Read The Old American for Free Online Page B

burn. Is this the omen he’s been looking for? It doesn’t feel like an omen. Even so, Caucus-Meteor leaves some slack below the knots. “Now you can escape,” he says to Nathan in Algonkian. He picks up the musket, holds it for a moment, leans it against a tree.
    They walk on ledge, down through ground made soft by pine-needle cover, to the rocky shore. Gentle waves slosh through stones. Caucus-Meteor is certain now that he does not want to return to Canada to face the burden of his responsibilities as a king. St. Blein will travel to Conissadawaga and report that he was killed by a prisoner. He’ll trust St. Blein to turn over his salary to his eldest daughter, Black Dirt.
    From Nathan’s squirming movements followed by no movement at all, Caucus-Meter determines that his captive has freed his hands. Caucus-Meteor drops to his knees to drink. He can hear the captive shuffle behind him. He’s picking up a rock, thinks Caucus-Meteor; he will bring it down on my head. The lake water is cold and very tasty. Caucus-Meteor enjoys a surge of intense feeling very similar to the feeling of gambler’s excitement. He’d like to turn and deliver a long oratory on the nature of choosing the time and instrument of one’s death, but this is not the place for oratory. It’s the place for submission to those unknown gods who rule by whim and mystery. Something like the lights that fill the northern skies in the winter dance in his head, and the image of the Spaniard is back, huge and metallic in his armor.
    Caucus-Meteor senses the decisive moment. Nathan Blake throws a rock ten feet over his head. With the sound of the splash, Caucus-Meteor leaps to his feet, and pulls his knife.
    The captive lurches forward, trips on his hobble and falls to his knees. Just as moments earlier, Caucus-Meteor awaited death, so now does Nathan Blake.
    Caucus-Meteor says politely, “Do you wish to drink?”
    â€œAye,” says Nathan.
    After Nathan drinks, Caucus-Meteor marches Nathan back to camp, and ties him down.
    â€œYou could have killed me, but did not,” says the old American.
    Nathan says nothing, gazes off into a place his own.
    â€œI am your master. You must answer my question,” says Caucus-Meteor.
    â€œI have not heard a question,” says Nathan, and the insolence in his voice tells Caucus-Meteor that his prisoner, through his refusal to kill, has found powers within himself that he did not know he possessed.
    â€œYou know the question. Why did you spare my life?”
    Nathan Blake remains silent. For the first time, Caucus-Meteor feels anger toward his captive. Perhaps he is a Christian devil, or maybe a trickster from olden times returned in a new guise. Perhaps he should kill Nathan Blake, or sell him to the Iroquois, or burn him, as in olden times, as a rite to assuage his own pain. But Caucus-Meteor has lived too long to be mastered by anger or fear or even hope.
    â€œIt’s just you, me, and the Great Now, Nathan Blake,” Caucus-Meteor says, and suddenly he’s thinking about himself from a time long ago. He switches to the tongue of his parents, so that Nathan can feel the emotion within him without the disguise of word-meaning. He speaks in the manner of his father, addressing the multitudes before the king’s seat in Mount Hope. “I wish I was a young man again so I could go on a vision quest, as we natives used to do before the French and English arrived. It used to be that young fellows would go off into the forest to seek dreams to understand their lives and place in the world. These days they get drunk, and think they’re having visions. They go to war, not to avenge a wrong or to make just an indignity or to assuage the grief of their mothers, but so that French merchants in Paris can have fur hats to sell.”
    Caucus-Meteor does not finish his thoughts with speech, for they would embarrass him, even if he did speak them in a language