“I know.” Trader whacked the stake with growing frustration.
Cold fingers of water trickled down his ribs. Was it worth it? Snow Otter’s wife would have a smoky but warm fire going down in the village. He could imagine that baked whitefish melting on his tongue. This was crazy. What had prompted him to think he could dig his own copper anyway?
“I’m leaving,” Snow Otter said pointedly.
“Smart man,” Trader muttered, whacking the stake one last time.
The rock shifted enough to allow him to slip his fingers into the crack. Trader lifted, feeling stone slide on stone. He rolled the angular fragment to one side, staring at the backside of the rock as rain spattered it. The stone looked as if it were veined with fungus. Lines of green seemed to dive into the rock’s heart. Green. But not metallic.
You’re nothing. Just some bird. You lost it all, and you’ll never have anything again. Not a friend. Not a wife. Only a canoe, and whatever trinkets you can barter.
A memory flashed from deep down between Trader’s souls. He saw his brother Rattle’s eyes, the cunning and deceit turning to fear as Trader’s club whistled. He felt the anger surge within, a hot red Power, as he put his weight behind the blow. He remembered Rattle throwing himself backward in the vain attempt to save himself. Trader relived the instant that sharp stone ax had smashed into his brother’s head. He could still feel the blow that crushed Rattle’s skull, as if the memory was embedded in the bones and muscles of his arm.
I killed him. Became the man I swore I never would.
Trader blinked it away. He was once again standing head-deep in a mucky hole, wet, cold, and hopeless. Frustration made him lift the hammer high. The blow struck the center of the mottled green stone, the crack like thunder as the hammer head disintegrated into shards that spattered around the inside of the hole.
“Hey!” Snow Otter cried. “That’s my best mallet!”
Trader stared at the ruined maul, then at the cracked stone. With one hand he pulled a spalled section away and blinked. The color was unmistakable.
“You’re going to have to replace that!” Snow Owl insisted from above. “Good hammers like that are hard to come by. I spent days making sure that one was just right. It cradled in my hand like a fine woman. It had a special balance.”
Trader used a fragment of broken rock to crack off more waste stone.
“Why don’t I ever learn?” Snow Otter was saying to the falling rain. “Other people never treat your tools with the respect they should. What is it about these foreign Traders? Why do they flock to me with their destructive lunacy?”
Trader cradled his find as he looked up into the rain. “I get to keep it, right?”
“The broken hammer? It’s yours … as long as you find me one as good to replace it.”
“No, the copper,” Trader said. “The deal was that I got to keep all the copper that I dug up.”
“That was the deal before you ruined my hammer,” Snow Otter growled. “That’s why I brought you up here to this old hole. We’ve never dug anything but small …” He was squinting through the downpour. “What have you got there?” The metallic sheen from beneath couldn’t be anything but metal.
“Copper,” Trader said reverently. “And from the weight of this rock, a lot of it.”
Snow Owl forgot his deerhide cover and scrambled down into the narrow pit. He cocked his head, fingers running across the rain-spattered copper. His eyes widened with disbelief, words catching in his throat. “That’s worth a fortune!”
Trader stared at the gleaming metal, the cold rain forgotten. “Yes, I know.”
Two
The trail Old White followed up from the river wound through the trees, skirting ropy masses of vines that hung from the oak, beechnut, and maples. Overhead the branches intertwined to create a lacework of gray between him and the cloud-banked sky. Squirrels, those few that had avoided the stew pot, watched from heights beyond the range of a boy’s arrow. Fresh leaf mat carpeted the forest floor in light brown, draping logs too rotten for firewood. Every other stick of wood had been scrounged over the last couple of years for village fires.
Old White cocked his head and listened. The sounds of war were unmistakable. He’d heard them often enough through the years. He grunted under his breath and resumed his pace along the narrow forest path. He grimaced as a loud shriek carried on the north wind. Humans could be such noisy beasts. Only the herons on their migrations, and the geese passing overhead, made such a racket.
He had seen at least fifty-some winters pass. But, truth to tell, he’d lost count some years back. It didn’t seem to matter much, given the places he had been, the things he had seen. A man could have too many memories. Fact was, he had accumulated more than any man he had ever known. So many trails had passed beneath his feet during his wanderings. And with his death, the sights, sounds, faces, and places would vanish.