I let go of his hand. “What’s it mean?”
“Panther.”
I nodded. It suited him. “Did you always have that name or did you take it … recently?”
“The name given to me by my mother was Michael. I took my new name when the disease took our parents and elders and we were forced to adopt some of our older and almost forgotten customs.”
“Is that when you added the tattoos too?” asked Peter.
He nodded, still only looking at me. “Why are you here?”
I decided the best way to deal with this panther guy was to be dead honest. Obviously, there were more indians around us right now, how many I had no idea, and I wasn’t exactly sure what had kept us alive to this point, but maybe it was curiosity or even kindness. I prayed it wasn’t the meat on our bones.
“We came from Orlando. Kids are going nuts out there and eating other kids. We just want to find a place where we can live in peace.”
“You do not seem to be a peaceful person to me. You’ve been trained to fight.”
“I’ve been trained to protect myself and my family.” I looked briefly at Bodo and Peter who was now standing beside me, holding Buster in his arms. For the first time in his furry life with me, he wasn’t spazzing out when he had all the right to be. “I don’t go looking for trouble, but when it points an arrow at me or pulls a knife on me, then yes, I’ll fight.”
Kowi looked at Yokci and said, “Nokosi.”
Peter leaned in and whispered, “I think that means butt kicker.”
Kowi smiled. “It means bear. Gentle unless its family is threatened. Not afraid of its own power. Deadly when annoyed.”
I smiled. “Yeah. That about sums me up, I guess.” I didn’t mind being compared to a bear. At least not until turtle-boy spoke up.
“Smell bad, too.”
Peter giggled.
“Hey, watch it, turtle-boy. I haven’t had access to a shower in months. It’s not my fault the friggin world came to an end.”
“So what’d da deal, guys?” asked Bodo. “Are you going to kill us and eat us or what?
Both of the newcomers frowned. “The Miccosukee do not eat human flesh,” said Kowi.
“Yeah, that’s just disgusting,” added Yokci. “Besides, we don’t need to. Kahayatle provides everything we need.”
“That’s why we’re here,” said Peter enthusiastically. “We don’t want to eat anyone or do anything to hurt people, either. We just want to … eat snakes or whatever and leave you alone. Just help us find a place to stay and you’ll never hear from us again, we promise.”
I smiled watching him. He looked so earnest, his eyes all shiny as he bounced on his toes. He was like our little diplomat.
“We’ll help you,” said Kowi.
Yokci folded his arms, not looking all that thrilled with the idea.
“But not for nothing,” Kowi continued.
“We have nothing to give,” I said angrily. “We have barely enough food to last a week for the three of us.”
“You have more than that.”
Another indian came walking up, this one a girl, small and wiry. She didn’t have any tattoos and was fully clothed, her long black hair handing in a braid down her back. “They have military-grade grenades,” she said. “And bikes with a trailer. They took whatever was in the Coleman’s shack.”
“They were dead,” said Peter. “We didn’t steal anything, and we didn’t kill them either.”
“You better not take any of dat stuff,” warned Bodo. “We made a lot of work to get dat here.”
Kowi looked at us impassively. “We’re not interested in your things, although the grenades … we may take those. But no, you have something more valuable to us than these things. If you agree to share it, we will agree to let you live on our land.”
“What’s that?” I asked, ready for anything.
“Fighting skills. We need you to teach us.”
***
I eyed him warily. “You’re going to give us a place to live, on your land, in exchange for krav maga training?”
“Yes. We have weapons that can be used at a distance, but as you can see, when it comes to hand-to-hand combat, our skills are lacking.” He frowned at Yokci who stared at the ground in shame.
I looked at Peter and Bodo. “What do you guys think?”
“I say, hell yes,” agreed Bodo without hesitation. “Dey are a tribe, we are a tribe. Let’s make an accord.”
“You sound like we’re in the model U.N. at school,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s kind of like dat, actually. We are two nations, only very small oness. We each have something to share dat the udder one needs. Togedder we are stronger.” Bodo’s accent was getting heavier with his enthusiasm.
“Well, I feel kind of bad that Bryn’s the only one who could contribute to this … peace accord,” said Peter.
“There will be other things I’m sure you can help with,” said Kowi. “We may be separate people, but we don’t believe in living in isolation. That was the case when the first settlers came to the United States and it’s the case now. Times have changed a lot of things, but not our basic nature.”
“So does that mean you still scalp people who piss you off?” I said.
“I suggest you not try to find out,” said Kowi without missing a beat.
I smiled. I was talking to a fellow badass and it was amazing to think my boys and I might have what was left of the Miccosukee nation watching our backs. It made the prospect of meeting up with canners almost something to look forward to. I held out my hand.
“You’ve got yourself a deal … on one more condition.”
He paused before taking my hand. “What?”
“We keep the grenades, with our promise that we won’t use them on you.”
“You keep half, we get half,” he countered.
I looked at the guys and they both nodded.
“Fine.”
We shook hands, and as soon as they went up and down together one time, a group of crazy birdcalls rang out around us. Bodies were coming out of everywhere, formerly hidden behind trees and clumps of rotted trunks and moss. When everyone was finally gathered in our small space near the hut, there were three of us and twelve of them - eight Miccosukee guys and four girls.
“Wow. I’m glad you made that deal,” said Peter, quietly so only I’d hear him.
I was thinking the exact same thing. Talk about outnumbered.
***
We went back to our canoes, and the entire group of Miccosukee came with us. They all piled into the different boats, making the paddling and rowing a complete breeze. These people knew what they were doing. Kowi rode with me and two other guys who were all heavily tattooed and shaved. Turtle boy was in the boat with Peter and two of the girls. The rest of them were spaced out with Bodo and the formerly empty boats.
“How come you left these canoes and boats with Rachel and her brother?” I asked. It didn’t seem very smart for them to have provided the vehicles that brought us this far towards their home. We could just as easily have been canners.
“They belonged to the Coleman family and were always kept locked up. The last time any of us saw them they were still alive. Rachel was very sick, though.”
“Yeah, well, she asked her brother to stop the pain with a bullet and then he decided to join her,” I said, softly. It didn’t seem right to speak so casually about their pact, especially since if it hadn’t been for their boats, it was hard to imagine what we’d be doing right now - probably still trying to outrun and hide from the canners. We owed them big time.
“I’m not surprised,” said Kowi. “They were close. She took care of him until she couldn’t anymore. Then he took over.”
I thought about Peter and his sister, guessing that it had been the same with them. Lily, I knew, was younger; but Peter was the type that seemed to need taking care of. I could see the back of Peter’s head and his slumped shoulders, telling me he was listening to us.
We took the left turns that Yokci had mentioned earlier and pulled into a small cove of root outcroppings. It didn’t look like anything special to me - it appeared to be pretty much the same as the other place, and there were no huts in site. I tried not to feel suspicious, since the indian kids seemed to be acting normally and none of them were shooting each other any funny looks, but living in this messed up world had made that impossible; now everything and everyone was suspect until proven otherwise. Since I couldn’t get rid of my sense of unease, I worked instead at hiding it behind a smile at the dog.
Buster jumped enthusiastically onto the bank and then ran back and forth, waiting for the rest of us to disembark. He was on happy-dog hyper drive, lifting his head up over and over as if to say, “Come on, guys! This is fun! Let’s go!”
“Leave the boats and things here for now. You can look first and decide if you want to stay,” said Kowi.
Yokci led the way, moving quickly through the heavily wooded area, ducking under moss and low hanging branches, and finally at one point, climbing through a crazy growth of trees whose branches had melded together over the years to create a widely spaced web of wood and leaves. Once I got through to the other side, I realized it was acting as a screen, blocking the view from the boat area of the two small huts we were standing in front of now.
Kowi came up and stood beside me. “These are two chickee huts that you can have, if you want them, in exchange for the training help and the grenades. They have sides you can put up when the rain comes or during the few weeks out of the year it gets cold.”
“Half of da grenades,” said Bodo, pushing past us to go get a closer look. Buster went running after him, looking every bit the klutz as he fell through the roots several times and scrambled like mad to get back on track.
Kowi said nothing more. He just stood in place, waiting for our reaction.
Peter and I followed behind Bodo. I didn’t see as how we had much choice other than to accept Kowi’s offer, really. It’s not like we could walk away and say, Thanks, but no thanks. Even if we wanted to, and I was pretty sure I didn’t, this was almost exactly what we had come looking for; it would have been stupid to turn away when it seemed so right. I’d actually been prepared for something more primitive when we’d set out to live in the swamp.
I stepped up into the closest chickee hut and felt like I’d practically just been offered a canner-free, four-star hotel room. I followed Bodo into the second one and Peter came in behind me. These huts were partially over root systems and partially over water, lifted up above all of it by several feet, on thick poles that almost looked like the ones used for holding telephone wires up in towns. We all stood in the center together, looking around and then back out at the group of fierce-looking indians on the bank.
“So, what do you think?” I asked quietly, trying to have a private meeting with my mini-tribe.
“I think we got very lucky,” said Peter softly.
“I like it,” said Bodo. “But I’m a little bit worried dat dey just accepted us so easily. Dare’s something going on with dem.”
“You know, me too; something bugs me about this whole thing a little. But I don’t see as how we have any other options right now. Do you really think they’d let us say no thanks and row right out of here?”
“Probably not,” said Peter, looking scared now. “So are we staying or testing that theory?”
I looked at their two faces, not wanting to be the one to make the decision for all of us and take responsibility for their lives like that. But they were waiting for me to do it, and I couldn’t imagine chickening out now. My dad had raised me to fight when I was being attacked - to be strong when adversity came my way. Now was not the time to go all wimpy on my friends.
