“Not even the Dakwa,” suggested Cobbett.
“Especially not the Dakwa. It’s too smart to be hooked.”
“And you believe in it,” said Cobbett.
“Sure enough I believe in it. I’ve seen it again and again, just an ugly hunch of it in the water out there. I’ve heard it humming.”
“So that’s what I heard,” said Cobbett.
“Yes, that’s what. And once, the last time I’ve ever been out in the boat at night, it shoved against the boat and damn near turned it over with me. You’d better believe in it yourself, the way it rasped your skin like that.”
Cobbett went over to the bookshelf and studied the titles. He took down Thompson’s Mysteries and Secrets of Magic and leafed through the index pages.
“You won’t read about it in there,” Lamar told him sourly. “That’s only about old-world witches and devils, with amulets and charms against them, and all the names of God to defeat them. The Dakwa doesn’t believe in God. It’s an Indian thing—Cherokee. Something else has to go to work against it. That’s why I wanted those books, hoping to find something in them. They’re the only published notices of the Dakwa.”
Cobbett slid Thompson’s volume back into place and went to the door and opened it.
“You fixing to do something foolish?” grumbled Lamar.
“No, nothing foolish if I can help it,” Cobbett assured him. “I just thought I’d go and look at the stars before bedtime.”
He stepped across the threshold log into grass. Dew splashed his bare feet. He paced to the dock and gazed up at the moon, a great pallid blotch of radiance. Gazing, he heard something again.
Music, that was all it could be. Perhaps it had words, but words so soft that they were like a faint memory.
Out upon the dock he stepped. Ripples broke against its supporting poles. Something made a dark rush in the water, close up almost to the boat. Whatever it was glinted shinily beneath the surface. Cobbett stared down at it, trying to make out its shape. It vanished. He turned and paced back to the cabin door, that faint sense of the music still around him.
“All right, what did you find out there?” Lamar demanded.
“Nothing to speak of,” said Cobbett. “Now then, I had a long uphill trudge getting here. How about showing me where I’ll sleep?”
“Over yonder, as usual.” Lamar nodded toward the cot.
“And we’ll get up early tomorrow morning and go get my gear and those books of yours.”
“Not until the sun’s up,” insisted Lamar.
“Okay,” grinned Cobbett. “Not until the sun’s up.”
When Cobbett woke, Lamar was at the oil stove, cooking breakfast. Cobbett got into the robe, washed his face and hands and teeth and unclasped the banjo case. He took out Lamar’s old banjo, tuned it briefly and softly began to pick a tune, the tune he had heard the night before.
“You cut that right out!” Lamar yelled at him. “You want to call that thing out of the water, right up to the door?”
Cobbett put the banjo away and came to the table. Breakfast was hearty and good—flapjacks drenched in molasses, eggs and home-cured bacon, and black coffee so strong you’d expect a hatchet to float in it. Cobbett had two helpings of everything. Afterward, he washed the dishes while Lamar wiped.
“And now the sun’s up,” Cobbett said, peering at it through the window. “It’s above those trees on the mountain. What do you say we get me back into my clothes?”
Wearing the GOLDEN GLOVES bathrobe, he walked out to the dock with Lamar. He had his first good look at the boat. It was well made of calked planks, canoe style, pointed fore and aft, with two seats and two paddles. It was painted a deep brown.
“I built that tiling,” said Lamar, “Built it when they started in to fill up the hollow. Can you paddle? Bow or stern?”
“Let me take stern.”
Getting in, they pushed off. Lamar, dipping his paddle, gazed at something far out toward the middle of the lake. Cobbett gazed too. Whatever it was hung there on the water, something dark and domed. It might have been a sort of head. As Cobbett looked, the thing slipped under water. The light of the rising sun twinkled on a bit of foam.
Lamar’s mouth opened as if to speak, but closed again on silence. A score of determined strokes took them across to a shallow place. Cobbett hopped ashore, picked up his clothes and pack and blanket roll, and came back to stow everything in the waist of the boat. Around they swung and headed back toward the island. Out there across the gentle stir of the water’s surface, the dark, domed object was visible again.
“Whatever it is, it’s watching us,” ventured Cobbett. “It doesn’t seem to want to come close.”
“That’s because there’s a couple of us,” grunted Lamar, paddling. “I don’t expect it would tackle two people at a time, by daylight.”
That seemed to put a stop to the conversation. They nosed in against the dock. Tying up, Lamar helped Cobbett carry his things into the cabin. Cobbett rummaged in the pack.
“All right, here are those books of yours,” he said. “Now, I’ll get dressed.”
While he did so, Lamar leafed through Mooney’s book about Cherokee myths.
“Sure enough, here we are,” he said. “Dakwa—it’s a water spirit, and it used to drag Cherokee hunters down and eat them. It’s said to have been in several streams.”
“Including Long Soak,” supplied Cobbett.
“Mooney doesn’t mention Long Soak but, yes, here too.” Lamar turned pages. “It’s still here, and well you know that’s a fact.” He took up two smaller volumes. “Now, look in this number two book of Skinner’s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. Hmmm,” he crooned.
“More Dakwa?” asked Cobbett, picking up the other book he had brought.
“Skinner titles it, ‘The Siren of the French Broad.’ This time it’s not as grotesque as in Mooney. It’s supposed to he a beautiful naked woman rising up to sing to you. So, if you’re a red-blooded American he-man, you stoop close to see and hear better and it quits being beautiful, it suddenly has a skull and two bony arms to drag you down.” He snapped the book shut. “I judge the white settlers prettied the tale up to sound like the Lorelei. But not much in any of these books to tell how to fight it. What are you reading there in The Kingdom of Madison?”
“I’m looking at page thirteen, which I hope isn’t unlucky,” replied Cobbett. “Here’s what it says about a deep place on the French Broad River: ‘There, the Cherokees said, lurked the dakwa, the gigantic fish-monster that caught men at the riverside and dragged them down, swallowed them whole.’ And it has that other account, too: ‘The story would seem to inspire another fable, this time of a lovely water-nymph, who smiled to lure the unwary wanderer, reached up her arms to him, and dragged him down to be seen no more.’ ”
“Not much help, either. That’s about what Mooney and Skinner say, and it’s no fable, no legend.” Lamar studied his guest. “How do you feel today, after that gouging it gave you in the water last night?”
“I feel fine.” Cobbett buttoned up his shirt. “Completely healed. It didn’t hurt me too much for you to cure me.”
‘Maybe if it had been able to get you into its mouth, swallow you up—”
“Didn’t you say that was an old Indian preparation you sloshed on me?”
“It’s something I got from a Cherokee medicine man,” said Lamar. “A valued old friend of mine. He has a degree in philosophy from the University of North Carolina, but he worships his people’s old gods, is afraid of their evil spirits, carries out their old formulas and rituals, and I admire him for it.”