Mica Bird stopped, panting, sweat glistening on his brown skin. Overhead, the leafy canopy of the forest interlaced in an emerald miracle; but in this place, where he paused to catch his breath, Mica Bird stood like a wraith in the brooding shadows.
Here, so far into the hills, the oak, hickory, maple, and walnut giants prevailed. He placed a hand on the smooth, silvery bark of a beech, sensing the eternal Power of the ancient tree.
The humid air pressed around him, breathlessly hot, even for this time of deep summer. Though he gasped, the air seemed to offer no relief for his laboring lungs. An earth oven might have been this searing, this miserable.
High overhead, birds chirped and called. The trill of a redstart carried magically. In the distance, the sacred crow cawed and clucked.
Late at night, they had been in the clan house. Mica Bird remembered Grandfather’s rasping words: “I thought it was cy-rious that his people hadn’t buried this dead man. That they had just left him sitting there. I stepped under the overhang, looking at the moss that hung down. Not a blade of grass grew in that place of darkness. It was cold—even in the summer heat.
My heart beat with fear. Perhaps he had called me, sent his ghost to bother my Dreams.”
At the sudden scurry of sound, Mica Bird wheeled, frantically fumbling to nock a dart in the hook of his atlatl, then saw the gray squirrel that seemed to defy earth as it leaped up a dead sapling, jumped to a branch, and shot across open air to reach another tree.
Mica Bird wiped the beading sweat from his forehead with a trembling hand. This wasn’t his country, this land of the High Heads. Here, he was unwelcome—an intruder in this ominous forest.
This place had a strange feel, unlike the rich bottomlands he knew so well. From childhood, he had learned the winding trails that led along the sluggish waters of the Moonshell River. In those familiar haunts, the ghosts of the ancestors watched over their clansmen. At any one of the farmsteads in the Moonshell valley, he could trace a relationship—sometimes back four tens of generations—and claim kinship.
In this forest, people did not live. On steep slopes such as these, fields couldn’t be cleared; the land wouldn’t produce rich harvests of goosefoot, sunflower, marsh elder, or squash. This place the High Heads kept to themselves, calling it sacred ground.
People traveled the forests, of course, but generally to hunt, or to collect walnuts, acorns, plums, or medicinal plants. In times of war, the clans fled to hilltop fortifications. This mountain, however, remained inviolate; even the High Heads avoided it.
But Grandfather had come here, and so many years later, he’d told Mica Bird: ‘ ‘ fabric bag lay beside the dead man, and I could tell that it was something important, something precious.
The corpse seemed to look at me, pleading. I felt that pleading, even though the eyes were gone—all shrunk away into pits in the skull. Its jaw had dropped open, as if crying out in death.
“One dried-out hand, like a claw, you know? It lay on that bag. I thought the bag must hold something very valuable.”
In the clan-house firelight, Grandfather had looked away, seeing back into the past—into that rock shelter.
Barely twenty winters in age, Mica Bird had grown wiry and tall. As the son of an important man in the clan, his forehead had been tattooed with a black stripe, which accented the firm lines of his jaw and his broad, straight nose. Normally, a serious intent filled his dark brown eyes, but here, in this haunting place, fear glinted instead.
He traveled light, wearing only moccasins and a breechcloth.
A mica pendant hung from a leather thong around his neck. His small pack, made from thick strands of double-twisted cord, hung over one shoulder. In his right hand he carried the atlatl, a supple stick a little longer than his forearm. The grip had been carved from the main beam of a whitetailed deer antler. A small black stone carved into the shape of a crow had been lashed to the center of the shaft to act as a counterweight. Finally, a bone hook capped the end.
In his other hand he carried four war darts, each longer than he was tall. A crudely flaked point of black chert tipped each thin shaft, crafted from the arrowwood plant. Turkey feathers fletched the shaft and kept it stable in flight. The butt had been hollowed to fit into the hook at the end of the atlatl.
The atlatl itself acted as an extension of the arm. With it, Mica Bird could catapult one of the darts with enough force to drive it the complete length of a bear’s body—as he had proven in the past.
A bear would be easy to deal with compared to the strangeness of this unfamiliar forest. He sensed a presence far more ominous lurking in this shadow-dappled wilderness.
Skin prickled on his neck the way it would if unseen eyes were watching. Ghosts? Is that why the High Heads feared this place so much? Feverish winds brushed his bare chest, and he spun around, searching. The presence seemed to pulse with the wet heat, studying, gauging.