough and sharp that he had actually recognized the correct spot on the river bank. Long forgotten memories of features his forefather's had described triggered his mind; the sight of a pine grove here, a twisted or forked Maple there. Finally he reached the curve in the river from which the sun could be seen sinking directly behind the steeple of the Moravian mission at Schoenbrunn. He was home.

On hands and knees, he cleared underbrush and vines, then searched with his fingers through the moist loam for the indented, circular fire pits. He soon found them, their moss covered stone linings undisturbed by the passage of time. He built his rickety shack on the exact site where his great-grandfather's wigwam had sat.

The longer he stayed in the ancient campsite, the stronger and more vivid came the dream images. If he concentrated hard enough, he could barely perceive the spirits of the Tuscazoarans going about their peaceful tasks. He saw the wavering image of a hunter enter the camp with a buck slung over his shoulders, and actually heard, although it intermingled with the noises of the tumbling river, the gushing adulation of the women at this masterful display of hunting prowess.

At night, he could hear the rhythmic pound of drums; and if he peered long enough and hard enough into the darkness; see dancers leaping in orchestrated abandon around blazing fires. He must be seeing into the spirit world, he felt, because the blazing fires did not cast a flickering reflection beyond the dancers. The trees and brush around them remained dark, even when Pierre clearly saw squaws throw more wood on the fires, and watched the resulting shower of sparks trail upward into the night air.

The deeper Pierre began to believe that the spirit world was real, the more easily the images of it came to him. He was getting closer to them. Slowly, he slipped a bit of the leathery peyote between his toothless gums.

In the old days, his grandfather had told him, peyote had been reserved for the shaman, and even a tiny bit would cost many pairs of fine doeskin moccasins. Pierre understood the value that peyote must have had to the medicine man, for if he, not even a warrior, could visit the spirit world through its use, think what a trained shaman could do! Every night he felt more intensely the call of the great Shawnee leader, Tecumseh. Pierre yearned for the great unifier to talk to him again, to make himself visible, to manifest his spirit physically in some way, and explain why Pierre had been called home.

Sitting cross-legged at his small fire, Twofeathers passed into a state very similar to sleep, yet was not sleep. He no longer felt the icy tentacles of winter cold creeping into his aging body. He felt warm and secure. He sincerely believed that when finally he was called to the spirit world, he would remain in this euphoric state for all of eternity.

Soon Tecumseh would come. Pierre smiled blissfully, rocking back and forth in front of the tiny pile of fading embers. He would not return to the land of the white man's intrusive civilization until long after the sun had burned the morning mists from the Tuscawarus River.