Many dark and sleepless nights have I been companion for owls,
                        separated from the cheerful society of men, scorched by the Summer’s
                        sun, and pinched by the Winter’s cold, an instrument ordained to
                        settle the wilderness. But now the scene is changed:  Peace crowns
                        the sylvan shade.
                                    —Daniel Boone, in John Filson’s The Discovery, Settlement and
                                    Present State of Kentucke

            1.     Pigeon Creek

When they come we gather from the forest, people appearing silently, shyly, in cloistered groups of four or five, families moving in languageless quiet.  We gather at a house near the ford to wait, camping in the trampled dooryard.  The householder, a stooped and grey-skinned man named JohnLogan (his name runs in to one guttural noise in his toothless mouth) provides water, kindling and the shade of his beech and chestnut trees—though leaves are flying fast to make the trees empty-armed.  This year there are, perhaps, two dozen of us.  We swap bits of gossip, news from last winter and summer.  A death, infant, from spotted cholera.  A daughter run away north of the Ohio with an itinerant preacher.  A granny declined into dotage, dying at the end of spring.  One man minus two fingers surrendered in woodchopping.  A woman with a jaw red and swollen by toothache.

A gaunt man in ragged linsey-woolsey rides in on a one-eyed mule.  “They comin,” he says.  “A day behint of me.  Cross the river tonight.”  Everyone is silent and drawn with expectation, a feeling akin to fear.  There is no need for fear—the big iridescent-hued birds are harmless, awkward doves, like old Noah’s peace-bird.  An apprehension, though.  Something sharp in the north wind that carries them to us.

We dawdle in the grey forenoon next day, chilled by the early winter breeze.  We children organize games to warm us. Hoops and tag and hiding in the brush.  After a thin lunch of bread and drippings, someone calls out, “Yonder—there!”  The grey sky is greyer still, edging toward black at its northerly rim.  A sound, a sigh, rustles over the treetops.  People stir, an infant squalls.  “They’re acomin,” a young woman breathes, an antiphony in the growing whir of wings.  The sky fills like an inverted bowl, the world turned upside down.

The pigeons come on and on, over us, around us, wings crackling like lightning now, soft cries amplified to seashell thunder.  Droppings rain down like skymilk.  A thick, life-stench fills our nostrils.  The flock fills the sky, wingtip-to-wingtip, and it is as dark as late dusk as they settle into the woods across the ford.  They thrash and fall through the limbs and dense brush.  Some splash into the creek.  A redbud bends under its load and splits at the crotch with a gunshot noise, collapsing under the whirl of soft sand-grey plumage.

The pigeons come on and on, always descending.  They crush themselves, plummet frantically through the tall tulip poplars and oaks, scrabbled broken in the humus below.  By sunset the sky has drained into this copse beside the creek, and the air is dense with a susurrus from the resting birds.  Weary from hundreds of headlong miles, feeling the new cold.  Feathers fluffed, jeweled eyes closed against the chill dark, heads tucked on breasts.  Packed so close they breathe in unison like a single great animal—which they are, a corporate engine, a group mind, a single impulse to souther before snow catches them.

Night comes with quiet cold, clouds breaking away before a huge ice-white moon.  We gather near our tools and torches and cross the ford.  Our splashes do not wake the pigeons—nothing rouses them from their deathlike fatigue.  We light pitchpine branches and enter the bird-heavy woods for the harvest.

Our torches light a feathered cavern.  It is like standing inside a giant sleeping bird, a deep downy maw.  A million million iridescent feathers wink in the yellow torchlight.  The women and small children hold the torches while we begin the killing.  With long poles we dislodge the birds.  As they fall, fluttering weakly, we club them with branches, hoes, shovels.  The soft bodies thump to the spongy earth.  Feathers, pearly droppings, bright red blood mix and mat under our feet.  We kill and kill in a delirium, inside the warm pigeon-cave.  A musky smell of endless life and death chokes us.  We slow, tire, reel into weariness.  The torches gutter, their pitchy smoke swirling into our eyes.

“Ay God,” a man says in a broken, worn voice.  “We done a right good night’s work.”

We trail from the woods.  In the morning we will return with sacks, barrels, rakes, to collect the carcasses.  Now we splash in the icy creek, blood washing from our boots, shamble to our bedrolls, too weary even to stir the campfires.  We are spotted with white and red, blood and excrement.  Feathers cling to our faces, our clothes.  We have become gaunt birds, scarecrows, fetishes to call the pigeons back yet another year.  We will gather the thousands of dead birds while the millions alive fly on, their cloud of life extending on south forever.  The moon rolls behind a cloud and only the gurgle of the creek comes through the blackness.

So many birds we will glut, sicken of the taste, feed them to the hogs to fatten them, plow them into our hard earth to enrich it.  So many soft bodies, always to be there, a late harvest from God above in this empty new Eden.  We go to our homes quiet and satisfied, our fingers and lips still greasy with pigeon fat, knowing that we will come back to Pigeon Creek next year and forever to harvest the great gentle birds.  In another year we will hunger for their flesh again.

            2.     Gather at the River

The empty territory began to fill up after the War.  The restless long hunters came and went—dead or westering.  The scarred Indian-fighters had become old in a decade.  The century turned over, and towns became defined on the land. No longer just log fortifications in ripped forest clearings.  Houses of stone and brick, paved streets, cleared roads that stretched from town to town.  The hunters missed the endless elk and bison herds and talked of crossing the Mississippi.

Thieves and bankrupts crowded in from Old Virginia, along with lost younger sons and shabby grubstake farmers.  The Wilderness Road choked with carts and wagons, families looking hopefully at the land opening below Cumberland Gap.  There were still bear and turkeys and painters that howled in silent nights, but people crowded close to each other, and behind them came circuit riders, starchcoated men with bible-chocked saddlebags, scouting hungrily for churches, congregations.

They spread along narrow roads, rough rivers—Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Moravians, other creeds with strange new-minted names.  In towns were churches, but in the forests and meadows were only cabins and rough log meetinghouses in stumpy clearings.  The structures served in rotation—housing whatever preacher  or priest emerged from the depthless woods.

Elihu Greene was one such, a Baptist who left Virginia when his preaching scalded the ears of planters in his parish.  He crossed over to Kentucke and found everyone hungry for any syllable of God, seeking recollection of something outside the wilderness.  He preached no dryasdust seminary doctrine but the new fire of the Lord that burned through him like a fever.  Elihu imbibed Bible verses and exhaled them in Pentacostal flames.  His long rides in the deep woods gave him time and silence for thought, for prayer, for singing and exhorting in the cathedral quietude.  His throat grew strong as a bronze cannon, his lungs were Jehovah’s bellows, his arms and legs stout as iron barrelhoops from gripping his sorry mule, Benjamin.

At dusk on the trail, as he forded a turbulent creek, the old beast betrayed him, slipping on a moss-slimed rock and toppling.  Elihu found his footing and dragged Ben to the shore. But one saddlebag slipped and the other was torn loose.  He searched the creek frantically and finally found it, in it his massive Bible, three generations old and big as a footstool.  It was soaked, and he built a birch rack on which to dry it before his campfire.  But wet wood steamed and died in the night, and a frost struck, freezing half the Good Book yet undried.  Elihu spent the next day camped, working over the Bible until it dried.  Next day he found a half-collapsed leanto, where he wintered, hunting for deer and grouse, grubbing for roots, ice-fishing.  Thirty-one consecutive days of snow that year.

Elihu turned to his Bible before each night’s firelight, but the old thick paper was ruined.  The gothic type was unblurred and dark in rectitude, while the pages themselves rotted and crumbled.  The first half of the book eroded, pages shredding as Elihu turned them.  The Old Testament withered before Elihu’s eyes, and he prayed and wept to the Lord at this fearful sign.  They fell away—the prophets he loved, the warfare of the Ammites and Babylonians, Nebuchadnezzar and the Witch of Endor.  By the end of winter the Gospels began to fall away.  With spring came a miracle—the rot ceased, and the last books lived, the books of the Pauline church, the mighty pages of Revelations.

When Elihu led Benjamin limping into a clearing called Fleener’s Station it was Palm Sunday, and his mind worked overtime on the miracle of his Bible.  Twenty-odd families gathered at the creek in a meetinghouse as humble as a hollow log.  They took Elihu in his desert-ragged clothes as a sign, too. A prophet shambling in from an ordeal.  He stood in the roughhewn pulpit and smote them with burning words from the last book of the Bible, images of beasts and angels in combat, mountains tumbling and seas rising. Elihu’s winter solitude burst like a dam, and all his feelings surged over the congregation.  He spoke for three-and-a-half hours, and at the end of the second hour, an old woman and two middling-stout men fell out with back-snapping convulsions.  In a few more minutes a nubile girl spun through several cartwheels and a perfect backflip before passing out.  Many wept, and several young men were seized with staggers and jerks, their bodies vibrating and snapping like Chinese firecrackers.  By the end of the sermon, Elihu had leveled the congregation except for a fat deaf woman who sat like an umpire in the rear and witnessed the annihilation.

Elihu traveled onward, through black forests and empty plains, trying to reconstruct the first half of his Bible from memory.  Mythical peoples and passages assaulted him in the deep nights.  Were there a tribe named Sibbites, visited by a plague of adders?  Who was Jazu?  Was Libet a daughter of Shem?  What were the forty transgressions of Ohed?  He preached to fierce black shadows in the forest, to birds cooing in prairie grass, to a small brown bear wading in a stream.

When he struck another settlement, Elihu preached again from his truncated book, serving the haggard congregation with the seven seals, the seven beasts, nearly uttered the mystical number that bubbled at the base of his tongue.  They convulsed, shouted, begged for release.  Women gave birth before their times, men were cured of warts, shingles, ague.  Children turned into wizened homunculi, stilled by awe.

Elihu crisscrossed the great meadow until one summer night his fire burnt down. Other preachers kindled other blazes. Campmeetings sprang up everywhere, and new churches formed and reformed, but Elihu was alone.  He threw his tattered saddlebags into a deep sinkhole and flung the few great sere leaves left from his Bible after them.  He untied Benjamin and walked away up a clay turnpike toward the new city at the Falls of the Ohio.  The mule called one harsh buglenote of enquiry and limped after Elihu, but the man vanished into the tangled mud streets of the settlement.

Something was finished.  The land would shake and stars would fall in the west, but Elihu preached no more.  He sat on the stoop of a small cabin and watched the fat Ohio flow away toward the sunset.  The small city rang to sounds of industry, and on Sabbath to churchbells, but Elihu Greene waited patiently for the final end, the last words promised him in his book.  Passersby thought him, in his rusty black coat and leathern breeches, a quaint emblem for the banished wilderness of the land.

            3.     The Forge in the Forest

Settlers needed things as they scrabbled at the edges of the wilderness, needed tools, weapons to battle with in the wide alien world.  They brought what they could carry, but plowshares shattered in the unbroken soil, axes dulled on huge tough trees, rifles broke, knives and saws wore away on the grindstone.  So Simon Parker came down the Ohio on a flatboat and trekked down the trail from Limestone on an oxcart laden with tools of his craft—tools to make tools.  A huge tun of a man, Simon hauled and fought his way to a crossroads, the place where an Indian trail intersected the great smooth slash of a bison path, near an ancient salt lick.  Among the odd rocks and steamy springs, among atavistic totems made by the Indians from peeled tree trunks, he built a shelter and set up his forge.

There was flowing water, and a woodlot stretched to the horizon.  There was game to eat, and Simon reckoned that white men would find the trails convenient for their passages. By the time snow flew, Simon was settled.  It was a savage winter.  The creek froze, and even the licks glazed with ice, the steam from the hot springs condensing and freezing on trees and bushes, gilding the landscaped with ice.  Simon ate his tough old oxen. He ate a porcupine.  He ate starved squirrels that broke into his shelter.  He lost weight but kept his muscles trim by battling the waist-deep snow and cutting firewood.  This was not what Kentucky winters were supposed to be.

Spring came suddenly, the snow was gone and rain fell steadily for a month.  As new grass shoved through the matted leaves and buds exploded into new leaves on the trees, Simon felt his strength returning.  He began to cut wood for charcoal and polished winter rust from his tools.  One morning he looked up to see his first visitors.

Two Indians stood in the dawn haze at the edge of Simon’s clearing. An old man and a young one, frozen in a tableau, dressed in ragged buckskin.  They moved forward as slowly as in a dream, and Simon stepped from his shed to show them his empty hands.  He heard a single bird caroling shrilly out in the white woods’ mist.

Simon had felt alone in the blankness of winter, but now he felt baffled and confused:  here were men but not kin-creatures.  As they approached they were defined in the new half-light as increasingly alien.  The young man’s face was barred with ochre and black clay from the springs, and the old man wore a weird vest of bones, fur and feathers across his narrow breast.  The old man carried an odd club or staff, and the young one held a French trade musket. Simon was aware that his rifle and tools were a dozen yards away.  For the first time since he roofed the shed and settled in, Simon felt the fear of desolation.

The two men stepped forward, and Simon stopped.  They faced each other across the broad table of an oak stump, its surface still freshly raw from Simon’s ax.  The men made eloquent hand-gestures, signs.  Then the old man set down his staff and untied a leather pouch at his waist.  With trembling hands he shook out its contents—a cluster of small bones, a dark blue stone, a twisted root, a large bird’s talon.  He arranged them at the center of the oak stump.  Then he took up his staff and gestured broadly, as if lining the points of the compass.

“I don’t . . .” Simon started to speak, but the young man scowled and raised a hand imperiously.

The old man arranged the objects again and again, with cabbalistic motions and moaned words.  The dawn mist dissolved in spring sunlight.  Simon watched with increasing dread.  Then the old man stood, made a kind of bow to Simon and walked away.  The young man glared one final time and followed him.  In seconds they were gone, vanished into the new laurel and briars.  Simon felt more alone than ever.  He looked at the little diagram of things left by the Indian.  He backed away from the stump and sat for the rest of the day inside his shed.

Years bloomed and died, passing swiftly, and Simon’s vision of success and order was proved.  Settlers flowed past his crossroads, farmers and merchants stopped off and built a village by the painted springs.  But Simon never forgot the appearance of the wild men, the last Indians he ever saw.  He prospered, but for years he shunned the big oak stump, the old wizard’s rude altar.  It grew up in burdock and thistle, and eventually when the trail grew into a road, it was obliterated, uprooted.

On certain mornings, though, Simon would stand in the open doorway of his smithy, looking toward the spot, watching mists swirl up from the springs in the forest and listening, listening. ###