His only friend was his uncle, Bushy Hair, who spent time with the boy when he was little and took over his manhood training when he grew older. This training was Bushy Hair’s responsibility, as was the way of the people. Like his sister, Bushy Hair had his father’s courage as well as his sweet charm and kindness. He talked to the boy, listening as if he were a grown man. Bushy Hair did not laugh at Micco, either, when his arrows did not fly straight at low-flying birds or slow deer, and his voice was not harsh when Micco ran from the water of the creek when a fish bit his hand. Bushy Hair was patient. When Micco eventually shot an arrow straight and killed a fat bird, and when he withstood the gnaws of the fish on his hand and threw it on the banks of the creek, Bushy Hair smiled and told the boy, well done, nephew. You are a great hunter, and Micco felt much love inside.
This peace that Micco felt would be broken, because in his fifteenth year there was trouble between the people of the village and a white man who had settled on the other side of the Oconee River. The people called him a “cracker,” for the sound of his whip when driving his five head of cattle right up to the boundaries of the village. The cracker was a stringy man in both hair and body, and ornery, too. He didn’t try to keep his cattle from running through the village cornfield, laughing when women had frantically waved to warn him. He had made obscene gestures at the women as well. Several times, men of the village had ridden out to the cracker’s farm, a shoddy place with a tiny cabin he had erected without the permission of the people. The men had talked to the cracker, warning him about his animals. He would nod his head in agreement but then kept driving his cattle onto the village grounds.
One morning a village woman was not quick enough to grab her toddling child from the path of the cracker’s cattle and her child was trampled to death. Though the village was a “white” place of peace, this insult could not remain unanswered. A group of younger men rode out to the place where the cracker had set up his pathetic farm, but the cracker was ready for a fight. He pulled out his long gun and trained it on the four men who stood in front of him. However, the cracker had not considered that his back was unprotected. There was a fifth man behind him: Bushy Hair, who made quick work of the cracker and left him dead.
The cracker’s wife had been standing at the window of her cabin watching the scene play out. She had screamed when she saw Bushy Hair hit her husband with his ax. He had been so quick she hadn’t been able to warn the cracker. She screamed more, a sound of hopelessness, and one of the men wanted to go inside the cabin and kill the wife. This was understandable as this man was the father of the dead toddler.
Yet the three other men did not want to harm the cracker’s wife; they still wanted to adhere to peaceful ways as much as possible. Bushy Hair listened to both sides, then asked the toddler’s father to leave the cracker’s wife unharmed. They had solved the problem of blood revenge, according to Creek ways. In times past, if someone in one village was killed in anger by someone in another village, the two places would get together, consult, and the culprit would be handed over to whichever village had been wronged. The white woman’s man was dead, Bushy Hair reasoned. She wouldn’t remain, especially since they were taking her husband’s cattle back to the village.
Perhaps Bushy Hair’s kindness had been his mistake, for the cracker’s wife found her way east of the Oconee and reported the killing of her husband to a headman in a town populated by white people. Bushy Hair found this out when his brother-in-law came for a visit only a moon after the killing.
Upon his arrival, Dylan Cornell marched straight to the elders of The-Place-in-the-Middle-of-the-Tall-Trees. Standing in the ceremonial grounds—turning his body so that the sun highlighted his yellow hair—Dylan declared that whoever had killed the cracker had broken the law and must be surrendered to the leaders of the white men.
The head elder scratched his chin, unconcerned by Dylan’s passion.
“Whose law?” he asked.
Dylan swept his arm. “The law of the government of this land!”
“Whose government? Whose land?”
The debate went on in this circular fashion. The other elders asked questions, such as, would the white man’s government come to the village? No, Dylan said. The cracker only had been one man. No one was coming this far out to avenge him, but the murder was a matter of honor. The elders tried to explain to Dylan that indeed the cracker had violated honor according to the Creek ways, but Dylan did not listen.