“To whom?”
“She made me pledge not to reveal that.”
“Then what was the message?”
“I don’t know what it meant. There were no words, no writing.” Zettlemeyer sank his head into his hands a moment. “A pouch. Inside were a claw, a bear claw with little red feathers tied around it. At the bottom were a dozen purple beads.” He looked up, searched Duncan’s face. “You are the Ramsey tutor. Explain the catastrophe that comes.”
“Huron raiders. Lord Ramsey. Major Pike,” Duncan said. “We are rich in catastrophes about to break upon us.” He felt the Moravian’s gaze again. “I don’t know. Evering was murdered before he could speak with me.”
They sat in the cool stillness, gazing at the stars.
“My son leaves soon to bring back more settlers,” Zettlemeyer said at last. “He has a grand speech about property and land ownership. I told him I cannot go because of my health, but the truth is I cannot go because I don’t know what to tell them about this place, about how a good Christian goes about taming the wilderness.”
“Do you fear the wilderness?”
“We’d be fools not to. Most nights one of the children wakes up screaming from nightmares about Indian attacks. But that’s only a part of it.” The missionary went silent again. “You think you bring your old identity with you when you come as a settler,” he began at last, “your culture, your values, your knowledge of what it means to be human. But when you settle onto the new land, you soon learn that all that is gone. You are naked. You have nothing of the Old World to rely on. There is only what is in here-” Zettlemeyer tapped his chest, “and what is out there.” He gestured toward the forest. “When I first came, I met an old Indian named Conawago. I said, ‘this is Eden.’ In reply he said, ‘Yes, except it is the eighteenth century.’” The German fell silent again.
“This is God’s great experiment on earth,” he continued. “Here He reduces everyone to a common denominator, to see how they start over. And there are others who have pursued a spiritual life in the forest far longer than we have.” He ended with an unexpected motion, two fingers extended, spiraling upward. Duncan had seen it before.
“Is it something about the heavens, Reverend, that sign?”
“They use many names. The Great Spirit. The Guardian of the Forest. Most of the old ones just call it the Great Mystery.”
Duncan considered the Moravian’s words as they gazed at the stars. “Are you saying, Reverend, you have lost your appetite for converting the Indians?”
Zettlemeyer seemed to struggle to get his response out. “I am only asking the question. What if our spirits are blinded by what we bring from across the ocean?”
A shiver ran down Duncan’s spine. “Why do you say these things to me?” Something small in the forest began screeching in terror, its cries gradually subsiding as it died.
“Because I am the one who betrayed the ghostwalkers,” Zettlemeyer blurted out in an anguished tone. “The price for doing so has been far heavier than I expected.”
“But they were captured by soldiers.”
“The three asked me to release them. I refused, for the good of their souls. I kept Sarah Ramsey locked in a room until she could be safely conveyed to New York.”
There was more, Duncan sensed. The missionary still was not telling him what weighed most heavy on his heart. “You visited Edentown last week,” he ventured.
Zettlemeyer sighed heavily. “We had nothing, hardly enough to feed ourselves, no hope of anything so costly as an iron furnace.”
Gradually Duncan fit the pieces together. “There was a reward paid by Lord Ramsey,” he concluded.
The Moravian’s head moved up and down in the moonlight. “A wagonload of food at the start of the winter. It was a great blessing. We gave thanks to Ramsey in our prayers. But I did not understand something about Ramsey.”
“A man like Ramsey,” Duncan suggested, “doesn’t pay rewards. He pays retainers.”
“Crates of Bibles. The equipment to build the furnace. More cases of Bibles, even copies of the Greek philosophers.”
“Money for transport of new settlers,” Duncan said.
“Even our bishop prays for Ramsey now. And I get letters from Edentown asking about things.”
“Things?”
“How many Indians have we baptized. How many Indian children in our school. Send the last known location of the shaman Tashgua. Make two maps of the location of all the settlers’ farms we know of. It doesn’t seem like much, does it? Ramsey sent me a passage from the Old Testament about how true believers must destroy the temples of the idolators. When he was here two days ago, Reverend Arnold announced that the hand of God soon will make a fist.”
The words left a smell in the air, like the smell after a lightning strike.
“Once every few days I see a huge bear at the edge of the fields, by the northern trail,” Zettlemeyer said in a thin, weary voice. “Sometimes it brings the body of something to eat there. It eats, then it sits and watches us. I couldn’t bear to tell Sarah about my dreams when she asked. I often wake in cold sweats, my heart pounding from a dream in which I find the bear sitting at our hearth in a chair, reading our Bible.
Duncan did not respond, in that moment did not believe himself capable of responding. The old Moravian began whispering a prayer, in German. Duncan studied the thousand stars overhead. When he looked back down, Zettlemeyer was gone.
He retrieved his pack from the shadows by the furnace and found his way to the cow shed, then located the small, slender form lying against the slumbering ox and settled onto the straw-covered earth beside the boy, pulling straw over them both. He listened for a long time to the strangely harmonized breathing of the two creatures.
“Alex,” he whispered at last, “I know not how to reach you when you are awake. But my grandfather taught me there are parts of us that listen while we sleep.” The breathing of the ox seemed to grow in volume, the great hairy back heaving up and down.
“My name is Duncan McCallum,” he began. “And I live between worlds, as you do.” After these first difficult words, the others came out with surprising ease. He explained how he had been arrested and transported, how he had met Adam Munroe, how Adam had died, then spoke of Reverend Arnold and Ramsey and Pike and Woolford. In a lower voice he spoke of Sarah’s kidnapping, and of Conawago and the ruined Indian graveyard where he had left him. “There are questions left by the dead, Alex, which will never be answered unless you and I help.”
When he finally fell silent, the ox turned its great head toward him, as if it had been listening and knew that Duncan had left something out. After a moment he whispered his final, brittle confession. “I built a dream around finding my brother, and all the while he has wanted me dead.” When he settled back onto the straw, he realized his hand had closed around the stone bear, his fingers rubbing the head. So often it had done so in the past weeks, it had become something of a reflex.
He rose before dawn, when he could still fix the North Star, and quietly slipped out of the shed, after piling added straw over the sleeping boy, pausing to touch the crown of the ox, who watched him intently, and pausing again with a grateful grin when he found a pouch of food lying on top of his pack. Five minutes later, on the far side of the fields, he halted. Someone had lit a small fire at the head of the trail to the north. Looking about for a sign of the Moravians, he warily advanced and was almost upon the fire when he glanced down and froze. It was a small mound of tobacco leaves, carefully laid over burning coals. He gasped in alarm as a hand closed around his shoulder from the back. His assailant did not speak, and was already returning his war club to his belt as Duncan turned to face him.
“Conawago!” Duncan exclaimed.