Chapter 6: Over The Hill

 

     "Oh Lottie," Benjamin Reed mumbles as he awakens into the mid-October chill from a fitful dream of following his mother around the bend of a flooding river.

The black and tan just moans in the pre-dawn shimmer of a slivered moon and curls tighter into her sleep ball.

Benny rolls over on his bunk, pulling tighter into a woolen blanket as he tucks against the earthen back wall. The tinkling of the nearby creek is lulling them both back toward sleep when startled by a raucous "cruck-cruck-cruck" echoing down the hollow.

"Dang, it gets light early up there," he groans as the white horse tethered to the outside of the lean-to cabin snuffles loudly. "Righto Ajax, might as well get going."

     Benny slips his buckskin hunting frock over linen undergarments in the semi-darkness. Skipping the usual stoking of the fire, he grabs a saddle stowed beside the stone chimney and begins loading it onto the old quarter horse. The coonhound has already sniffed out the clearing and is lapping from the creek as Benny stuffs the blanket into a saddlebag already loaded with hardtack, shot, and a clean pair of socks. He'll take his water from the streams he's planning to follow down into Kentucky.

     Slinging his long rifle over a shoulder, Benny hoists himself into the saddle and gives a squeeze with his heels to start the old stallion walking toward the creek. The dog is already running ahead as he reigns the horse toward the little path up to the waterfall where they follow the hound over to the red spot on a flat rock beside the pool. 

"Follow this trail," he commands, scratching the dried blood with a fingernail and reaching it up for Ajax to sniff the distinctive metallic scent.

     It had been a busy two weeks since Colonel Preston's first visit. Benny had kept the still running nearly continuously to fill the twenty cask order. His only breaks had been to negotiate with Tarleton's valet, trade puppies for barrels, and restock the cracked corn. The three members of the little cavalcade were equally excited to start the journey over the hill.

     Benny had been to the top of Clinch Mountain once before as a thirteen-year-old seeking the source of the creek he'd grown up beside. Imagining a mountaintop lake or gushing spring, he'd instead found that each successively smaller branch traced back to a trickle out of the hillside. There were hundreds of sources, and, slurping from one of them, Benny decided that most of life was like that. Each little moment confluenced into whatever would flow next.  

     In the current moment of swaying on a horse following a dog following a scent up a diminishing deer trail, Benny began to see that his father's death, childhood apprenticeship, mother's departure, and teen years of smithing and distilling had led him to this lonely sojourn to start his third decade of life. 

     "That might could show us the way," Benny calls out to the animals as the rim of a rising sun peaks the Blue Ridge. 

They've crossed the deciduous line into evergreen forest and are scaling pine needle strewn switchbacks up the steep trace. Cresting the ridge, they emerge into a narrow granite gap. 

"Hang on to your hats," he commands as a chilly wind comes racing through the rocks and they forge on.  

     Emerging from the gap and into the rolling hills of the north slope, they're stopped in their tracks by a tumbled mass of dark clouds roiling toward them. 

"Uh-oh mates," he exclaims as they're pelted by the first cold raindrops. 

He jumps down from the startled stallion and the old horse just turns her rump to the wind as man and dog scramble under a nearby rock ledge.

"So much for my blood trail," Benny sighs as the coonhound curls into a ball at his side to wait out the storm.