The Eden Hunter: A Novel by Skip Horack

Author:Skip Horack
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical, Florida, Quests (Expeditions), Wilderness areas, Fiction, Literary, Fugitive slaves, Historical fiction, General, Pygmies, Wilderness areas - Florida
ISBN: 9781582436098
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2010-08-17T23:42:27+00:00

HE WAS STILL sitting alone in front of his tent when he saw the soldier Xavier exit the barracks and begin walking toward him. Kau watched as he approached. The young man was barely twenty and had a smooth, rolling walk, a way about him that suggested a thin fish swimming slow, a bass easing along with a current. Xavier squatted down next to him in the dry dirt, then rocked back on his boot heels as he introduced himself.

“I ain’t forgot.”

“And your name is Kau?”

“Yes.”

Xavier began to draw circles in the dust with his long field knife—a small circle swallowed by a larger circle and so on and so forth. Like the other soldiers he wore a British redcoat and pale cotton trousers, a black round-hat fashioned from glossed felt. Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose and landed inside the smallest of the stabbed circles. He looked up. “I think I have heard of you before,” he said.

“How you mean?”

“Pensacola. Do you know it?”

“They had me there once.”

Xavier nodded. “And I lived in Pensacola. Back before I ran myself.”

“So?”

“So I remember some talk. They said a ship once came into the docks carrying a tiny man with teeth like fangs.” Xavier slid the blade of his knife between his fingers, cleaning it. “That could have been you, no?”

Kau shrugged but said yes, he supposed that it could have been, more than likely was.

Xavier sheathed his knife and stood. He pointed at the ground with both hands. “Will you be staying?”

Kau looked up and the rising sun forced him to squint. Xavier existed now only as a tall and dark blurring. “No,” he said to him. “No.”

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