Inheritance of Horses

Indian Givers

INDIAN GIVERS Some time or other, you would say it had rained arrowheads, for they lie all over the surface of America. HENRY DAVID THOREAU MOST of the boys I grew up with were more interested in playing baseball and football than they were in hunting andfishing and camping, but I was different. Until I was twelve or thirteen , I would rather have found an arrowhead than hit a home run. I had no more hope of doing one than the other, however, assuming that most of the arrowheads in our part of the state had already been collected. Had it not been for the Dargans, in fact, I would probably have concluded that arrowheads were as extinct as the ivory-billedwoodpeckers, but the boys of that family proved by continued successthat at least a fewremained. The Dargans lived in the country. Among the five children was a boy of my age named Freddie. Our fathers had been friends before us, so it seemed to me that Freddie and I were born already knowing each other. From weekends spent in his home I learned that finding an arrowhead required a talent, an eye, as hitting a baseball does/Freddie and his brothers had it but not I. We were crossing a plowed field one day, not looking for relics but going fishing. Suddenly,Freddie stopped, stooped over, and picked up something. He brushed the sand off and held it out: "Pretty little bird point." I don't know if my hands actually trembled when I took it—flaked flint, hard and sharp, an artifact of the wild, aboriginal past—but I was in awe, as 7 8 INHERITANCE OF HORSES though it had the power to impart a deeper knowledge of the savage life it stood for. Too quickly Freddie took the arrowhead back and dropped it into his pocket. When we reached the edge of the field, he stooped over and picked up another one. "That's not fair!" I wanted to scream. I kicked at a clod of dirt in consternation, angry, as though I had been intentionally wronged by someone in authority. "Why can't I ever find one?" I whined. The reason, I concluded, was that I lived in town, whereas the Dargans were country people, had been since Indian times. When I learned in fifth-grade South Carolina history of the traffic between Indians and the early colonists, it was Dargans I pictured, trading with naked warriors at the edge of a deep green forest, the same green forest that stretched away from the back fields of Freddie's place to the Pee Dee River swamp. From one generation to the next, I assumed, Dargan forebears had handed down their memories of the old, wild life. I was powerfully drawn to that. In that same South Carolina history book there was a picture of Indians, living beneath the canopy of a spreading, moss-hung oak. They ate acorns, the text said. Sometimes, especially in the fall, Freddie and I might come upon such a tree in the woods, and I would feel so strongly that the place was hallowed by an Indian presence that I could almost make myself believeI saw them, feathers and paint, slipping away through the dim trees. Back at the house, Freddie and his brothers, sometimes eventheir father Mr. Hugh, would speak of Indian ways with such authority and familiarity that I came to regard them as the appointed stewards of Indian lore in our part of the state. No wonder they had a drawer full of arrowheads. It was clearly understood, of course, that the artifacts were theirs and not mine. When I looked covetously upon their riches, they said, "That ain't nothing. You should have seen INDIAN GIVERS 9 the collection Daddy had that got burned up. He had ten times this many." They were referring to a fire that destroyed their parents' house before they were born. How could an arrowhead burn up? I wondered. I had thought that stone would be impervious tofire. "They just all turned to dust. When you tried to pick one up, Daddy said, it just crumbled in your hand." As an adult I spent many years as an avid birder, tramping through fields and forests that must have been strewn with arrowheads, but it was not until I becamea hunter that I began to find them. The first ones...