One of his favorite stories was that of the campaign against the Catawba. “I was a runner and scout,” he would begin, and then if any visitors were in our house, he would say, “Two-Falling, tell them what year you think this was.”

“About 1731.”

“About 1731. We had set our faces against the Catawba and the Cherokee—we needed the use of their hunting grounds. At the mouth of the Red River, at the place called the ‘low, dark, and bloody lands,’ my friend and I discovered that the Catawba had word of our war-venture and had set an ambuscade. We had to keep ourselves from shrieking out our joy, from yelling out the scalp-whoop as we made our way back to our brothers. We trembled and smiled and smiled. We had a great secret between us.” Hiokatoo’s face was shining.

“Twelve hundred. When we swept down on the ambuscade from the rear, we fought for two days and many of us fell, but by the great sunglobe’s setting on the second day we had massacred twelve hundred Catawba.”

His hand contracted and relaxed, contracted and relaxed. Mary folded her arms.

“From that day”—Hiokatoo’s face registered a kind of awe—“after those two or three days, the Catawba were heard of less and less. Now they are no more.”

And if a visitor was present, say, some kindly white neighbor who came from time to time to keep him company, he would lean forward; if he could have seen to clutch someone’s sleeve, he would have done so. “Now,” he said, “tell me this. Had you ever heard of the Catawba before this day?” His unseeing eyes, under the folds of lids, were set; they nearly glittered in anticipation.

“No,” the visitor would say, “I have not.”

“No. See? You have not. Because of that very massacre at the place that I think is now called Clarksville. Do you know,” he would say without pausing, “what most of us fought with in those days?”

“No. Tomahawks?”

“The bow and the arrow. Those were the days of the bow and the arrow.”

These wars against foreign tribes was always the topic of conversation when whites were present. His hand would announce the story.

“Once—once we took some Indian prisoners and tied them up. Then we let little boys shoot arrows at them, for practice. The boys were clumsy with their bows and they had to shoot many arrows before those Indians died.”

Here there would be silence.

Hiokatoo’s hand would open and close, open and close until he spoke his next sentence. “But of course you know about the French war.”

The visitor would say yes, of course, he knew about the French war.

“Do you know something about that?” Hiokatoo said.

“What is that?”

“I was at every river battle.”

“River battle.”

“I was at every battle fought on the Susquehanna and Ohio Rivers during the French war. Every one.”

“Oh, my,” our visitor would say.