“Sound judgment,” I said. It had been, on the King’s part, as well as Brant’s. The King—or at least the government—wanted to keep the Indians on their side, as help in suppressing an incipient rebellion. And Brant, naturally, would like to be on the winning side of that rebellion, and at the moment of going to press, the British undeniably looked like the best bet.
We had reached level footing, and I led the way onto a trail that wound gently down toward the small lake where we fished for trout.
“So,” I said, and took a deep breath. “It was a dark and stormy night. Isn’t that how ghost stories usually begin?”
“Do your people often tell such stories?” He sounded quite startled, and I looked over my shoulder. The trail had narrowed at this point, and he was walking behind me.
“Ghost stories? Yes, don’t yours?”
“Yes, but they don’t usually start that way. Tell me what happened next.”
I did. I told him all of it, from my being trapped in a storm at night on the mountain, to coming face-to-face with Otter-Tooth; what I had said to him, and he to me. And with some hesitation, I told him about finding Otter-Tooth’s skull, and with it, the large opal that he had kept as his ticket back—his token of safe return through the stones.
And then, of course, I had to tell him about the stones. It isn’t, in the nature of things, possible for a person possessing epicanthic folds to actually grow round-eyed, but he made a good attempt.
“And the reason why I knew that the ghost—I didn’t know his name until much later—why he was from … er … my time, was that his teeth had silver fillings: metal that’s put in the tooth to strengthen it after you remove a pocket of decay. That’s not done now; it won’t be done commonly until … I forget, but more than … say, two or three generations from now. But look …”
I opened my mouth and leaned toward him, hooking my cheek away with a finger so he could see my molars. He leaned down and peered into my mouth.
“Your breath is sweet,” he said politely, and straightened up. “How did you learn his name? Did he come back and tell you?”
“No. He left behind a journal that he had written, while living with the Mohawks near Snaketown. He wrote down who he was—his English name was Robert Springer, but he had taken the name ‘Ta’wineonawira.’ Do you read Latin?”
He laughed, which relieved the tension a little. “Do I look like a priest?”
That surprised me somewhat. “Aren’t you one? Or something like that? A—a healer?” I had vague memories of Ian telling me about the False Face Society, healers who would gather to offer prayers and songs over a sick person.
“Well, no.” He rubbed a knuckle lightly over his upper lip, and I thought he was—for once—trying not to laugh at me. But no; he’d only been making up his mind what to say.
“Do you not know what the word ‘sachem’ means?”
“Rather obviously not,” I said, a little miffed. “What’s it mean, then?”
He straightened up, half consciously. “A sachem is an elder of the people. A sachem might advise and lead a great number of his people. I did.”
Well, that accounted for his self-confidence.
“Why aren’t you a sachem anymore?”
“I died,” he said simply.
“Oh.” I looked around us. We had come to the trout lake, which was glimmering with a cold bronze light; the sun was coming down, and the forest surrounding us was mostly pine and birch trees, dark against the sky. There was no sign of any human habitation. I took a deep breath of the wind and the coming dark. I’d taken his arm coming down the hill; his flesh had been warm and solid; I’d felt the hardness of his bones.
“You’re not a ghost, are you?” I said, and thought, oddly, that I would have believed either answer.
He looked at me for several moments before answering.
“I don’t know,” he said.
We found a fallen log and sat down. At the far end of the lake, a family of beavers had built a lodge that dammed the small creek leading out of it. I could see a beaver on top of the lodge, its stocky form silhouetted against the light, head raised to the breeze.
“Jamie says they mostly come out at night,” I said, nodding toward it. “But we see them often in the daytime, too.”
“They feel safe, I suppose. I have not heard many wolves. Other than small Hunter; he howls very well but is not big enough to hunt beaver yet. And his parents don’t let him out at night.”