Finally, Otci washed his face and hair, and stood up out of the water to see if the others were through. Their reddish brown bodies gleamed in the morning light, giving accent to every well-formed muscle on strong frames. Even in a hurry, the initiates washed as if in the presence of an unseen authority.
They stepped out of the water and gathered on the bank. Otci stood among them. “Fuswa,” he said. The Bird Clan hunter would know an unwatched path to the old man’s fire. “Tell us where to go.”
“There is a trail that runs to the north around the edge of the swamp by the bend,” he responded promptly. “It is thick enough with bushes and trees to hide us. It will be unguarded, I’m sure.”
“Maybe unguarded,” replied Illitci, “but it is too well-known by the hunters. He would be watching for that one. We need to find a path that is far out of the way, one that would come up behind him.”
Tumchuli raised his head and said eagerly, “We can canoe downstream and approach him from the west. The trees are so thick that he would never see us until we are right upon him.”
“Too thick for us to even walk through, Tumchuli,” said Pinili, shaking his head. “Too many briars.”
“We must find a way that is never taken, approach the fire from a direction he would never suspect,” said Francis. He looked at Otci for a comment.
“Pinili,” he said, “you’ve been out in the thicket enough. Isn’t there some hidden path you take to kill your turkey?”
The reticent hunter pondered silently, then he looked up. “His fire is on the north side of the juniper grove, and I know the grove well,” he said.
“Yes, and there is a creek that runs by the trees, too,” said Tumchuli excitedly.
“That creek comes out into the river right down there,” said Pinili pointing downstream in the direction of the bend in the stream. “We may take the creek up to the juniper trees, and then only a short distance from that is where he burns his fire,” he said.
“What is the wood like by the creek, and how dense is it from the trees to the fire?” asked Katutci.
“It is clear by the creek. I see squirrels feeding along it every time I’m in there. But the growth from the junipers to the fire is dense. If we can sight the mulberry tree that stands right behind Nokusi then we can crawl around to it. It’s big enough for us to see,” he said.
“Only there won’t be any commands, Otci,” said Hobithli.
“Yes, I know,” said Otci. “Then you stay in front of me and point out the way, Pinili. Katutci is behind me and the rest know their place.”
Otci set the order of their progression through the woods every day. At his direction, each took an advanced position in line as they traced their way from the river to the fire for the master’s talks. Thus, as Bear ordered, they all had the opportunity to lead. But Otci, if he didn’t lead himself, was always behind the one in front, and was always responsible for the direction and the skill by which the group moved.
He walked ahead a few steps up to the rise of the bluff, the rest falling in line behind him. He looked back to see if Hobayi had a branch with which to cover their footprints, and waited until his raw-boned, sharp-jawed brother had broken off a limb from a small tree, shook it to see if it had the weight he liked, and joined in at the rear of the line.
Otci felt a communal spirit. It would sustain them all in their tasks before their teacher, for each was a protector of the other. And each one was each one’s brother. Though each was of a different clan, they were all bound up in the same quest. The initial words of instruction still hung in his ear. Nokusi had ordained it beyond the miko’s objection. This was their time together, like no other time in their lives. It was the sacred time in which boyhood’s inhibitions were shattered to bring on them the risks of the wider way of men.
It was like that with everything the old warrior had told them before his fire since they began meeting deep in the thicket. They had listened devoutly as he told them the unbreakable laws of the path, and to Otci the word held firm. The warriors at the head of the line and the rear of the line have the important roles, Bear told them. One directs; the other conceals. That is the entire movement: a joined, coordinated stealth through the great, dense thicket.
Nokusi would begin their warriors’ story with his own. If they could follow his path, then they would become warriors in spirit. Otci knew the council believed it. Nokusi told them how as a young man he led his warriors against the English along the Oconee River to the east. Once he led the French captain from Toulouse all the way around the English camp, only to find them gone and a slight wisp of smoke rising from an extinguished fire pit. Yet it was a feat for which he was given a new musket and powder canister. He had trailed the branches as his party advanced into the pine woodland country of the Choctaw west of the Tombigbee, and when he returned, his bow dangled with the hair locks of two victims. He taught making bows from the osage orange tree, arrows from the elm, and how to coat the flint heads with cloth and pitch to flame a stockade wall. He showed them how to cut the hair from the fallen enemy. He used the initiates’ leader and a stick to demonstrate how to cut it quickly and cleanly, and made each one practice on him until they knew it rhythmically.
He taught them other devices of the path: how to crawl though the cane to kill alligator, how to give the deer, turkey, eagle, and wounded bear call to lure them, how to carve out a deer head and wear it, and how to place the deer hide over their backs to crawl up to the banks where Idjo feeds on grass and shoot him. When hunting in the country of the Upper Muskogee or the Lower Muskogee and Seminole, they learned what to look for in trade to bring back to the miko as they bartered goods from their own river area: salt, dried fish, pigeons, and flint. These teachings of the gray-browed warrior stirred Otci. It was as if Bear was giving them the tools of life. The others, too, anticipated every instruction. He taught them that only this would bring them honor. To violate the laws of warriorhood, Otci knew, was to betray the man, and all that the nation kept sacrosanct, and to invite the rebuke of their fathers, along with the shame of their ancestors.
The sun now approached the treetops as he led them over the bluff to a narrow, nearly concealed trail that Pinili pointed out. It led off the main path to the village. It was getting late. They must advance in haste, for the old warrior does not smile upon late arrivals. He signaled them through the brush behind Pinili as the file crept in the hushed, deathly advance. The rhythmic rise and fall of their shoulders make their going one continuous, fluid movement, lunging in unison through the new green. He cautioned the hunter with a tap on the shoulder. He stepped off the trail toward the faint musical flow of a clear pebble-bottomed creek. They crossed the creek to the right side to avoid the spirits of unburied warriors killed in battle that pass along the left side, moving to broader, deeper rivers. It was a matter of reverence. He stepped carefully, skillfully, straining with his back and legs to obscure from any watchful eye their discovery by sight or sound. He crouched in stealth through the wet, yellow-green woodland maze.
Pinili pointed out the juniper grove that stood darkly in the thick cluster of trees before them. As they reached the first juniper tree, his right arm extended and caught the fragrant dripping branch. Looking down, Otci felt a soft moss bed beneath his foot and his tension eased. It would be a quiet path. He passed the branch back with his left hand to Katutci, who took it and gently swung it to Tumchuli, who ducked beneath it, and passing beneath it the line advanced without pause, snaking through the growth. In the teaching of the master, they moved as an animal, a fluid weave among branches and trunks that towered above them, each knowing that one deviant movement or noise could betray all of them. Otci felt secure about this way. Behind them crept Hobayi, trailing the cypress branch that pulled leaves over their