Chapter 2: A Droplet Of Red

 

     After a moment of silence following the raven's call, Charlotte gives a soft whine and looks up at Benny. He tilts his head and, hearing that she senses no danger ahead, waves his hand forward. She trots up the rocky trail and he follows soundlessly, feeling each boot fall before placing weight on it. 

     He skirts the log lean-to he'd hewn into the hillside of the narrow hollow five years before, his hatchet at the ready on his right shoulder. Beyond a little clearing along his still race, he creeps up a last rocky ledge and peers over a boulder at a spring-fed pool below a tiny waterfall. 

     At first there are only feint rippling reflections on the water.  Benny whistles a short tweet in mimicry of the parakeet that flits in these Appalachian forests. A movement by the pool lifts his hatchet to the ready, but then tan pumpkin-seed spots approach through the dark and the tall dog comes back with tongue wagging and tail beating. Benny lowers his throwing arm and runs the fingers of his other hand in the places she likes behind her long black ears. That's when he hears the keening of a girl's song. 

     Settlers in the central Valley of Virginia were well aware in 1780 that the Cherokee would breach the supposed boundaries along the Blue Ridge to the southeast and the Alleghenies to the northwest. The tribe had only recently been displaced from ancestral towns and hunting grounds in the broad and well-watered grassland between the peaks. While the Chickamouga Wars with settlers farther to the southwest were ongoing, small local bands from newly formed Kentucky county would sometimes drift over high Clinch passes to revisit their former haunts. 

     Benny Reed was subconsciously acquainted with these over mountain visitors. Though he was too young to remember his father's demise in a 1762 raid, the fear from that awful night of hiding in the springhouse with his shivering mother's hand across his mouth still coursed through his veins. 

     Jane Green Reed had hung on in Tazewell for ten years with the help of other mixed-race neighbors. Then in the spring of 1772, when Benny turned an independent thirteen years of age, she had climbed on their old horse and followed the creek down to the New River, over to the Dan, and all the way back to the Green farmstead at the inland tip of Albemarle Sound. 

     Benny stills the coonhound with a hand on her back and they listen, entranced, to the soft wail. It goes on for what seems like hours and is somehow both sad and happy. Then a flash of full moonlight cracks the ridge to the east, illuminating sleek blue-black locks hanging down the back of a girl squatting beside the shimmering water. 

     She stands quickly and stares straight at his blaze of shimmering hair showing over the ledge. The dropped hatchet clambers down the rocks as Benny lunges for it and misses. When he looks up again, she's gone.

"Bloody hell Lottie, did you see that?" 

They step over the rocks to the spot where the native girl was bending over the pool, the big dog sniffing a droplet of red at water's edge.