The Red Heart by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

Author:JAMES ALEXANDER Thom [Thom, James Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76313-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

November 1791

By the Maumee Sipu

Good Face separated out three little strands of her red hair above her left ear and began braiding. She looked in the mirror at the braid sometimes, but mostly at her eyes and face. It was such a novelty to see it, and she was quite taken with her appearance. It was a very pleasing face. It looked so much like her memory of her birth mother’s face that she could now remember how her birth mother had looked. Or she thought she could.

Her husband, Like Wood, had brought the mirror home from the battlefield, one of the things he had looted from one of the big tents. It had been an officer’s mirror, he said. It was set in a round frame of smooth, reddish wood with silver-headed tacks all the way around, with a short handle that had a hole drilled in the end, making it easy to hang from a limb or from the frame of the wikwam. He had worn it home hung by a thong around his neck. From the same tent he had brought for himself a fancy wig of curled white hair. He liked to joke that of the three scalps he brought back from the battle, this was the only one he had taken without a knife. He had just picked it up from where it lay on a box beside the mirror. In the frenzy of the victory, dancing around the blazing fires, his two blood-crusted real scalps had been displayed on the end of a long pole, but he put the wig of silver hair on his own plucked bald head. Had he only the wig as a trophy, he would have been considered a contemptible clown for dancing the scalp dance in a wig, but since he had killed and scalped two soldiers and had their brown-haired and yellow-haired scalps, he was not only a hero in the scalp dance, but a high-hearted and funny hero. After the three battles of his young life, Like Wood now had four soldiers’ scalps and a wig. To the pigtail of the wig he tied the eagle feather he had earned as a warrior. Tuck Horse disapproved of his son-in-law’s clownishness in this manner, thinking it must offend the ancestor spirits to see the feather of a warrior’s true honor attached to a white man’s wig, which the old man considered to be like a mere fool’s hat.

But Like Wood had scoffed, pointing out that some of the warriors wore their eagle feathers attached to the three-cornered soldier hats they had brought from the battlefield. “You are too serious, Father,” he said, grinning, and Tuck Horse grunted at him and shook his head. Like Wood said, “You wear your eagle feather tied in white hair, Father. Why should I not, also? Ha ha!”

Tuck Horse himself had taken one scalp at the battle. He had walked down Girty’s Town trail from the packhorse camp that morning before the

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