SAMPLE THE STORY BY READING CHAPTER ONE

The man came out into the little clearing, and paused there with the sunlight on his black buckskin jacket and on the long rifle in his hand. His head was thrown back so that it seemed he listened for something other than the drowsy chirp of insects and the high scream of a distant panther that sounded faintly on the wind. Only for an instant did the man stand frozen like that. Then he was moving as a shadow moves, swiftly and silently. His moccasined feet made no mark on the tufted grasses, for a moment after he had gone in his long stride and silent tread, the tiny green blades were springing back in place and the clearing was as it had been before his coming. 

The man was running now with long strides. The fringed buckskin thongs down each thigh and outer calf swung to his lope, his feet seeming only briefly to touch at rock and hard ground where it lay carpeted with rotting vegetation. The powder horn that he normally wore on a leather loop over his shoulder was tied now at his waist, lest it hit against a tree trunk or catch in the high shrubs that leaned across his path. 

Behind him came Yellowface with a score of Huron warriors. They had followed him all the way from Deosongwa, the place of the deep spring, as if suspecting the mission on which he ran. If they could, they would kill him here in these forests, and prevent him from fulfilling that mission. 

From the gulf country around the Mississippi delta, northwestward to Acadia, France was readying herself for war in this fall of 1753. The Ohio was a vital link in their communication lines between Canada and their Illinois and Louisiana territories. Controlling it, they controlled a forest curtain all the way across the continent, a barrier of trees and Indians and French soldiery capable of swinging eastward and pushing the English settlers underground or into the sea. 

The French were building forts in the Ohio country now, to protect that communications link. The peace of Aix-la Chapelle, that had concluded the last war between the British lions and the French fleur-de-lis only five years before, was a mockery. Yet the English, against whom these preparations were proceeding so feverishly, were strangely placid. To rouse the English from their lethargy, Stephen Brant was staking his life against Yellowface and the Hurons who ran with him. 

He bared his teeth, thinking of Yellowface: a Huron chief who coated himself with gilt paint from toes to head, so that he seemed a golden statue in this forest world. It was Yellowface who raided the Iroquois villages for scalps and maidens and warriors to die at torture stakes in Canadian villages. Yellowface, who hated all things Mohawk and let his hate show in his bloody scalping knife. 

There was no hesitation in Brant. He slid through a grove of birch trees thick with scarlet foliage. Then his moccasins were in the cold waters of a little stream and he was striding swiftly in the close-footed walk of the Mohawk back in the direction from which he had come, toward Canajoharie and the bark longhouses of the Six Nations. 

He went like that in the brook for three miles. Then, more silent than the waters that ran at his ankles, he stepped into a clump of tall dogwood and stood there motionless. The water dripped gently from his black buckskins to the soft loam underfoot. 

The Hurons came silently, headed by a big man whose skin seemed made entirely of gold. His stiff scalp lock was gilded, as were the feathers that dangled from it across his wide back. His eyes moved from tree to tree, and then down to the swirling waters of the brook. A musket that seemed carved from solid gold gleamed in his yellow hands. 

The twenty Hurons with him fanned out across the woodland groves, moving a little, then standing silent: listening. If they found him, they would take a long time to kill him. Stephen Brant did not like to think about that; it was not that he was afraid-no son of Nickas Brant was a coward—but pain was pain, and no man enjoyed thinking about his possible suffering. 

Yellowface made a circle with his yellow arm. The Hurons grunted softly to each other, turned and moved away from the brook. One of them passed so close to the man in the red-stemmed dogwoods that he could have reached out and touched him with the muzzle of his long Pennsylvania rifle. 

He waited until dusk. Then he moved away from the brook and turned southward from it, toward the Virginia plantations and the Carolinas. Caution and alertness still lay heavy in him. His hard blue eyes were always moving, studying the fall of a leaf or the lean of a branch. He could not be sure that Yellowface had given up the hunt. He could never be sure of that, not even after he reached Virginia. 

His eyes studied the tiny imprint of badger paws in the soft loam, and the marks made by deer antlers against the bark of a sycamore. His ears held the spill of sound that went through the forests: the caw of a soaring crow, the cough of a running fox, the faint bellow of a bull elk. For life was everywhere in these forests, and where life was, there was also death. 

The moon was on the horizon when he stepped onto the grassy bank of a slow, wide river. The waters showed the moon in a thousand ripples, and the cattails in the meadow beyond rustled in the little breeze that had sprung up. His eyes roamed the water's edges until he found a hump of dirt and flowers growing below a shelf of rocks. He crouched down to tear at the flowers and brush aside dirt, and sighed as the prow of a birchbark canoe gleamed in the moonlight. His hands worked faster now, scraping away loam and soil, but they worked quietly, with no more sound than the brush of a bit of earth against a flower stem. 

He bent and heaved, and the canoe loosened in its bed. The muscles along his back rippled once and stood out firm, and then the canoe came forward, sliding easily. It was free of the ground and turning in the air and settling gently onto the water where it swayed a little, as if rubbing its keel in greeting. 

There were paddles on the ground, dry under the canoe. The man picked them up and placed one across its bottom. With the other in his hand, he lunged with his toe and swung his body on spread arms into the canoe. It glided ahead in the water without sound. 

The paddle came out and dipped, and only the drop of water from the paddle blade to the river surface—a distance of an inch as he swung it—echoed its movement. 

All night the man paddled. As the sun came up like a red ball in the east, the forests on either side of him came alive with sound and movement. A fox ran down a hare for its breakfast and the terrified bleat told the man in the canoe what had happened. A covey of quail swept upward from the river marshes, and their angry cries revealed the presence of a lurking weasel. 

The world was alive and hungry, and hunger sat in the lean man in the canoe, but his long arms did not break rhythm with the paddle. 

The canoe slid through a cluster of broad-leaved water lilies silvery with morning dew. Drops of water lilies silvery with morning dew. Drops of water runneled down the narrow paddle blade, making gentle ploppings. Like a buckskin shadow, the man reached an arm forward toward the long rifle that lay across a thwart of his birch bark craft. He lifted the rifle and held it, staring over the water at a man in a field that rose in a gentle slope from the river bank. 

The man in the field did not stir. He was a big man, broad in the back and with small hips. His black hair was worn long and gathered at the nape of the neck in a bun. He did not see the canoe, nor hear it. His attention was fixed on something at the other end of the little meadow. 

The woods runner laughed under his breath. Almost, he was tempted to touch the tall stalk of a field thistle at the man's side with a ball from his gun. But Kit Gist was no settlement man, to stand frozen for the moment in which the canoe-man could make his identity known. Christopher Gist was a woodsman like himself. He would go flat in those grasses when the ball whistled through them, and his own rifle would be talking back at him. 

The canoe-man pursed his lips and moved his throat, forcing air up from his lungs in the melancholy hunting cry of a short-eared owl. At the first sound of that kear, kear, Kit Gist turned. His rifle came up to his hands and he went down on a knee, whirling. It was a fluid move, and the man in the canoe smiled his appreciation of the readiness of the other. He repeated his wailing cry and added a few throbbing notes at its end. 

The man named Gist rose to his feet, calling back over his shoulder. He was a sturdy figure, naked to the waist, his buckskin leggins tight over powerfully muscled thighs and calves. His face was burned the color of new cedar, and the generous mouth under his wide nose was curved with humor and a sympathy for all living things. He was in his late forties in this autumn of 1753, and like the man in the canoe, he had spent most of those years in the wooded forests of the settlement frontiers. 

He came forward now, walking with his toes together in the manner of an Indian. His dark eyes were slanted, crinkled in laughter, showing crows-feet at their corners. When he came to the shoulder of the little ridge that sloped down toward the lily pads at the river edge, he grounded his rifle and leaned on it. 

"I knew no short-ear would be roving so far south, this time of year," he said soberly, as the canoe ran through the blossoms of the water lilies to scratch its keel on loose mud. He added, "Though I'm almost as surprised to lay eyes on you. Did the Hodenosaunee close their lodge doors to your ugly face?” 

"I've come because they sent me," said the man in the canoe, rising and moving forward with feet so sure that the canoe swayed only slightly to his passage. He stepped onto the bank, looped a hand under the cedar mold-board and began to drag the canoe forward. 

Gist went down to help him. Together they raised the silvery canoe and turned it over in the clump of bluebells lining the ridge. Over its dripping bottom that flashed with sunlight as it lay upturned, he held out his hand. 

“Stephen Brant,” he grinned. "Toyoga, the Wolf!" making the Mohawk name a greeting between them. "How are you, Steve?" He studied the brown face under its shock of yellow hair cut in Iroquois fashion, reading the obstinacy of full lips curving in at the corners, and the perpetual movement that lay in the warm blue eyes. This young Englishman, adopted into the Wolf clan of the Mohawk people at the age of five, and raised to warriorhood by Nickas Brant, was a handsome cub. If it were not for his Indian lineage, he might have gone far in the colonies. Pity stirred a moment in Gist for this youth with the wide yoke of shoulders and lean waist, whom he had first met daubed in warpaint across from a Mohawk campfire. Almost in that pity, he said again, heartily, "Good to see you, lad!” 

The Wolf said slowly, even as his eyes roamed beyond Gist for the red and yellows of autumnal maples and chest nuts bordering the field, "I come fast from the Upper Castle, Kit. I shook the Hurons forty miles back. Over twenty of them, led by Yellowface." 

Gist waited, the patience in him like the patience of the Indian. A breeze sprang up from the north to ruffle the yellow hair of the white Mohawk. Gist knew of Yellowface, the Huron warrior who painted himself with gilt and brought his red brothers down out of Canada into the corn fields of the Six Nations, stopping now and then at a lonely settler's cabin to ravish its women and torture its men. No man knew his Huron name, or his tribe. 

The Wolf said more slowly, "The French have begun to move. They are building forts in the Oheeyo country, where my brothers, the Senecas, hunt. They have many of them, Kit. They ring in your people as our beaters ring in wild turkeys when we have a shoot." 

Kit Gist turned his regard from the young woods runner toward the far end of the meadow. Watching him, the white Mohawk swung around. He could see a tall man, heavy set and seemingly muscular at this distance, stripped to tight buff breeches and frilled shirt against the Indian summer heat. He wore his hair in a cadogan at the base of his neck. He was bent over a telescope set up on a tripod stand. 

Stephen Brant raised yellow eyebrows. 

“Surveyor," said Gist succinctly. "Marking out land for a new house. He's also a major of Virginia militia, appointed by Dinwiddie himself. He'll want to hear your story, Steve. Come along." 

They moved the same, these men, with the toed-in gait of the Indian, with something of their stride in their sloping shoulders, alert heads and their eyes that were never still. Their rifles were almost a part of the buckskin they wore. They were a product of the forest trails as men are always a product of their environment. 

The older woodsman said, "He's a good man. From a rich family in Virginia, though he doesn't ape the ways of some planters. Name's Washington. George Washington.” 

They found the surveyor in a cluster of riotous yellow groundsel, sweat staining his face, his frilled cambric shirt wet and dark against his wide chest. There was a smear of grass stain on the left knee of his green wool breeches. The blue eyes he lifted as their shadows fell across his instrument were mildly impatient. 

As Kit Gist introduced them, Washington held out a big hand. There was a cautious reserve in this young surveyor, a proffered invitation to friendship that was delicately balanced, as though a word or a change of expression might destroy it before it was fully born. His mouth was wide, mobile. His nose was large, but the feeling of bigness was lost against the broadness of the jaw and brow. A deep voice told the Wolf he was welcome in the plantation country. 

"The French are building forts along the Ohio, George," Gist said softly. “They've been raiding the settlements 'twixt here and Fort Niagara in force." 

“Scalping and looting as they come," added Stephen Brant. 

Washington allowed a frown to furrow deep lines in his fleshy forehead. He sighed and murmured, "It isn't un expected. Just so soon. So soon after Louisburg." 

The young surveyor found a flat rock half buried under a thicket of blackberry branches. He put his rump to it and stretched out long legs. 

"Now tell me,” he said, and his hard eyes were like pale agates boring up at the woods runner. 

Accustomed to the ways of his Mohawks, Stephen Brant squatted down, making his calves a chair for his thighs. He sat relaxed, with the west wind blowing steadily across his shoulders, stirring the long black deerskin thrums on his sleeves and across the back of his buckskin jacket. 

"The people of the longhouses live in friendship with their English brothers. King Hendrick, who is chief in my clan, is much beloved of James DeLancey, who is governor of New York State. Our women are plump, our bark pails and bags are fat with food and berries. Shahdagayah, the great eagle god who lives in the sky, has seen fit to bestow his blessings on us. 

"For many years now, since Louisburg surrendered, we have been at peace even with the Wendats, the Huron wolves from Canada.” 

The Wolf frowned, his eyes turning inward to scan the memories he carried of the great bark longhouses, of the grayish smoke of the fires swirling upward from the stone coal-beds toward the rectangular holes in the roof, the thrill of the hunt, when the twaang of a bowstring was echoed in the dying bellow of an elk. He told them a little of the false face dancing, the making of their wampum, the meaning of their war paint. 

He spoke briefly of this, adopting the sonorous phrases of the Iroquois tongue, twisting them into hard, clipped English. He told them of Drayanna long legs, daughter of Ganaganears, sachem of the Turtle clan. As he had tasted blueberry cakes she brought him over the campfires, so he made them taste them, until Washington shifted restlessly. 

Kit Gist smiled. "He is Mohawk except for his skin, friend George. As a boy, they found him wandering in the woods near Fort Hunter. Ten miles away there was a burning cabin and a dead man and woman. Their names were Wolfe. Peter and Helen Wolfe. Nickas Brant found him when he was five. Adopted him. Gave him a home, a family and a name: Toyoga, the Wolf. Steve's as much a Mohawk as you are a plantation man, George. If he speaks now so roundabout, it's only because he has lived all his years with the Hodenosaunee and follows their custom." 

The young surveyor nodded, telling himself, I must learn these facts about my country. I must become patient and more understanding. He was a surveyor now, and a major of Virginia militia, but he need not stop there. He might even aspire to sit in the governor's chair at Williamsburg, that Robert Dinwiddie now graced. Politics was not so bad a career for a young man in these exciting times, and to better understand politics, he must better understand the people who make it. 

And so George Washington gestured apologetically with a big hand to excuse his impatience. "Forgive me, friend Stephen. You spoke of the French at first." 

The Wolf grinned. "I'll get to them. But it's important to understand about the Six Nations, too. They hold the northern border, from Sorel along the St. Lawrence to Fort de Chartres on the Mississippi. If they won't fight for your redcoat soldiers, your French frog-eaters will take all this land, from Quebec as far south as Spanish Florida.” 

Washington looked as if he did not believe this, but was too polite to say as much. The woodsman glanced at him shrewdly. "You'd better believe it! They're holding a conference at Albany any day now, to win over my people. Benjamin Franklin from Philadelphia will be there. So will Daniel Claus and most all the governors of the crown colonies." 

Gist said heavily, "Aye, he's right, George. This far south you can't conceive those northern forests, and how the red men are the one real force in 'em. If his Mohawks should go over to the Frenchies, there'd be no way of keeping 'em out of Pennsylvania State or Virginia." 

George Washington leaned forward, elbow on a knee. He was aware that a cold excitement was building in him, as it always did when he dealt with portentous matters. Sometimes when he walked the gardens of Belvoir with Sally Fairfax, or stood sleeplessly at the windows of his dead brother Lawrence's Mount Vernon estate, he sensed a strong aura of destiny in him. His better judgment mocked at this, for he was essentially a humble man, little given to self deceit. But his will was like an unquenchable fire, forcing him on in reckless disregard of obstacles. 

It was not to come to this man until years later that he was absorbing his country as he sat here with his ears and mind open to Stephen Brant. Already he knew the plantations of his own Virginia, and the Carolina coasts. He had been with Lawrence to Barbados Island. He was to learn much more, with his will driving him on to listen and dream on this hazy October morning. 

"If the French can win over the Iroquois Confederacy, or if they can only guarantee their neutrality, they'll be strongly reinforced in their attacks. They've already made their first move. They are building forts at Venango, at Presque Isle on Lake Erie, and at LeBoeuf." 

Washington stirred in his excitement. His quick mind saw the danger opening before them. "They'll have bases from which to operate, from which to send their raiding parties." 

Washington put his big hands together, squeezing them tight. "The Ohio Company, a group of Virginia business men and traders, backed by the Privy Council, have in vested heavily in properties along the Ohio. Kit, you've been out exploring for them. You know that settlers have already cleared ground under the grants. Those French forts are like a gun aimed down their throats. Only another gun pointed back at them can keep those settlers safe. Virginia must build forts too." 

He got to his feet, his large hands dangling. The woods runner sensed that this man was naturally awkward, but that by reason of his pride, forced himself to a semblance of ungainly grace. In contrast, he himself rose with fluid grace, like a panther stretching from a nap. He sniffed the air and his blue eyes noted the branches of a mountain ash where they hung heavy with scarlet berries, and scanned the expanse of the slowly flowing river. 

Quietly, Washington gathered his equipment. Against the heat of the day, he carried his gold-braided green woolen coat over an arm. His white stockings were stained green here and there, where the grasses had streaked them as he worked. He wore black leather shoes, fitted with large silver buckles, and a black tricorne edged with gold fringing. 

It was Stephen Brant who slid the canoe into the water and held it there with a paddle dug into the soft mud of the river bottom as Christopher Gist stepped into it. The young surveyor came next. 

With Gist in the prow, kneeling and driving the paddle with strokes as steady and as rhythmical as those of a piston, and with the Wolf echoing his every move, the canoe shot down the swelling blue waters of the Youghingheny at a steady pace. 

This was the wide, rolling country here, south of Laurel Ridge. To the west, meadowland lay lush with growing grasses and thickets of mugwort and horehound, as far as the Monongahela. In the distance, the spreading bulk of the Alleghenies made a fringe of deep blue in the fall haze. Along the river bank pale yellow fern hovered over water thick with dropping leaves from bordering maples. From the shelter of a naked rock abutment, a great buffalo bull stood like a lonely sentinel and watched them.