The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 1): First Time (5 page)

Darius wrote:

"I checked to make sure that whoever had attacked this young man was not around, then I dragged him to the relative shelter of a nearby overhang. There was no good way to move him painlessly and I believe the agony of his broken leg being jostled both woke him up and put him back to sleep. It was many hours before he regained any sort of consciousness, and days before I thought him to be in his right mind.

"I could not speak his language and he, obviously, had never seen a white man, let alone one with blonde hair. He seemed both frightened and defiant towards me but soon realized he was in no condition to refuse my ministrations.

"Through signs and other signals, I discovered that the young man was of a tribe I had not yet heard of: the Cherokee. If what he tells me is true, he comes from a tribe of no little size. Of course, our conversation is very crude and I cannot even be sure I am interpreting him correctly.

"...The Indian I have met cannot be more than fifteen. He has the bravado of many a young man eager to prove he is more mature than his years would indicate. When he tried out the crutch I had fashioned for him today I could see in his eyes that such pain wafted over him that he was near to collapse. Still, he kept his face stoic and proud, acknowledging my assistance with a mere nod of the head before sitting down, obviously worn out. Even in his poor state, he still insists on doing as much around camp as he possibly can. I have given up worrying that he will overdo too soon as it seems that he is tireless even when in pain.

"The young man, whom I call Justin—in honor of my father—has shown me how to make a travois. I gather that these are usually pulled behind a horse, but with this one I will be the beast of burden. I am sure Justin would try to walk back to his village on his own, but I don't think even he would make it. I am also interested in making friends with his people—if possible—as winter is coming on and I fear to push on too far without knowing what the conditions might be like in these parts during the winter months."

Darius was able to take the young brave (whose name later proved to be, simply, Bear) back to his village. Their arrival was greeted with shock for, not only had they begun to suspect Bear had been killed, no one in the village had ever seen a blonde man before. (Though it may be assumed that there would at least be legends of DeSoto and his men—which would have contributed to their fears.)

Over the next few days, Darius was treated with a sort of wary curiosity by the Cherokee villagers. They were impressed by his fine, Pennsylvania rifle (though two of the older men had seen rifles before when traveling in the Spanish lands to the southwest and the French lands to the south), but were most fascinated by his hair. Even the men of the village would reach out cautiously and touch it, apparently expecting it to have magical powers or be an illusion. Darius remarked in his journal that, up until the moment they first saw him bleed and realized how like them he really was, he probably could have sold locks of his hair for use in curative powders and all sorts of potions.

He makes no mention of the circumstances in which they saw him bleed.

Chapter Four

Garison’s Journal

Date still unknown (March 16?)

My sleep was very fitful last night. It was not for lack of a place to sleep, and I can't really blame it on the lack of quiet—though the meadow was rather noisy. I had just lain down in the grass, using my bag of clothes for a pillow, but discomfort was not the problem with my sleeping, either. My problem was with the stars.

When I started scanning the sky to make my computations, I had spotted immediately that something was different about the Big Dipper—and all the other constellations I could find. It was not just that I was seeing them from a different latitude (by a few degrees) and longitude (by many), there was something amiss. They were not where they should be. It was just barely tangible, but I couldn't grasp it. It was rather like a non-musical person like me, who hears a song and knows that a certain note is off but can't quite tell whether its because the note was flat, sharp or natural and was supposed to be something else. The constellations were there, they were just a little bit off.

Finally, I forced the problem of the stars from my head and was able to drift off to sleep. It was a sleep filled with strange and foreboding dreams. In them, I was trapped in the meadow and—try as I might—I could not return to La Plata Canyon. I kept trying to walk out of the meadow only to find myself back in the middle after a few steps. Ever so often, I'd get tired of this dream and wake myself up, but after I had fed the fire and gone back to sleep I was back in that same dream.

Then there were the meadow noises. I cannot imagine being able to sleep well with all the noise the birds in this meadow make. I have often heard people say they were going to go out to the country for peace and quiet—and I had said it myself; but I was referring to a house in the country. With the cacophony of birds, crickets and frogs, there is no quiet in this country. Not like the La Platas, where all sensible animals and insects look for some place warm when the sun goes down. If you are looking for quiet, my money says you get more of it down by the railroad yard than you would in this meadow.

Wherever he was, he supposed his first order of business was to get back home. He briefly wondered why that would be his first order of business. He had no family. He had very few friends.

"Two," he muttered to himself. "I have two friends. And one of them I have not idea how to contact."

He had seen that friend just the day before. As he lay there on the hard ground, trying to sleep, his last visit with Tex kept replaying through his mind. Why, he suddenly wondered, did the thought that it was his last visit with Tex stick in his mind so?

Excerpt from
A Fitch Family History by Maureen Fitch Carnes

Darius records that he stayed with the Cherokee through the winter of 1779-80, learning from them and trying to find news about the west. While many of them had traveled some distance in their lifetime, Darius could find none who knew anything about the lands beyond the great river (which later proved to be the Mississippi).

Darius wrote:

"I find their reluctance to speak about the western lands surprising as I have found them be an otherwise fearless people. I am most curious, though, about a legend I have heard spoken of more than once in this village and also by elders in villages I have been taken to as a visitor.

"Though no one seems to have seen the beast themselves, they all speak of grandfathers or uncles who once saw a beast which sounds to me like some sort of hairy elephant. Having seen elephants only in picture books, and having always been told that none exist on this continent and never have, I was at first skeptical of their legend. The fact that the legend is so wide-spread, however, makes me wonder. How could a people who had never seen an elephant invent one? Was an extremely large buffalo sighted by a distant ancestor and the story has somehow grown into this? If so, how could some story teller invented the long nose? Why invent the long nose? Was there really such a creature as they describe? Are all these stories just the outgrowth of some fable told to children centuries ago?

"If, and I hesitate to even admit to such a possibility, these creatures really did once roam these lands, where are they now? Somewhere back in the woods, might I one day find one of these hairy elephants still living?

"Somehow, I feel that chasing after this mythical beast is not the mission General Washington sent me on, but it is an idea that has my interest."

Chapter Five

Garison was exceedingly glad when dawn began to finally break over the meadow. While the first rays of sunlight seemed to increase the volume of the birds' warbling, it was gratifying just to be able to get up and face a new day.

Garison was awash with conflicting feelings as he used a little of his water to clean up, then changed into fresh clothes. His joints were stiff from sleeping on the ground and the cold, but the water from the stream—which he had decided (for no empirical reason) was not poisonous—refreshed him and prepared both his mind and body for the day ahead as he splashed it on his face. On the one hand, his machine had proven to be a remarkable success in the realm of world travel, but it seemed to be an even more remarkable failure at what it was built to do. All that was left was to, as the saying went, go back to the drawing board.

The first step, though, was to get somewhere with a telephone and find a way to get transportation back to the canyon. The element of this plan that most irritated Garison was that to do so would mean to somewhat expose his machine. He reminded himself that no one would have the slightest idea what it did, but he still hated the thought of people finding out about its existence, for that could only lead to questions. And what if someone started wondering how he had gotten all the way from the western slope of the Rocky Mountains to the east coast of the Soviet Americas without having booked airplane passage or anything? Then, they might further wonder why he couldn't get back the same way. How would he explain that?

Try as he might, Garison could see no signs of industrialization—or even habitation—in any direction. He had thought that, with the light of dawn, he would be able to spot the smog that would indicate a city—or, at least, the smoke of a chimney. The east coast was, after all, almost one solid city from its northern tip to the Shenandoah valley and he found it hard to believe that there was no sign of humanity around him.

Of course, he reasoned, maybe his calculations had been way off and he wasn't anywhere near the east coast. What if that salt smell he was detecting was because he was near the Pacific Ocean? As the idea hit him, he realized how cautious he would have to be. If he were near the Pacific Ocean, then that would mean he was in the Japanese Americas. If that were true, he was on enemy ground and had better be more careful than he had ever been in his life. Capture, with Japan preparing for war (if the rumors were true), could very easily mean his summary execution as a spy.

Still, he had to get moving and the best course he could think of was to follow the stream. Even in a society with plumbing (which most of the Soviet world had) cities and individual homes were still located near water. It was a necessity and a holdover from the days before easily accessible plumbing. And traveling downstream, he knew, would increase his chances of finding people as people tended to converge at the same points streams converged and became rivers and rivers converged to become...he let the thought die there because he wasn't sure where to go with it.

Keeping the stream in sight, Garison stayed back in the woods in the hopes that, when he did come upon people, he would see them before they saw him. The going was fairly easy in the woods, moreso than it would have been in the pine forests of the La Platas, but what continued to strike him most was the absence of fences. Quoting from Lewis Carol, Garison muttered, "Curiouser and curiouser."

He followed the stream for some time before coming to his first sign of human habitation: a dirt road. It was really just two ruts cut into the grass that wound through the forest and crossed the stream at an easy ford. In a place or two, Garison could see where stumps had been cut down or pulled up to make travel on the road easier, but it was not, he knew somehow, an industrialized road. In fact, it looked to him as if the tracks he could see in the dirt had been made fairly recently, and by narrow wheels of either wood or iron. A close inspection of a few yards proved to Garison that no rubber tires with tread had been on the road in some time—if ever. Of course, he could only judge accurately what had passed along the road since the last rain.

Still quoting Lewis Carol, Garison decided his best bet to find a phone or radio was to follow the road, but he wasn't sure in which direction to look first. The road ran, roughly, east to west and the stream he had been following ran northwest to southeast (which had seemed to him to bare out his original assumption of being on the east coast though it was by no means definitive). Still guessing that any settlements would be built near water, Garison decided to go right, or east, on the road. He continued to keep unobtrusively to the trees, but he was beginning to wonder why as he still had seen no signs of people.

The road started up an incline and, at the top of the ridge, Garison thought from the looks of things that he was going to be forced to break from cover before he could get back into a forest. He eased up to the crest of the ridge and looked over into a wide valley that wasn't going to provide him much cover at all. But his heart lifted when he saw the wisps of smoke coming from a small town—really no more than a village.

He lay down on the ridge—wishing again for binoculars—and reconnoitered for a while. He could see people moving about, and from the distance they didn't appear to be either Asian or Hispanic, but he couldn't be sure. The architecture was not of a sort he was used to, but neither did it appear to be the kind he associated with the formerly Spanish lands on the west coast.

Garison looked around and could see no way to approach the village without being seen without going miles out of his way. Besides the obvious drawback to such a circuitous route, there was the problem of explaining, even if caught by "friendlies", why he was trying to sneak into or around town. If the people were not enemies, then his best bet was to approach the town in as non-threatening a way as possible. It occurred to him that that might also be the best way to approach enemies. "When in doubt," a somewhat larcenous old philosophy professor of his used to say, "Be honest."