LITMIR.BIZ

      3

      I awoke to the screams of quarreling blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata) and the scratching of squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) as they scurried over the roof. I realized at once, and to my horror, where I was. Bessie snuggled beside me. She stirred, lifted her frightful visage, and tenderly whistled words that, after lengthy cogitation, I made out to be “good morning, sweetheart.” My heart swam amongst my liver and lights.

      “Be kind, my pet, and untie these bonds,” said I cajolingly. She stuffed the rag back in my mouth and had her wicked way with me again, under the steamy bearskin robe. The human mind is a curious engine, for in her repeated, furious assaults I began to imagine that I was at the mercy of a gigantic rabbit. The delusion was, I regret to confess, not wholly unpleasant, for, as rabbits go, she would have made an handsome one. Far into age, the mere sight of Lepus americanus browsing on a greensward has prompted in me a shameful excitation.

      Soon voices were audible below and the cottage filled with the aroma of boiled coffee. Bessie loosed my bonds, put on one of her tattered dresses, and departed down the ladder. I waited what I hoped would seem a decent interval, and went down myself. Bilbo was fussing at the fireside. The doors and windows were flung open. Outside it was a beautiful spring day, the woods ringing with birdsong. Uncle sat grumpily at the dining table.

      Bilbo, for his part, had awakened in spirits exceedingly buoyant. With a breakfast of venison chops and biscuits drenched in molasses, he pored over the map President Jefferson had given us.

      “Hmmmmm. Ahhhhh. Ummmmm.”

      He decided at length, on the basis of my prevarications, that we should embark down the Ohio thirty leagues, turn north up the Dismal River, now called the Scioto, into the country of the Shannoah, and there search around the vicinity of that wilderness footpath known as Zane’s Trace for the fountain of youth. I assured him that I would recognize the spot when we arrived nearby.

      It was midmorning when we had reloaded our keelboat with many of the supplies lately pillaged by our business partner. It was Bilbo’s idea to drain the cask of Monongahela into our specimen jars.

      “We shall be needing both whiskey and jars,” he reasoned, “and by the time we have drained all these vessels of whiskey, we shall have reached our grail of fortune, so to speak, and the bottles will be ready to receive that stronger liquor that shall be the wonder and benefactor of all mankind.”

      By noon, we were ready to go. Bilbo stood on the silty beach facing his stolid little cottage in the verdure. He called to those two oddities of nature who constituted his kith and kin, put one prehensile arm around his daughter’s shoulder, placed his other hands [O3]upon the dwarf’s black-curled head, and bid adieu to that little island haven that had been his home in the wilderness lo these many years. Uncle and I stood mutely aside whilst the trio had their little ceremony, Bilbo himself weeping great drafts of parting tears. It was a very affecting scene—until one remembered that his happiness had been purchased at the expense of Lord knows how many waylaid innocents, such as ourselves. In any case, he evidently did not expect to return. The formality concluded, we waded out to Megatherium, cast off our lines, hoisted the anchor, and poled out into the current.

      Captive or not, it buoyed my heart to be back out upon the mainstream, floating swiftly under a fleece-dotted sky, amid the teeming waterfowls and stately vistas of the hills clothed with infinite thick woods. We had not been on the river two hours when what would we spy at the head of an island but a family of five signaling distress from the prow of a half-submerged flatboat.

      “Why, boil me in bear piss!” Bilbo cried with equal parts delight and affront. “Look what’s doing over on Cathead Island. Nowadays I guess everyone wants to go freebooting it. Ain’t that so, Neddy?”

      “Arrruk arrruk!” Neddy replied.

      Bilbo drew his pistol and sent a ball whistling over the family’s heads. The quintet leaped for their lives into the river, while Bilbo reloaded. The current carried us closer. Unlike Bilbo’s trap of a derelict, this craft showed no saplings sprouting in the deck, nor moss grown upon the gunwales. Bilbo gleefully discharged shot after shot, as fast as he could reload, blowing huge splinters out of the hull while the family remained hidden. We never did learn whether they were troubled pilgrims, or trouble incarnate, as we had lately met to our continuing woe.

      At twilight, we turned our craft into one of the innumerable coves that scallop the river’s banks, and in a fine grove of ancient walnut trees (Juglans nigra) and pin oak (Quercus phellos) we made our camp for the night. We were gathered ’round the fire enjoying a ragout of opossum (Didelphus viginiana), procured by Neddy in his mysterious fashion, when a brisk wind very suddenly arose out of the north, rattling the treetops and causing their swaying trunks to groan ominously, like the ancient druidical spirits we read about in the chronicles of Ossian. It sent a chill through all of us, including especially that poltroon, Bilbo, who halted yet another implausible braggadocio of his youthful exploits—this one placing him on the high seas as gunnery officer to none other than John Paul Jones.

      “A spring zephyr, heh heh,” he remarked unconvincingly.

      We resumed eating. A minute later something rustled the laurels at the penumbra of our firelight. Neddy growled. Bilbo drew his pistol.

      “Indians …?” I wondered aloud.

      “W-w-w-who g-g-goes there?” Bilbo called out.

      In the next instant, a figure flew out of the shrubbery with all the faultless physical grace of an acrobat. He turned an handspring, vaulted the campfire, caracoled swiftly around, performed several cartwheels, and finally leaped atop the sturdy overhanging bough of an oak. Doffing his skunkskin hat, he bowed. Our company could only gaze up at him in utter thrall.

      The figure on the limb rose from his bow. Dressed in a fringed, snow-white doeskin tunic with lapis-colored beadwork sewn at the yoke and matching leggings, he was a lean and muscular white man in the prime of life. His hair, worn shoulder length in the frontier fashion, hung in golden curls. In the flaring firelight it glittered almost like precious metal. His face, with its solid, clefted jaw, its sparkling, even rows of pearly teeth, aquiline nose as straight as a splitter’s froe, wide, noble brow, and lustrous blue eyes, was the embodiment of those qualities we Americans idealize as the essence of manhood.

      “Good evening, gentlemen,” he declared in a ringing, virile baritone. “And madam,” he added upon ascertaining with some difficulty the sex of Bessie, who had been wrapped against the chill in a blanket. “How fortunate to meet a party of my countrymen ’round the cheering campfire this fine night.” He struck an attitude out upon the limb, hand on hip, jaw stuck out, Kentucky rifle held akimbo. His posturing reminded me of the tableaux vivants of the New York theaters.

      Uncle gazed at him as an old owl might regard some passing curiosity of the forest. Bilbo looked up with undisguised suspicion. Neddy growled lowly. It was impossible to interpret the look on Bessie’s face other than that of an hare stunned by the light of a poacher’s lamp.

      “W-w-who are you, stranger?” Bilbo inquired timidly. The intruder struck a new pose. I was amazed that he could balance himself so easily upon the limb with nothing to hold on to.

      “Who am I?” the stranger echoed him and struck yet a new attitude, one of self-bemused incredulity. “Some call me Pathfinder. Some call me Deerslayer. Others know me as Natty-o’-the-wilds. The Injun calls me O-wari-aka Yunno-kwat-haw.”

      “’Tis Tuscarora,” Uncle explained aside, while our visitor struck new tableaux.

      “What’s it mean?” Bilbo asked.

      “The rough translation would be White Buffalo Mystery Man,” Uncle said.

      “What shall we call you?” I inquired.

      “You may call me …” he paused portentously, “… Woodsman.” His face lit up in an immense smile of satisfaction. With that, he leaped acrobatically from

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