Devil Tree

Prologue

Prologue

SOME JOURNEYS WERE like rivers. You dropped your canoe into the current and hung on hard while the go just took you. Some were like oceans – deep, wide and hard to figure. Those journeys were the ones you navigated by skill and dead reckoning.

And if you reckoned wrong you’d most likely wind up dead.

Abraham Golightly had hanged a man once. The truth was, the man had needed hanging more badly than most, but on some nights he saw those feet kicking at death, tree-high and a long way down.

Abraham had traveled through deep wide country for the last two weeks, riding up alongside of the Greensnake River, breaking ground for an impending invasion of immigrants. He had trapped and scouted these parts for most of his life. He thought he had seen everything there was to see.

Not hardly.

Not yet.

“What is up ahead, Abraham?” Wilson asked.

Wilson was a greenhorn who had his hand poked snugly in several pairs of deep-pocketed green-lined breeches. Bluntly put, the man had money. He knew many friends – fat sleek European bankers who dreamed in dollar signs and strong black ink.

Wilson had hired Abraham Golightly to scout a route along the Greensnake. Wilson had a dream. He wanted to run a trade route straight through, funneling the where-with-alls that travelers would need to survive and shipping out the meat and fish and the green that run through this land.

Wilson’s plan struck Abraham as a damn fool scheme but Wilson had those infernal deep pockets and did not hurt to draw from that well.

We all get thirsty in our own kind of style.

“Yonder,” Abraham said. “What’s up ahead is Yonder Country. Places you ain’t seen or been. That is all I can tell you. This country grows awful thick, awful fast. No map that is ever been scribbled can hope to keep up.”

Wilson fixed Abraham with a scowl and a glare like a burning glass. Deep pockets or not, old Wilson did not grow much of a sense of humor.

“Come on,” Abraham barked. “Keep up.”

Abraham Golightly had decided some time back that Wilson was nothing more than an ambitious flatlander. Ambition got a person only so far out here, but common sense traveled a whole lot further.

Two Bear and Rabbit Eye were up ahead, scouting the territory while Abraham and Wilson followed behind, riding with the remuda of packhorses. Two Bear and Rabbit Eye were damn fine scouts. They knew the territory better than either white man. If there were trouble up ahead, those two would find it out and fire it up.

Abraham had been feeling a keening yearnfulness pulling at his heart like an arrowhead of geese flying south for the winter. He did not know how to put it into words. He heard something calling to him, just up ahead.

Abraham had felt the same sort of feeling six years back when a pack of Crow hankered after his pony and everything it carried – him included. It came down to shoot or sink and Abraham shot dead straight.

Only this was a different kind of feeling.

“I feel an itch,” he told Wilson. “Only I don’t quite know how to go about scratching it.”

“Are you expecting trouble?”

“I am looking for it,” Golightly answered. “So far I see nary a sign but this rabbity jumped-up feeling just won’t leave me be.”

The scouts, Two Bear and Rabbit Eye rode up. Two Bear was a grinner. He usually had a joke of some sort but there was nothing funny in the look he threw. Rabbit Eye was the quiet one, a deep kind of thinker, and he looked worse.

“Trouble ahead, Golightly,” Two Bear signed. “You come. You see.”

Rabbit Eye still did not say a word.

Abraham went on up over the hill, following a trail that broke through the dirt like some kind of running snake, all twisty and elusive. He rode up from the river to the top of a ridge and looked down into a deep serving bowl of a valley.

He smelled ashes and age wafting up from the valley’s gut. Old foul ashes. Something dark had burned down in the heart of this valley. Something that ought to stay dead – but hadn’t learned how.

“Should we go down there?” Wilson asked.

Abraham Golightly did not want to ride into this valley but Two Bear would not hear of it.

“You come,” he signed again. “You see.”

“Waugh,” Abraham growled in assent and rode on down.

The sun climbed a notch into the sky and hid itself behind a cloud like it did not want to see what the men were up to down in the belly of the uncharted valley. The valley reeked of old growth, pine and fungus and dry rot and death. It stank, like riding into the mouth of an unkempt graveyard.

In the valley’s heart Abraham saw a ring of ashes at least a couple of furlongs in go-round. His pony reared at the edge of the ashes and refused to enter. Abraham did not blame it one bit.

“You stay here with the horses,” he said to Wilson.

He looked at Rabbit Eye who was quiet at the best of times but could keep a straight barrel and shoot for center when the going got harder than it ought to be. Abraham could tell by the tight lines around Rabbit Eye’s mouth and the glazed ice-on-granite stare that the Indian might turn and run if they pushed him any further.

“Rabbit Eye, you stay with Wilson.”

Abraham looked at Two Bear.

“We go?” Abraham asked.

Two Bear nodded. The two men walked on out into the circle of ashes. Abraham did not rightly know what he figured on finding but he had the feeling there was something out there waiting. There was something here he needed to see. The sun beat down as hard and steady as a meat maul. Abraham could not hear a bird or a cricket singing.

There was something about the silence that bothered him.

The fact was he had never heard woods so damn quiet as this one.

The fact was the silence kind of scared him.

But he walked right on out into the heart of the blackened clearing and that is where he found the baby.

The baby and the tree.