We are young, and the fires within us burn bright.
All the world lies before us and nothing is too great to be done, no challenge too awesome.
Then suddenly the days are no more, the years are gone, and the time that remains is little, indeed.
Kin has grown tall, as fine a woodsman as I know, and as good a man. Brian is the thoughtful one. Each book I have he has read and reread, and soon, I know, he will go from me to a wider world. Regret is in me that he would leave, yet happiness, too, for he has his own life before him in a bigger world if not a better one.
Yance? What shall I say of Yance? His heart is pure, his strength the greatest of them all, I think. Yance is strong, he is rough, he is always wrestling, fighting, climbing, doing, changing.
He is a good son, faithful to his mother and to me. To his brothers, he is loyal. Yet he acts before he thinks. He is a bundle of muscle and impulse, a swift runner, a dead shot with any weapon, and a dangerous man because of it.
He listens when I speak, and he obeys. Yet sometimes he acts before I have a time to speak.
And then there is Jublain ... named for my old friend but called Jubal.
He is the truly quiet one. A ghost in the woods, he moves like a shadow, and lives much with the Indians. He is gone for weeks, then comes and squats against the wall and listens to the talk and is gone again.
To me he gives love and respect, to his mother, adoration, and that is as I would have it.
We none of us know how far he has gone or what he has seen, for he rarely speaks of it. Sometimes stories come to us ... an Indian from the west once came among us, looking for him. Jubal had been gone for weeks, and the Indian told us by sign language that Jubal had been far beyond the great river that divides the country in two ... we had not known that.
Kin has no wife, nor has Brian or Jubal. Yance does, of course. He went far to the north last year and came upon a colony that had settled there several years before. For days he scouted about, watching the people go about their work. He had done the same at Jamestown when he grew old enough to go so far from home, for Raleigh had at last planted his colony and my boys used to go down to the place where they were and lie in the woods and watch them to see how they lived.
Yance had done the same at the place in the north, the place they were calling "New England."
That group landed in 1620 ... thirteen years after the Virginia colony was finally established at Jamestown. Yance had been curious, as were all the boys, for the tales they heard from their mother and me, as well as the others of our group, were not enough. Only Yance went so far north.
He usually went alone or with a Catawba or two. He had gone several times with their war parties against the Iroquois or the Cherokee ... with whom, in fact, the Catawba were often friendly.
Yance found the place called New England, already scattering out from the original settlement. He went into the village bringing meat. My boys always brought meat when they went anywhere, including their home.
He made friends, for he was genial, agreeable, and a hard worker, but for them he was too filled with good spirits, too energetic, and not Godfearing enough in their way. So one day when he had offended they put him in the stocks. It took nine men to do it, but they did it.
Only that night a girl stole her father's key and came down and set him free. He built a careful fire against the stocks and burned them down, but by the time the fire was discovered Yance was in the hills, and being Yance, he took the girl with him, and she, being the kind of a girl he would choose, came willingly.
Oh, she was a lovely one! Gay, filled with good spirits, singing always ... and not always hymns, for she took readily to our wild English ballads of lost loves, highwaymen, and the fairs.
For we sang much in our hills, the gypsy songs, the Scotch Highland songs, the Irish songs.
There was always the fighting, for the Indians came against us, and no morning sun arose without its risk, no day in the field without its danger.
The Catawbas were firmly our friends as they were to be the friends of the white man always. As warriors came from afar, hoping to kill a Catawba and have the scalp to boast of in the villages, so they came to fight us also as our name grew.
We were fighters all. John Quill, who had made his great defense of the fort after the death of Slater, was remembered by our enemies, for they gloried in the strength of any fighting man, enemy or friend.
But time has a way of stealing strength from a man, and even before that, his swiftness and agility. One day they came upon Glasco, working at his forge.
The boys were off hunting. I with my wife and our new daughter was at the river ... only Tim Glasco was there. Usually an uncommonly wary man, that time he was not wary enough, and they came very close. He heard them, got off a quick shot and laid about him with his hammer and tongs.
They got an arrow into him, but he did not drop. They rushed him, and he swept two of them, right and left, into the dust. One went down from the red-hot tongs, another from a freshly sharpened spit for roasting meat.
Still they came, and they killed him.
We heard the shot from afar-Wa-ga-su, Pim Burke, and I, leaving Kane O'Hara with the women.
Too late. Glasco was down and his scalp taken. He was not quite dead, and somewhere he had picked up some Indian thoughts. "Get them," he whispered hoarsely, "and my hair back. I'll have my own hair upon my head when I cross the divide."
With Jeremy, Pim, and Kane O'Hara we set out after them, and we fled them down the nights and down the days, and across the rivers that men had given names, over the Broad and the Wateree, across Rocky River and Coldwater Creek to a skirmish on Long Creek, and then on to the Yadkin.
Suddenly, on the Yadkin, they turned to fight, and outnumbered we were, but better shots. And two warriors died and lost their hair before we moved again.
Through the woods and across the savannas, through blackberry patch and under the hickory trees, and suddenly before us we heard a burst of firing, and then another, and we closed in swiftly to see the Senecas trapped in a bend of Lick Fork of the Dan. We saw one man down in the water, another trying to crawl a bank in a trail of blood, and we closed in swiftly.
From the bank beyond, a huge warrior suddenly stood up and shouted a challenge, and from the brush leaped Yance. He rushed forward, knife in hand, and the two met there in the open glade in a fierce and desperate fight. The big Indian threw his tomahawk. It caught Yance on the shoulder and the big Indian went in as Yance started to fall. But as the Indian charged, Yance kicked up both feet and boosted the Indian clear over his head. Then, swift as a striking snake, Yance turned on him and buried a knife in his chest.
The Catawbas, who ran the war trail with us, took many a scalp that day, and evened the score for their own people slain. And when the scalps were taken, we turned our backs and started slowly home.
My sons had been hunting the Blue Ridge, looking for caves of which we had heard, caves in which white men were said to be buried ... men from some long-ago time before the beginning of years.
An Eno found them there and told of the war party of Senecas heading south upon a raid, and so they had come down from the high-up hills, too late to help defend our settlement, but in time to intercept the Senecas' return.
From far away they had heard shooting, then saw the Senecas coming across a savanna, and moved to meet them on Lick Fork.
Yet when we returned, Glasco was dead, only hours before.
"I wish he could have known," I said. "We brought back his hair."
"He knew," Lila said. "I told him. For I saw it as in a dream, saw Yance come charging with a knife in his hand, saw blood upon his shoulder, saw him go down, then come up and turn, and saw his shoulder move."