Two Rivers was a man beholden to none. Born a Cherokee, he lived his childhood surrounded by the beauty and life of the Blue Ridge Mountains. So taken was he by the incomparable beauty of that life and the Spirit that moved within it that he swore to forever remain Cherokee. But events would conspire against him. He would not be permitted the things of childhood for very long.
Throughout his boyhood Two Rivers had been instructed to keep one foot in the white world and one foot in the red. Although his father was but a simple woodcutter, he went to school every morning. He learned to cast the white man’s spell of language and letters, of numbers and equations. But every afternoon he went with his father into the forest to take his true education. He learned of the web of life that sustained the Cherokee and that they were all a part of. He learned that the Cherokee must seek to nurture if they in turn would hope to be nurtured. On Sunday morning he was taken to church for instruction in the white man’s scriptures and hymns, but by afternoon he was taken to those places where the Spirit of his Great Father truly moved over the waters for an education that cut straight to the heart of spiritual matters. Day by day Two Rivers grew towards manhood with the head of a white man but the heart and soul of a Cherokee. But he was never truly permitted to grow into a man.
Childhood’s end came to Two Rivers like a thief in the night, with a bayonet pressed into his back and an order to march or die. Two Rivers and all of his family and most of his tribe chose to march, but many of them died anyway. His father, his mother, all of his brothers and sisters and kinfolk; one by one they all fell by the wayside. When Two Rivers finally reached the land that the white government had promised to be his nation forevermore, he arrived as an orphan without a family. So many had fallen he was practically a man without a country.
Two Rivers had paid a terrible price for his manhood, as many tears marked the trail to his new home. Always he would be haunted by his father’s ghost. Always he would clearly see in his mind’s eye the broken and bleeding body of his patriarch expiring slowly and painfully on the side of the road where it had been tossed like garbage. Being without a family, there was nothing to hold him in the new land. Being without a father, there was no one to warn him that revenge cast only his own heart into the grave. Faced with the white man’s orphanage, Two Rivers ran as fast as his feet would carry him into lands still wild and untamed. There he banded together with other orphans to live wild and untamed. But it was not the path of life that Two Rivers and his new tribe walked; it was the path of death.
In his grief, Two Rivers had forgotten the face of his father. They wreaked a bloody and terrible vengeance upon every white man they could find. They fell upon them like highwaymen, cut their throats without warning and without mercy, took all of the gold for which the white man had sold them down the river, and then vanished like ghosts upon the landscape. So great was their thirst for blood that when they came upon a stockade filled with the blue coats of their tormentors, they only looked one to the other and said “Perhaps today is a good day to die.” The fell upon the Blue Coats like thieves in the night, faces streaked with blood, red as demons and screaming like banshees. For most of Two Rivers’ newfound family, it was a good day to die.
The Blue Coats took a sevenfold vengeance upon the band of rebels. Their numbers multiplying like insects, they swarmed across the four corners of the Earth like a pestilence upon the land. The Blue Coats found horses and guns to hunt Two Rivers and his blood brothers like game. So stung they were by the hornets nest they had stirred up, the orphans scattered into the four winds that they might yet stay one step ahead of the hangman. Two Rivers followed the path of the deer, praying for swiftness and cunning as he ran from his predators. Though he knew it not, now only Two Rivers remained to tell their story.
The as yet unsettled lands to the north afforded the freedom fighter with the protection of anonymity for a time, but this did not last very long. Soon white men decided that this land too must be settled, cultivated, and conquered in the name of progress. One by one, the trees that had nurtured and protected Two Rivers were cut down so that rich men could rape the land and build up a bunch of ugly boxes. One by one, the deer that had cared for and nourished Two Rivers were slain as white men hunted with greed, killing more than they could ever eat. Finding no more protection in the forest, Two Rivers traveled west onto the plains. There he saw a strange sight indeed.
At first Two Rivers avoided the fire that cast a red glow into the night, but then he saw that only one man sat beside it. Figuring he had few other chances for survival, Two Rivers decided to approach the stranger. His thirst for blood quenched a long time ago; he hitched his wagon to the hope that this strange man might have wares to sell. Why else would he travel alone unless he was a salesman? As Two Rivers drew near to the firelight, the sight grew curioser and curioser. The man’s muddy clothes marked him as a son of the city, not of the frontier upon which he sat. He was small and lean, and he had none of the calluses that spoke to the hard work needed to sustain one in the countryside. Bit he did indeed have many more supplies than one man could possibly have a use for. He must be a salesman. Two Rivers rode into view and spoke with him. “Sir, I have had a hard ride and I am in need of food. I am wondering if you might have any available for sale. I have gold for the purchase.”
The unfamiliar white man smiled at him and gave him a look of genuine goodwill that ignited Two Rivers’ curiosity even further. He gestured to his side. “I have no need of gold, only of friends to share my fire. Come, sit and eat.” Puzzled at this funny little man and his alien ways, but filled with an inquisitiveness that demanded satisfaction, Two Rivers did exactly that. This white man acted much more like a Cherokee. He gave not for gold but for brotherhood. He did not talk just to hear himself speak, but only gazed at the fire as if contemplating the ways of Spirit. As he took his meat, Two Rivers watched the smoke rise to meet the Heavens and wondered at the things he had seen.