Chapter Ten

Last Camp

The whole population of Last Camp—six hunters, a camp cook, and fourteen very eager hunting dogs—was waiting at the landing when the Headstrong nosed into the bank. It was nearly dark, three days since the raft had left Longleaf and more than two weeks since the men at Last Camp had seen Floyd and Massey. Amid much hooting, back slapping, and coonskin cap tossing, the three raftsmen stepped ashore with the swaggering confidence of real rafthands.

“Here’s your stockade, boys,” announced Floyd. And because he could never resist tweaking Cooky, he added, “Now, where’s my supper?”

“I thought you was drownded,” grumbled the crusty old cook, his wiry gray beard wagging. “It’s bad enough you two coming back alive right before supper,” he waved his ladle toward Aidan, “without you bringing an extry mouth for me to feed.”

Aidan couldn’t help but smile at Cooky’s exaggerated gruffness as the old man stumped back to his cooking fire. “I won’t eat much,” he called after him. “And I won’t stay long.”

Floyd presented Aidan to the group. “Boys,” he said, “this is Aidan Errolson from Longleaf. Aidan, this here’s Burl, Chaney, Big Haze, Little Haze, Isom, and Hugh. You already met Cooky.”

Aidan shook hands with each of the men, repeating each name to be sure he had it right. He liked these men already. They were weather-toughened and strong of limb, and in their broad, open faces he saw a confidence that allowed them to be genuinely welcoming of the stranger in their midst.

“I know you,” said Big Haze. “You’re the boy killed that giant.”

“Well,” answered Aidan, “he wasn’t actually a giant.”

“If he weren’t a giant, he was something mighty like a giant,” interrupted Massey. “Anyway, Haze, you got it right. This is the same Aidan Errolson. I seen him handle five plume hunters too.”

“With at least four crossbows between them,” added Floyd. “And he ain’t a half-bad raft pilot neither.”

“Hey, Cooky,” called Burl, “I hope your supper’s better’n usual tonight. We got a sure-enough hero amongst us.”

Cooky scowled over his stew pot. “Any hero don’t like my cooking can fix his own supper. That goes for flea-bit deer hunters too.”

There were no permanent buildings at Last Camp. The stockade, when built from the logs they brought, would be the first. There were four or five wagons, including Cooky’s covered mess wagon, and several deerskin tents encircled the fire. But there were more empty tent sites than there were tents. Last Camp usually bustled with at least twenty hunters—more in the autumn—but the place was nearly deserted now.

“Where is everybody?” asked Floyd. But he suspected he knew the answer.

“Culler and Minty are hunting deer over at Longpond,” said Burl. “They’re camping up there tonight. But everybody else has quit us.”

“Hadley and Munce said they wanted to try farming,” offered Hugh, “and Redden went back up north to the mines.”

“Folks just sort of drifted off,” Little Haze added. “Wiley went to work with his uncle, who’s a butcher in Tambluff. He figured that was better work than getting shot at every night.”

“It’s got worse since you left,” explained Burl. “Most nights now we’re getting attacked. Nobody’s got hurt or killed yet. Whoever’s shooting up the camp just wants to scare us.”

“They doing a thorough job of that,” said Isom. “All that hollering in the trees scares me as bad as the arrows and spears.” He gave a little shudder. “Makes my blood cold.”

“I want to start on that stockade at first light tomorrow,” said Chaney. “It won’t be long before some of them arrows or spears hurts somebody, whether they’re trying to or not.”

By that time, Cooky was ladling up supper, a stew made of rabbit and possum. Aidan ate his hungrily, and his genuine enjoyment of the meal softened Cooky toward him. The campfire conversation was lively. Massey and Floyd gave a full account of their river adventure—from their near destruction of the Hustingreen waterfront to their run-in with the plume hunters.

But Aidan, of course, was the main attraction. Except for Little Haze, who hadn’t been fighting age at the time of the last Pyrthen invasion, all of the hunters had been at the Battle of Bonifay, attached to the same infantry company. Even Cooky was there, serving as their mess sergeant. So they had all witnessed Aidan’s combat with Greidawl. They eagerly relived the day of Corenwald’s greatest victory—the reawakening of a valor that had nearly dwindled away, the terror of the Pyrthen thunder-tubes, the exhilaration of the last charge across the plain that drove the invaders from the island. They insisted on hearing the details of Aidan’s trek through the caverns under the battlefield and the climactic explosion of the Pyrthen flame powder that set the rout in motion.

Talk turned inevitably to the strange happenings in the Eechihoolee Forest. “The best part of the whole thing,” said Burl eagerly, “was after we run the Pyrthens into the swamp, and they come running back to surrender.” He chuckled at the thought of the Pyrthens’ panic-stricken faces as they tripped over one another to be the first to hand themselves over to the enemy.

“After a quarter hour in the Eechihoolee, those old boys weren’t looking so proud and shiny,” added Floyd. “Their faces was as ashy as a possum’s. And their eyes was like this.” He held two disks of sweet potatoes to his eyes to imitate the Pyrthens’ bulging eyes. He ran around the circle of the fire, still holding the sweet potatoes to his eyes. “Help me!” he shouted in an exaggerated Pyrthen accent. “Save me from the lizard people! Save me from the tree alligators!” But the sweet potatoes obstructed his view, and he tripped over a chunk of firewood, much to the amusement of the others.

“What chapped my hide,” said Burl, “was the way our own officers tried to explain everything away. Said it was just crazy talk, said the Pyrthens was seeing things that wasn’t there.”

“Ain’t that just like town folks and hill-scratchers?” Massey interjected. “Anybody who’s spent any time out east here knows different. I’ve seen a lizard man my own self.”

“I’ve seen one too,” offered Chaney.

“We’ve all seen ’em,” Isom added.

“Sometimes you look across the river there,” said Burl. He pointed to the south bank of the Tam. “And them trees is just alive, just crawling.”

“Crawling with what?” asked Aidan.

“I don’t know exactly,” answered Burl. “But all that hollering and hooting we heard that day in the Eechihoolee right before the Pyrthens come running back out, that wasn’t the only time any of us Last Campers ever heard it.”

“It’s a long way from here to Tambluff,” said Massey. “In Tambluff, you can go for days and never have dirt underneath your boots, only cobblestones. You can tip your high-plumed hat at a lady on the street and neither of you think about how that plume got from a bird’s back to your head. You can watch the alligators lazying in the castle moat and pretend you’ve faced the beast. In Tambluff, you can believe we’ve got the whole creation under our control. Seems strange to me that the folks who make the decisions for this whole kingdom live in such a place as that.”

“But out here,” said Isom, “the nursery tales of feechiefolk and the Wilderking don’t seem all that fantastic—no stranger than the world that buzzes just across the river and in the forests all around us.”

Big Haze looked across the fire at Aidan. “You’re sitting at the edge of the world, Aidan. How does it feel?”

Aidan smiled. “I like it here. It feels more like home than Tambluff Castle.”

The hunters cheered and laughed, flattered by Aidan’s remark. Tambluffers were a rarity at Last Camp, and even rarer were Tambluffers who accepted the hunters on their own terms.

“Well, if you don’t mind my asking,” said Burl, “what brings you to Last Camp?”

Aidan measured his words. “I’m out here to fetch something for King Darrow.”

“You ain’t the tax man, are you?” asked Cooky.

“No,” Aidan assured him and laughed.

“So what have you come to fetch?” pressed Chaney.

“Ain’t no use asking,” Floyd interrupted. “Me and Massey had him surrounded three days on a raft, and we never got it out of him.”

Before anyone had a chance to ask another question, the forest erupted in a series of blood-curdling cries: “Haaa-wwwweeeeee! Haaa-wwwweeeeee! Haaa-wwwweeeeee!” The hunters dove to the ground and tucked themselves into tight balls in order to make smaller targets for the arrows that came whistling into the camp. Half a dozen arrows embedded themselves with a thwack in the logs where the hunters had been sitting. Another arrow glanced off Cooky’s stew pot, ringing it like a bell and careening into the forest on the other side of the camp. A spear stuck in the ground less than two feet from Aidan’s boots.

“Aidan! Get down!” shouted Massey. “It ain’t over yet!”

But Aidan didn’t get down. Among all the people at Last Camp, only he understood exactly what the forest hollers were: feechie battle cries. And he felt he could do something to stop the attack. He grabbed a small log that was half in the fire and brandished it for a torch, trying to catch the gleam of feechie eyes in the forest. Then, even as arrows continued to sail into the camp, he belted out a blood-curdling yell of his own: “Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo … Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo.”

The woods grew still as the echoes of Aidan’s watch-out bark subsided. Aidan thought he heard the slightest rustle in the treetops—a rustle that grew more distant as the attackers receded into the forest. Still bearing the torch, Aidan ventured a few steps beyond the camp into the trees, as if in pursuit of the attackers. But they were gone.

“What just happened?” asked Floyd. He was looking at Aidan with undisguised awe.

“What was that holler you just did?” asked Isom, equally amazed.

“It sounded,” gasped Chaney, “like the bark of the bog owl.”

But Aidan didn’t hear them. He was inspecting one of the short, white-feathered arrows the feechies had shot into the camp. “Who fletches an arrow with egret feathers?” he asked aloud. And the arrowhead was equally perplexing. It was made of burnished steel.