Circle of the Ancestors Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Also by Susan Gabriel

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: The Fall

  Chapter 2: The Casino

  Chapter 3: Grandmother

  Chapter 4: The Dream

  Chapter 5: The Red Hawk

  Chapter 6: Buried Treasure

  Chapter 7: Riddles

  Chapter 8: Lost

  Chapter 9: The Path

  Chapter 10: Savages

  Chapter 11: The Curse

  Chapter 12: Goodbyes

  Chapter 13: Card Games

  Chapter 14: A Turn for the Worse

  Chapter 15: A New Hiding Place

  Chapter 16: To Catch a Thief

  Chapter 17: The Thief

  Chapter 18: Betrayal

  Chapter 19: Peaceful Warriors

  Chapter 20: Connections

  Chapter 21: The Curse

  Chapter 22: A Special Visitor

  Chapter 23: Confrontation

  Chapter 24: The Decision

  Chapter 25: Gratitude

  Chapter 26: Reunions

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Interview with the Author

  Sneak Peek

  Other Books by Susan Gabriel

  Circle of the Ancestors

  A Native American Hero's Journey for All Ages

  Susan Gabriel

  Wild Lily Arts

  Circle of the Ancestors - A A Native American Hero's Journey for All Ages

  Copyright © 2014 by Susan Gabriel

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  ISBN 978-0-9835882-6-9

  Wild Lily Arts

  ALSO BY SUSAN GABRIEL

  Fiction

  The Secret Sense of Wildflower

  Temple Secrets: Southern Humorous Fiction

  Grace, Grits and Ghosts: Southern Short Stories

  Seeking Sara Summers

  Quentin & the Cave Boy

  Nonfiction

  Fearless Writing for Women

  Available at all booksellers

  in print, ebook and audio formats.

  DEDICATION

  To Massimilla

  for encouraging me to trust the process

  CHAPTER 1: THE FALL

  Morning light filters through the valley. Vast mountain ranges surround Sam like ancestors who circle to watch his every move. At times he isn’t sure if they are here to help or hinder. He places a careful foot on the rocky path, letting each step settle before taking the next one, as his grandmother taught him. A misstep on his climb could mean a disastrous fall, or even death.

  With slow and steady progress, Sam and his dog, Little Bear, ascend the mountain. Mountains are sacred to the Cherokee people and Sam’s climb is meant to honor them. He reaches an out-cropping of rocks fifty feet before the grassy summit and stops to rest. Water from the last rain gathers in the cleft of a boulder and Little Bear drinks it. As a puppy he looked like a black bear cub, which is where he got his name.

  “We’re almost there,” Sam tells Little Bear, but maybe he is reassuring himself. The climb is not easy.

  As Sam pulls his way to the top, he thinks of how his grandmother would be proud. He wants to be a warrior someday. A real one. Not a fake one like his dad who poses in tribal costume in front of a souvenir shop near the casino whenever he needs gambling money. Tourists take photographs and leave tips, never knowing the truth.

  Grandmother says becoming a true warrior will involve a test sent by the ancestors. Sam doesn’t like tests, especially the ones he takes in school. But Grandmother reassures him this trial is different. It will call on all his strength and change him from the inside out. Sam likes this thought. He needs things to change.

  At the summit—an altitude of 4500 feet—the vista stretches in every direction. Crisp air fills Sam’s lungs and the early morning mist feels cool on his face. Fog nestles in the valley below, like a long, white snake zigzagging its body around the hills. Above the fog rises an orange and yellow sun cresting a distant peak.

  “Hey look, we’ve got a visitor,” Sam says to Little Bear, pointing to the sky. He blocks the sun with his hand to make out what looks like a red-tailed hawk. It is rare to see one.

  For several seconds the raptor darts upward, as if racing with the sun to see which of them can go higher. The great bird holds steady against the wind, rising and falling on the currents. Its wide wings stretch like fingers reaching for greater heights. Rust-colored feathers ring its white chest. Sam stretches out his arms to imitate the hawk.

  What’s it like to soar? he wonders.

  At the top he bows in the four directions as his grandmother taught him, thanking the mountain and his ancestors for letting him pass. He wonders why the mountain has called him here. Is it simply to pay respect? Sitting on a rock, he eats the biscuit and honey he brought from home and feeds Little Bear the crumbs. Up here, life makes sense. People are small and unimportant and the landscape is what is great. The land doesn’t have to pretend it is something it isn’t to survive.

  After completing his brief ceremony, Sam joins a narrow trail that descends the mountain in a different direction. He has never taken this path before, although his grandmother has told him about it. According to her, it was once used by Europeans who traded beads and blankets with the Cherokee. Through the openings in the trees, Sam sees the red hawk soar high above, as if intent on not losing him. The Cherokee are members of the bird clan, one of seven clans of the Eastern Band. Is the hawk a part of his clan, too?

  A stream glimmers in the distance below like a tiny ribbon of light. Sam looks at his watch. For nearly an hour he has descended along the narrow trail that will end up a mile from his grandmother’s house at a marked trailhead. Near a small waterfall the ground becomes slippery with moisture and moss. Cautious, Sam walks on the other side away from the ledge. He ambles through thick forest and the path darkens. Mountain laurel reaches up around him in all directions, a wall of deep green. The tightly closed buds are beginning to open and smell sweet and sour at the same time. It is easy to get lost in a maze of mountain laurels.

  Two summers before, a four-year-old boy was lost in the forest. His parents camped on the north slope of Jacob’s Ridge and the boy wandered off. The search continued for weeks. Forest rangers and volunteers, many of them from Sam’s tribe, combed the entire mountain looking for him. They found one sneaker about a mile from the camp and then all traces disappeared. The boy was never found.

  Seconds later, Little Bear growls and then barks, his eyes trained on the trail behind them. Little Bear doesn’t bark often, except to announce an intruder, so Sam turns to look. A loud flutter of wings announces a swooping red hawk, its sharp talons extended. Wind from the bird’s wings rush against Sam’s cheeks. In the next instant, the hawk lets out a keening cry, like an ancient battle call. It swoops again. Before Sam can right himself he falls backward and loses his balance on the path. He stumbles toward the steep edge of the embankment. Meanwhile Little Bear barks wildly, grabbing Sam’s pants with his teeth. For several long, slow seconds Sam clutches mid-air for something to hold onto, but he is too far off center.

  Sam goes over the edge and lands with a loud thud on his back, the breath knocked out of him. His body quickly becomes a sled. He careens, feet first, down the mountain like an avalanche. The forest blurs past him. A voice—he can’t decide if it is outside or inside him—tells him to dig in his heels. Sam obeys. He thrusts his hiking boots into the earth and slows his descent. A cloud of dirt and pebbles
travels with him.

  Trees blur past, then several large boulders. Sam hears a long, desperate scream and realizes it is his own. The stream, no longer in the distance, churns white water below him. Seconds before colliding with a large oak on the bank of the stream, Sam grabs onto the branch of a mountain laurel bush. He clings to safety and finally comes to a halt.

  Waiting for the spinning to stop, Sam holds his head and sputters grit from his mouth. Little Bear barks from the trail high above him, sounding a continuous alarm. Sam is alive, but far from okay. His heart pounds like a drum delivering a warning. He can’t remember a time when he felt more terrified.

  Little Bear makes his way down the steep edge of the mountain creating cutbacks as he goes. For the first time Sam notices that he has fallen along the path of an old rockslide. Boulders lay nearby that would have killed him instantly if he had hit his head.

  Small pebbles are embedded in his palms, as well as the moss and dirt grabbed on his descent. He brushes them away. Little Bear arrives panting and licks Sam’s face. Blood trickles from a cut on Sam’s cheek. He dabs the blood with his sleeve and grimaces. His head pounds as if running a race with his heart. He holds onto Little Bear like a life preserver. His watch is broken, stopped at 8:44 a.m.

  On the ground next to him lies his red Atlanta Braves baseball cap. It was a gift from his mother before she left. He must have hung onto it as he fell. In a rare moment, he allows himself to wish she was here. He could use a mom right now. But life doesn’t always give him what he needs. Sam brushes the dirt from his hair and puts on his cap, now dirty and torn. His breathing returns to normal, although his hands haven’t stopped shaking.

  “I thought that was the end of me,” Sam says to Little Bear. Somehow hearing his own voice makes him not feel so alone. Little Bear licks Sam’s face again, as if he also thinks the fall could have been the end of Sam.

  Like a puppeteer with a fragile puppet, Sam moves his arms and legs. Nothing appears broken, but everything hurts. That crazy hawk seemed to want to make him fall. He leans back to look for the bird, but it has disappeared. He will ask Grandmother if she’s ever known a hawk to attack people. It followed him most of the morning, which is unusual in itself. To the Cherokee, birds are thought to be the messengers between the living and the dead. If this is true, what are the ancestors trying to teach him? How to die at a young age? Yet now that he thinks about it, didn’t the last two days foretell that something big was about to happen?

  CHAPTER 2: THE CASINO

  Two Days Earlier

  When the security guard looks away, Sam slips inside the smoky casino. No one under the age of twenty-one is allowed inside, but Sam is tall and lanky for a thirteen-year-old. Besides, practically everyone who works there is a member of the Cherokee tribe and knows him and his family.

  People perch on stools in front of flashing video machines. Some people appear plugged into the machines by the cords that hang around their necks and are attached to casino credit cards inserted into a slot in the top.

  Rocky, Sam’s father, sits at a quarter slot machine, his bulky body slumped in a familiar pose. Both Rocky and Sam wear their hair straight and long, held back in a rubber band, but all likeness ends there, at least in Sam’s mind.

  Sam claims the empty stool next to Rocky. His ashtray nearby overflows with cigarette butts, and a drink cup perspires a rivulet onto Rocky’s keys.

  “I’m not through yet,” Rocky says. He lights another cigarette without taking his eyes from the glowing video screen, and then deftly presses the buttons to choose which cards to discard and which to keep. He loses money on the hand and then presses the button to raise his bet and deal again. Whether he wins or loses his expression stays the same.

  Sometimes Sam remembers what Rocky was like before he started gambling. He used to play baseball with Sam in a field near their house. But they don’t play anything anymore. In the last year Rocky lost their house from gambling away the monthly payments, and it looks like he is about to lose another job. They already live with Sam’s grandmother.

  The size of three football fields, the casino is designed to look like a Native American hunting lodge. The ceiling, lined with animal figures in flight, resemble cave paintings, outlined in red and purple neon tubes.

  This place is meant to honor our heritage, Sam thinks, but it isn’t the least bit sacred.

  For as long as he can remember, he has felt a special connection to his ancestors. Often he dreams about them.

  Sam fans away the smoke from Rocky’s cigarette. In centuries past, Native Americans smoked pipes on sacred occasions, the smoke rising as prayers to honor the ancestors. But here the smoke from hundreds of cigarettes rise into nothing, sucked away by an overworked ventilation system.

  How can this please the ancestors? Sam wonders.

  Sam feels different from his parents. While they have forgotten their heritage, he tries to claim it. If not for Sam’s grandmother, who holds on to many of the ancient ways, he might feel totally alone.

  The casino owner walks by and Sam ducks behind a machine. For a brief time, Sam was friends with the owner’s son, Tink, short for Tinker. Managers are typically outsiders brought in by the casino.

  “That was a close one, Rocky,” Sam says. Sam has called his father, Rocky, since he was a little boy. It was what his dad wanted.

  “They don’t care about you,” Rocky says. “Not as long as I’m losing.”

  Seconds later, bells and lights spring to life on the row behind them. A balding white man wearing a Hawaiian shirt jumps out of his chair and yells “Jackpot!” He collects a rush of coins in a plastic bucket with the casino’s name on the side. Like a kid in an amusement park, Rocky’s face brightens before darkening again.

  Rocky turns back to his machine, plays another hand and loses again.

  “You used to be different,” Sam tells him.

  Rocky frowns, like maybe he remembers the difference, too.

  When Sam was younger, his dad taught him how to skip rocks across the river. A flat, thin stone works best—one that fits easily between his thumb and forefinger. A good eye is important, too. Not only an outer eye, but an inner one. Sam closes his eyes and imagines a rock gliding across the water’s smooth surface with three perfect skips to the other side.

  “If you stand tall at the end,” Rocky told him, “the outcome doesn’t matter. You’re a better person simply for trying.”

  Sam glances at his slouched father, who lately has stopped trying. When he was younger, Sam admired Rocky. But years have passed since they skipped rocks together. Gambling has changed him.

  Someone taps Sam on the shoulder. Judy, a hostess at the casino, is an old friend of Sam’s mom. When she works, she wears lots of makeup. Sam thinks of it as war paint because she often talks about hating her job.

  “Any luck?” she asks, glancing at Rocky.

  “It would take dynamite to blast him out of that chair,” Sam says.

  Rocky locks in a pair of twos, going for three of a kind.

  Judy offers to buy Sam a soda, her standard joke. Sodas are free in the casino, since alcohol isn’t permitted. But that doesn’t stop Rocky from having a beat-up cooler filled with beer in his old Buick.

  Sam and Judy sit in a small café. Blinking lights outline a drawing of a large teepee, even though it was the Plains Indians who lived in teepees, not the Cherokee. Sam sees mostly white faces here in the cafe, tourists taking a break from the machines. A few look over at Sam’s dark skin and black, straight hair. Even though Native Americans were the first to settle this country, they are still objects of scorn to some people.

  He tilts his chin, as if to say: what are you looking at?

  They turn away.

  After finishing his soda, Sam stands. “I need to get home. I promised to help Grandmother in the garden this afternoon.”

  “Your grandmother is lucky to have you, Sam,” Judy says.

  “Have you heard from Mom?” Sam asks.

&
nbsp; “Not since the post card.” Judy applies a fresh coat of light pink war paint.

  Six months earlier, she received a postcard from Sam’s mom, who now works at a casino in Las Vegas. At the time, Sam questioned why his mom didn’t send him and his younger sister Allie, a postcard, too. But he figures she doesn’t want Rocky to find her.

  “Oh, I forgot,” Judy says. She frees a twenty dollar bill from the pocket of her tight pants and hands it to Sam. “Your mom sent this.”

  It isn’t like Sam’s mother to send money. Besides, Judy admitted she hadn’t heard from her since the postcard. When Sam refuses the bill, Judy stuffs it into his back pocket and kisses him on the forehead before returning to work.

  Grateful for the cash, Sam wipes away Judy’s lipstick. Allie needs new sneakers and this will cover it. This time last year Sam might have shoplifted the shoes from the Dollar Store, but his grandmother made him promise not to steal anymore, even to get things they need. According to Grandmother, warriors don’t steal or do bad things.

  When Sam returns to the machines, Rocky hasn’t moved. A slab of concrete has more give to it.

  “Dad, are you ready to go?” Sam asks. He calls him ‘dad’ to remind Rocky he has a kid to consider.

  Rocky lights another cigarette. As the smoke ascends, Sam sends a silent prayer to the ancestors asking for the gambling spirits to release Rocky so he can be a good father again.

  The flashing cards appear to hypnotize Rocky and for a second Sam understands the attraction. As long as he stares at the cards, he probably doesn’t even think about Sam’s mom.

  The casino, built five years before, created jobs and money in the community. Each child in the tribe now has a college account that money goes into every year. New roads and new buildings have resulted. But to Sam, the casino is a mixed blessing.

  “Why don’t you take a hike on that mountain you seem to love so much,” Rocky says, like he’s tired of being watched.