The Eden Hunter. Skip Horack

his tongue and pointed. “Look there,” he said.

      Kau followed his gaze and in the fading light he saw a spotted fawn walking alone in the oak grove, cold-trailing its dead mother through the leaves. The fawn trotted into the camp like a pet goat, then began to nuzzle the wet doe hide that lay crumpled nearby.

      “Sad,” said Little Horn.

      Morning Star threw a coiled length of rope to Blood Girl, and she tied the confused fawn’s leg to a sapling. She walked back to Morning Star, and the fawn folded itself atop the comforting deerskin.

      Kau looked across the fire at Little Horn. “If there had been a child with me, would you have killed him?”

      Little Horn bounced the deer heart over the flames. “What kind of child?”

      “A white child. A boy.”

      “A baby white child?”

      “No.”

      “How big?”

      Kau placed the flat of his hand two widths higher than his own head.

      Little Horn laughed and the fawn’s head lifted at the sound. “That is no child,” he said.

      HE SAT UP that night watching the caught fawn sleep, wondering whether the creature knew that its mother was dead, whether the little deer realized that it was only waiting for the moment of its own slaughter. Morning Star was tossing through a nightmare, and Kau saw him shiver and then kick at the ground. The fawn awoke with big blinking eyes and though Kau considered slipping its noose he knew that there was no point, that tether or no tether it would never leave this place that smelled of its mother.

      MORNING. THE REDSTICKS woke late and lazed in the camp eating venison and passing pipefuls of tobacco cut with sumac. The deer meat had begun to ripen in the sun, so a rack was fashioned from green limbs. The hungry fawn went to bleating as they smoked the remains of the doe, and its cries brought a horned owl swooping like some gigantic bat. The owl settled into an oak, watching the fawn until the owl itself was spotted by a crow, and then these ancient enemies fought in the treetops like courting dragonflies until more crows came calling and at last the day-roving owl was chased off.

      The redsticks watched all of this and after a while even they could no longer bear the cries of the starving fawn. Morning Star whispered to Blood Girl and then handed her his ball-headed club. The fawn cowered as she walked toward it.

      THAT NIGHT THE three redsticks planned their next raid while the skewered fawn cooked on a crooked length of dogwood that had been stripped of its bark. He listened to them plot. A company of thieves was living in a cave back across the border, not far from the federal road. The redsticks would kill these highwaymen and ride to Pensacola, buy weapons and supplies from the Spanish and then fall in with the other redsticks—those who had already fled deeper into Florida. Little Horn bit at his fingernail. “We will find them and together we will fight a running war. I have learned from our mistake at Horseshoe Bend.”

      Kau watched the eyeball of the skinned fawn begin to bulge and then split from the heat of the embers. He sat up on his horse blanket and the redsticks looked at him. He was thinking that maybe there was another lesson to be learned that day at Horseshoe Bend. “What if the Americans cannot be defeated?” he asked.

      Little Horn leaned closer to the red coals, and his flat skull-face gleamed in the firelight. After a long while he spoke. “Your tribe must have been a very peaceful one,” he said.

      Kau nodded. “We had no enemies,” he said quietly. “Not until the end.”

       III

       The Ota and the Kesa

      NO ENEMIES UNTIL the end.

      The redsticks pressed him on this comment but he gave no answers. The entire truth was that he had brought those enemies and that end, same as he had brought about the death of Benjamin, the torture of Samuel. The fawn was pulled from the fire and consumed, and as the night wore on the redsticks finally left him alone save Morning Star. The prophet rose up from beside Blood Girl and went to sit with him. At first Kau was nervous but then he relaxed. He stared at the fire and thought of his lost home, of an emerald forest cut by swift rivers.

      THOUGH HE AND his band of Ota roamed the forest like bees, they seldom strayed very far from the Kesa settlement of Opoku, trading wild meat and wild honey for the vegetables and fruits of the village fields. The Ota and the Kesa were separate, but they were also the same in that each depended upon the other for their survival—still, while the Kesa viewed the Ota as something like allies, they did not consider the tiny forest people to be their equals. And for their part, Kau and his tribesmen, they too were not without arrogance.

      But the arrogance of the Ota was akin to the quiet satisfaction of a spy who continues to escape detection. Moving among the Kesa, the Ota were shy and deferential because an Ota is a mimic. What he knows of survival is learned in the forest and—just as a stalking Ota huntsman copies the bark of duiker, the chatter of monkeys—the Ota long ago traded their own language for that of the Kesa, doing what they must to gain access to that village world of plenty they had grown to covet. Only when the Ota were alone in the forest was their true nature revealed. Here, with the last remnants of their dying language, they described those things for which the Kesa had no words or understanding. And they mocked the villagers, a superstitious people who presumed evil spirits and witchcraft to be the cause of every ill.

      The villagers’ fear of the forest was above all a confusion to the Ota, as the Ota trusted in the forest. The Ota saw the forest as benevolent and kind and believed that when there was a hardship it was only because their guardian had fallen into a slumber. During these bad times the Ota would send for the sacred molimo that they kept hidden high in a treetop, and with this wooden trumpet they would call out to the forest so that it would then awake and continue to protect them. There would be singing and dancing, a celebration of the happiness soon to return.

      OCCASIONALLY IN THE long history of their association, the condescension of the Kesa and the deception of the Ota caused minor clashings between the two peoples. Insignificant disagreements and confrontations that were always soon resolved.

      But then one day Kau’s wife was caught foraging in the village cassava fields. Her name was Janeti, and she was the mother of their young daughter Tufu, their infant son Abeki.

      The farmer who seized Janeti had long desired her from afar—as it was a fact that most Kesa men found the small and cheerful Ota women to be more attractive than the sullen females from the village. And with her shiny skin and wide hips Janeti was even prettier than most. The farmer wrestled her to the ground and then clamped his hand over her dark lips. Janeti’s barkcloth fell away, and when she returned to the Ota camp that evening she was dirt-caked and crying and bruised. There was outrage among the Ota, and though they were not warriors some of the younger men took up their hunting bows and threatened to attack the village of Opoku. Kau himself was leaving the camp when his mother and his wife locked their arms around his leg. At last his father intervened, asking that the elders be allowed to speak. The women and children withdrew to their leaf huts, and the men held council until a consensus was reached. Because it was the Ota way, they would make a bid for peace—the Kesa would be given the opportunity to punish this farmer themselves.

      And so the next day Kau went to Opoku and requested an audience with the Kesa chief, a massive man named Chabo. The chief had a leopard skin draped across his broad shoulders and wore a necklace of sun-bleached cowrie shells. He listened in his hut to the grievance, and then the farmer was sent for.

      The farmer was an honest man, and when Chabo repeated Kau’s accusations he admitted to the rape. “But it was justified,” said the farmer. “Who knows how long that woman has been taking from me? How much I have lost because of her? How much food has been stolen from the mouths of my family?”

      “But what of my wife?” said Kau. “What of my wife?”

      The farmer looked to Chabo, then punched