"What's going on here?"
An excerpt from an experimental serial novel published on the digital spaces, The Promise of Shaconage.
Timpoochee crawled into a clump of bushes just as the delegation from the white man’s council house came thundering down to the river.
Lightning flashed in the darkening sky and Timpoochee saw his father standing among the men at the river’s edge. They were talking rapidly among themselves.
He stood up to signal to his father but collapsed again into the bushes.
Yufala saw the boy fall and rushed to his side.
“Timpoochee!” he said fervently, wiping the boy’s wet brow with his shirt. “What’s going on here? What is this disturbance all about?”
Captain Wills also stepped to the side of the boy and his father.
“What is going on here?” he demanded. “Has this boy done something to my crew?”
Just as suddenly as the lightning, Cornstalk leaped from another clump of bushes just downstream from the stunned Timpoochee and concerned, confused Yufala.
“Father!” he shouted. Those men, on the white man’s ship, they tried to capture Timpoochee and me!”
“What are you doing here and what are you saying?” Yufala shouted back at this elder son, his eyes staring fiercely at his elder son.
“Those white men, they have come to capture all of us! Just now they tried to capture Timpoochee in a fight! They have bear men captured on the ship!”
Timpoochee, still too shaken to speak, listened to his brother squeal his tirade nearly in a frenzy.
Yufala stepped toward Cornstalk, his eyes full of fire and his muscles ripping.