The Land Breakers Read online

  “I own all this upper valley,” the man said, somewhat baffled by it, as if this were something he had traded for and wasn’t sure he should have taken. “I own this hundred thousand acres from the top of the ridge to the top of this’n, and I own from the start of the stream down the stream for ten miles. I traded gunpowder and shot for it to a hunter.”

  They listened, not particularly interested in owning any of it, but interested that a man would own so much while they, who wanted to own land to tend, had none.

  “I got it fer so little I don’t know how to charge. How much would you want of it?”

  They didn’t want any, they said.

  “Could you buy it all?”

  No, they said, and the thought went through Mooney like a comic theme. Could he buy it all.

  “I don’t want to sell a tiny piece of it, though you look so needful. Have you come far?”

  They had come far, they said.

  “I could do this, I could sell you a thousand acres and tell the man I finally sell the whole plot to that you’re there, got a cabin on it, and he’ll have to accommodate your land within his’n. Most men had rather buy where somebody’s gone to open up the territory. I could sell you twelve hundred acres.”

  Like a comic theme still, even more comic now that the land was closer to them.

  Imy asked how much he would charge them, and he scratched his head and worried over it. “Have you got a gun? You’ll need one up there?”

  They had one, she said.

  “Do you have money for powder and shot? I’m told it’s land a person will have to fight beasts for.”

  Imy took what money they had and laid it on the countertop.

  The storekeeper looked at it discontentedly, ran a finger through it. “Uh huh,” he said. “You’ll need a bag of salt and some seed.”

  “We’ve got seed,” Imy said. “We could use a bag of coffee.”

  “Uh huh. Coffee’s a right smart high. Have you got any tools?”

  Imy waited for Mooney to tell what they had, and he didn’t mind saying, though he wanted no part of a wilderness. He preferred a settlement; he wasn’t an explorer of land way off.

  “An ax,” he said. “And an auger. A knife.”

  “Uh huh,” the storekeeper said. He was quiet and the storeplace was quiet and musty and smelled of the meal and smoked meat. It was a room stocked with brown and blue linen, stockings and gloves, sheets of glass for sash windows. Looking glasses were lined up along one shelf, reflecting the wall on the other side of the room, where hung sizers and saws and hatchets and chisels, bills, hoes, spades, grubbing hoes, wedges. Near them was a barrel of nails. On the counter was a box of locks for doors. At the back of the room, hanging on wall pegs, were traps of all sorts, but mostly for beaver (though they were called fox traps). There were grindlestones, whetstones, a box of paper, a bottle of ink, a number of saddles, bridles, a piece of leather into which fishhooks had been pushed; there were fans, a necklace made of pearls, a box full of beads strung on thread, three rolls of ribbon, a roll of tape, a small box of thimbles, a box of shoe buckles. Near the back door of the store a heavyset, slow-motioned man was going through a pile of deerskins. There was the odor of tobacco in the place, too, and of firewood that had been burned the previous winter, but the fire was out now in summer.

  The storekeeper gazed about the room. He walked down along the counter and came back with an iron wedge. “You’ll need that to split logs. You can make a maul, can’t ye?”

  Mooney nodded. There was a worried expression on his face, which didn’t show dismay or pleasure, either; he was waiting mostly, wondering what in the world Imy was up to.

  “You ought to have a gouge,” the storekeeper said.

  Imy took one from a chest and put it on the counter. The storekeeper ran his fingers through the pile of money once more; then he went along the counter and returned with a froe and a foot adz. Behind him on the wall were maul rings, and he took down two of those and put them on the counter. It was still a comic dream to Mooney.

  The storekeeper’s long fingers moved through the money again, what they had earned and saved. His lips moved as he counted what was still there. “You can get a trace chain at the blacksmith’s, and a plowpoint or two,” he said. His fingers moved some of the money aside, putting it by for that. “Uh huh,” he said, and fell into contemplation again; then his fingers folded as his hands came together, and he said quietly, “For the little money that’s left, I’ll sell you six hundred forty acres of bottom land.”

  The answer burst out of Mooney, who for almost three years of wandering had sought a piece of land; even before Imy could speak, he heard himself say, “Yes,” say it so suddenly that he stunned the storekeeper. He was surprised himself to think he had said it, and turned away and heard Imy pick up the money for the chain, and went outdoors and sought fresh air, relief coming over him, and he sank down on the porch step and began to chuckle and shake his head. Good land, the storekeeper had said, river-bottom land, he had said.

  He went out into the middle of the road and looked off to the west, and there it rose, dark blue, a tall line drawn across the horizon. High up and way off, unknown, untampered with, left but lately by the savages. It lay before him: the mountain world.

  * * *

  They had a horse, a cow, two sows and a young boar when they started up there. They had that she-dog and had four chickens. The chickens Mooney put in a cage and strapped to the horse. Imy led the cow. The pigs, of course, followed.

  As they climbed the trail out of Old Fort, they entered a misty spot, then walked into a cloud. They were in that cloud all day. The place was damp, and the trail was eerie; the whole place looked like a ghost world to them. That night they lay in each other’s arms near the fire and comforted one another, assured one another they had done right in this, and on the second day they went on up, walking as fast as they could manage. At last they came to the top of the climb, to the gap, and they came into sunlight there. Below them was the sea of clouds that covered the lowlands. They were above the clouds, above the world of Old Fort and Morganton, and doubtless of Virginia and Pennsylvania, too. They got caught up in exaltation, thinking about that, for it was all pretty as a picture and as fine as they had ever seen; they got to laughing and joking, hurling pieces of limbs and rocks down into the lowlands. They got to hugging each other, lost in pleasure to be up here and off to themselves, and they sank to the ground together and sought one another in this new place.

  They walked along a valley near the small nameless river which foamed downward toward the west—not toward the east at all, as they would expect. That night they made a fire, Mooney using his rifle flint and a speck of powder, and cooked a piece of fish. They let their pigs root for old acorns and for sprouts of green, and the cow and horse grazed contentedly. Then the night came in on them and they felt close, felt like belonging here, as if they had won out at last over the various misfortunes and handicaps of life down there, way off in the lowlands.

  The stock was quiet; the dog was cozy and content. The darkness came on deeper; it seemed to be a deeper darkness than the lowlands knew. Then sharply, quiveringly, came a long cry.

  Another cry came from another way. It was a creature being tortured, sounded like.

  A current of cries began, a babble of screeches, screams, calls.

  Mooney built up the fire. Imy gathered wood, too. They were both wide-eyed with wonder and she with fear, and maybe he with fear, for he had never heard such terror-filled noises before. Their pigs got scared and ran off, and the horse squatted down, its legs trembling; the cow came so close to the big fire that she got her head hair singed. The dog threatened and crawled about, dismayed.

  The night passed slowly. They hoped for dawn and welcomed it. They gathered up their things quickly, packed the horse. Mooney found where the boar was hiding and led him in to camp. The sows followed, ashamed of their nighttime fears.

  Imy was there in the road, waiting, look
ing off into the woods. “Where was it coming from?” she said.

  “Panthers, most likely. Wolves. Lord knows what all.”

  “There’s nothing out there a’tall.”

  “I wouldn’t say so for certain,” he said.

  “I thought for a while they was going to come on in to congregate at our fire. They was none too welcome-sounding.”

  “No,” he said, and smiled at her. “I’ll say not.”

  They stood in the narrow road that went from Old Fort to Watauga. They could go on, or they could go back. If they went on into the mountain country, however, they might not find it easy to get out again.

  What did they expect to accomplish, after all? he wondered. Could they make a settlement back in there? How in the world could they get their crops to market?

  They waited. Each was waiting for the other to say, or was waiting for a sound from the woods, which was now as quiet as a Sunday morning. A chicken cackled. The dog got to jumping at a butterfly on a low limb of a bush, snapping at it. When the butterfly went on off, the dog lay down, shamefaced.

  Mooney kept waiting. Imy said nothing. So he said finally, “Maybe we can be to our place by evening,” and he took the horse reins and led the way along the Watauga road into the west.

  The third day they crossed a wide strong river which carried off a sow. Mooney spent the morning downriver looking for her and found her at last, still trembling from her plunge in the rough cold water. So they lost much of that day.

  In the evening of the fourth day, at last, at a wide river fording place, they found a hickory tree marked with three deep gashes, as the storekeeper had said they would. This was the sign of the trail that led to their land, and a trail was there, all right, twisting in and out around the trees, a trail made by animals, most likely, or long ago by Indians.

  They camped there that night. Next morning they ate cornbread made with meal and river water and drank what milk they could get from the cow. They started up the trail, expecting to be home by nightfall. They reached the top of the ridge by mid-morning, but the trail stayed on the ridge, wound along the crest of it for a far ways.

  From here they could see mountains strewn in all directions, and it was awesome to consider the marvels and dens and torrents of this new country, to feel the loneliness of being here, yet at the same time the right of belonging here, for he and Imy were the only people, were the possessors of it. Not even the savage’s footprint was on the moss of the forest, not the sight or sound of another person was found anywhere. This was the land of the wolf and the bear, the panther, the snake, the eagle high above them, the buzzards following them—or so it had been until they arrived.

  “Our place is just down that next dip,” Imy said, limping now, for her shoes had come apart from the walking and her feet were sore.

  But the trail stayed on the crest of the ridge, and that night they slept in a damp place, a sort of gap through which the mountain mist poured. They heard the sound of falling water, too, though where it was they didn’t know. The sound of water had come to them to be the voice of this new land.

  Limping, body-tired, bone-aching, belly-taut, they moved on the next day. At last, as afternoon came, the trail started downward. They moved faster, sensing that they were close. Even the horse seemed to know the trek was near over. Pride swept through them, pride in the long views of new land, in the great trunks of the tall, great trees, some of them as thick as two or three men laid head to foot. The butts rose straight upward for ninety or a hundred feet before the first limb sprang out.

  They could see the valley now, down there below them, and beyond it the high mountain they had been told about. They began to run, calling out gleefully. The sow broke loose from the saddle and fell, but followed squealing. “It’s right down there,” Imy said, running, her broken shoes flapping against the old trail. She held out her hand and Mooney took it and they ran together, side by side, breathing heavily now. They could see below them where the river appeared out of the thickets and treetops. The cow was coming after, lowing. The dog ran ahead of them now. They ran to the valley floor and sank to the ground laughing near the upper springs, at the edge of a cold creek, buried their faces in the water, and he looked up at her then, laughing, water rolling down his cheeks and chin and from his hair onto his torn shirt, he saw her pridefully, loving the sight of her and of this place here, their own, to which they had come, which they had found after their long and fretful journeying.

  * * *

  They could not get enough of walking through that valley and of being with each other in a place of new discoveries. There was one woods where pigeons roosted, came in always at dusk, so thickly settling that Mooney could stand at a certain place and look up into a mass of feathery whiteness. There were vines as thick as a man’s body, and Imy liked to climb them and swing out from the big tree trunks, where lizards and squirrels were, and where boomers chattered to her in noisy protestations. She and Mooney did no work. They walked the long lanes between the trees, or lay on the soft ground and made love and slept; they ate berries and bread and marveled at this land and at themselves in it.

  They did no work for several days; then one morning Mooney awoke and stretched and yawned; he went off into the woods, and was coming back, flipping spring water from his hands when he saw a great footprint in the ground, one far larger than his own, a reeled print, so it was the print of an old beast. He called Imy, and she came through the woods sleepily.

  She put her foot into the track. The track was ankle deep and four times as big as her own. “What in the world?” she said.

  He didn’t know, either. How could anybody say what it was, or what might be in this strange world of theirs? “It come nigh to the fire last night,” he said, looking cautiously about, sensing the change that had come suddenly to their place.

  That very morning he cut a maple sapling and split it open to let the wood dry. He would use that for peg wood for the cabin door and table, he said. That afternoon he selected trees, one oak and the others poplar, that were not too big to be used in building. They were uphill of the cabin site, which was just above the valley floor. At evening he led the way to the oak, which was about two feet thick. She watched as the axhead swung through the air for the first time in that country and struck deeply into the wood.

  The sound went out against the face of the mountain and echoed back. They heard it vibrate in the ridge across the river, where it was caught in some of the caves.

  He struck with the ax again. The woods trembled. Sap began to seep out of the tree wound and glisten on the axhead. He struck again. The sound carried through that country, a new sound for the wild ears of that place. He struck again, and sap flowed freely from the wounded tree.

  They cut the logs into lengths of twenty feet and barked them. Imy moved the fire sometimes, so that they would have light enough at night to skin logs by. He worked day and night and rarely grew tired until late; then his strength would drain out of him swiftly, and he liked at such times to rest limply on the ground near the fire, lay his head back against a tree root and look up at the stars, which he could see through open spaces left by the felled trees. He would talk then about his plans. He wished he had a broadax, he said. He could square the cabin logs if he had a broadax. He wished he had a sled made. He could carry rocks easier from the river bottom if he had a sled.

  One day he went to work on the oak, the roof-board tree. He drove the ax into the butt log and set his iron wedge into the crack. He tapped it in, widening the crack until he could get gluts started. They were made of dogwood and were bigger than the wedge. He drove the gluts in deep with the maul he made from a branch of the tree. The maul was as thick as his thigh, and he had whittled it down to a handle at one end.

  He quartered the oak tree. He cut off the sap wood, then split off boards with the froe, driving it into the wet wood with a wood mallet. He cut off four thick boards for the door.

  As dusk began to settle, he began splitting off
boards for the roof.

  “Will you have enough for a table left?” Imy asked him. She had been around all day, watching, going after water, helping pile the slabs beside a hickory tree.

  “Not enough, if we’re to double-thick the door.”

  “We need a table, and we need bed boards.”

  “We’ll have to make a cabin first,” he said, smiling at her. “I’ll make you a table later.”

  “If we had ropes, we could stretch a bed that a way.”

  “We can make a bed out of saplings or leather or something,” he said. “Lord, my muscles is sore, Imy.”

  “You work harder than anybody ever did afore. You was like that back home, too. You never stopped for long enough to sleep.”

  “Oh, I sleep. I sleep enough. I like to work. Any water in the pail?”

  “No. I’ll fetch some.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  He went down the path to the spring and knelt. The ground was cold to his knees, and the air was chilly there where the water sprang out of the ground. He let the water wash over his hands and wrists. He looked up at the bare sky; the moon was bright tonight. He would need to have his cabin walls up so that he could lay his roof shingles during a failing moon, else they would cup; he would need to move faster with his work.

  He leaned far forward and drank, lapping the water into his mouth. He wiped his mouth with his hand. “Ahhh, Lord,” he said deeply. “Lord,” he said.

  Then he saw the beast. It was across the spring, looking down at him, a great bear, almost twice as tall as a man. Its brown fur was shaggy and torn, and had gray splotches in it. Its eyes were red and rheumy with age. Its mouth was open and its big tongue hung out, dripping wet. The bear was looking down at him as if it had no other thought except him.

  Mooney spoke warily, gently to the bear. “We didn’t come here to harm you. I know we cut down enough trees for a cabin, and we’ll girdle trees to clear a patch for planting crops, but we don’t aim to harm you or this place.”