The Movies
by George Gauthier
Chapter 4
Frontier Militia
First up in the film series was a retelling of mountain man John Colter's story where it happened, in North America. The Nantahala Mountains right here in North Carolina were standing in for the Rocky Mountains. The region boasted locations at least as stunning as those used in "The Last of the Mohicans".
The Nantahala region is the second wettest in the country after the Pacific Northwest. Its name derives from an expression in Cherokee meaning "Land of the Noonday Sun." In some spots, direct sunlight reached the bottom of the forest's deep gorges only when it was high in the sky at midday. The terrain varied in elevation from a high of fifty-eight hundred feet to a low of twelve hundred, hence its many spectacular waterfalls.
Our locations in two national forests were connected by the scenic Cherohala Skyway some forty-three miles along. Its name is a portmanteau of Cherokee and Nantahala, the two national forests through which it passes.
Most of the filming would be done on location rather than in a studio or in a green room as so many productions are these days and suffer for it. The chief cast was myself, Kyle, and Ramón. Character actor Jess Miner, a full-blooded Mohawk Indian and Native American activist (as a nod to the late Russell Means), played the wily Shawnee chief who was not so much a villain as an antagonist.
Now in our retelling of the tale Ramón played a Shawnee but one who was deeply moved by the exotic beauty of the stunning white boys his tribe had captured. The shorter one had hair the color of corn silk while that of the taller boy was an auburn the color of autumn leaves.
[No prizes for guessing who played whom.]
Heartbroken at the thought that two youths graced with such exotic beauty would be slain out of hand, Ramón's character proposed the ordeal of the Run of the Arrow. The Shawnee were already in a good mood from their success in driving out the white invaders of their territory, so the tribesmen readily agreed that it would make good sport to allow the two white captives a decent head start and then give chase. There was nothing like a good chase to get the blood up, and the occasion would give everyone, even the braves who arrived too late for the battle, a chance to strike a blow against their enemy.
The Run of the Arrow was a footrace in which the prize for the winner was survival not a trophy. A brave would fire an arrow as far as he honestly could. That would be our head start, mine and Kyle's. If we got clean away, more power to us. That would just prove that we were worthy warriors and had been favored by the Great Spirit.
I played Axel Van Zorn, who, despite his Dutch surname, was of German extraction from a family of the Shenandoah 'Deitch' (sic) who, with the Scots-Irish, had settled the fertile valley between the Blue Ridge and the Appalachian Mountains twenty-odd years earlier in the 1730s. Since the script was written with me in mind, this Axel was described as a comely lad, short and slender and pretty as a girl with delicate features, high cheekbones, large green eyes and a blond thatch on top, which describes me perfectly.
My comrade in arms was another youth named Johnny Strang, a lithe redhead a hand's-breadth taller than myself. Both of us started out dressed much like our Indian enemies. In the heat of high summer, we wore only a deer hide loincloth passed through a cord wound low around our hips. The strip of hide was only two hands breadths wide in any event, and the color of the deerskin nearly matched our tans. From any distance, it was not easy to tell that we weren't entirely nude. Otherwise except for moccasins and loincloths, our tanned bodies were bared for all to see, like naked savages only without the war paint.
We did carry matching leggings and hunting shirts perched in a roll atop our packs which were loaded with jerky, pemmican, and way bread. All of us also carried a powder horn, canteen, skinning knife, and tomahawk on thongs thrown over one shoulder. The rifle was never carried by a sling but only held in the hand.
The opening scenes showed the outbreak of war along the frontier, the inevitable atrocities of frontier warfare, and the march of our militia into Indian Country intent on retaliating against the Shawnee for their latest depredations. As our column marched along, one of the militia men nodded toward me and joked:
"Is that an Indian buck snuck in among us?" His comrade replied:
"Except for the hair he's the right color, I'll grant you, but he is more like a fawn than a buck," another joked.
I pretended not to have heard.
My character Axel was one of the new recruits who recognized that he had to endure a certain amount of teasing and testing. So, as scripted, I just smiled at that remark or others like it, as when another militiaman opined that Axel's blonde thatch would be quite a prize scalp for some Indian brave.
Finally one of the teasers asked if I really knew how to use my rifle. With a big grin on my face, I pointed to a distant target, a dark knot in a tree about the size of a man's head and over two hundred yards away.
"Watch" I said simply, then raised my rifle, aimed smoothly, and fired. The Captain was looking through his telescope to observe the shot. Snapping it closed, he said simply.
"That would be one dead Indian".
Of course the impact seen through the telescope was produced entirely by special effects in post production, though in real life I could have made the shot easily enough.
The men nodded, now accepting Axel as one of them. He had proved not only competent but personable, someone who could take a joke as his expense. A good comrade then for the march. My companion and soon to be lover Johnny Strang, a year older, was already known as a hunter and marksman.
Our campaign was a raid against two villages followed by a hasty withdrawal lest we be overwhelmed as the Indian Country across the Alleghenies rose up en masse. It was while we crossing a wide stream that our characters Axel and Johnny Strang got separated from the others. The stream was too deep to ford so the militiamen had to swim for it. Stripping off their clothing, they floated their gear across on makeshift rafts: tree limbs, shirts or leggings stuffed with grass, etc.
As part of the rear guard, the two youths stripped and were waiting to cross when several others got into trouble in the water. Both good swimmers, the youths plunged into the water and helped the men to safety on the far side. Suddenly the Indians attacked the remaining rear guard cutting them down to a man. The youths had to abandon their own clothing and gear. The men whom they had rescued passed them tomahawks from their own packs, so the youths would at least have some kind of weapon. Then everyone ran off down the trail.
Shots rang out from the high ground overlooking their escape route dropping the other two men. Cut off from the main body the boys lunged off the trail into the forest to get away from the ambush. They managed to escape immediate detection and came upon another nearly overgrown trail. After half an hour of careful movement they paused to take stock then decided it was best to move away from the vicinity of the running battle between the militia and the Shawnee braves.
By then the fugitives could no longer hear shots from the main action. Not having any food with them they stopped and gathered berries and dug up roots like wild carrot and, less appetizingly, grubs found under a log. At least the youths had plenty of water from a stream. With evening upon them, they found a small grassy area surrounded with brush and settled down for the night.
So began the big love scene of the movie. Now a cinematic love scene is anything but erotic, not even with your real-life boyfriend or rather even less so. So many people were looking on, standing just out of frame, cameras poking at you plus a sound boom loomed overhead. It was hard not to be self-conscious about all of it, especially for essentially amateur actors. Above all we must never look into the camera and pierce the so-called fourth wall, a term derived from the theater.
Though it was a warm night, it was only natural for the two youths to lie close together, to hold each other protectively. They were so very vulnerable, alone, unclothed, afraid they would be killed or, what was worse, captured and tortured in ways only fiends could imagine. Their dialogue gave viewers a glimpse into the history of Johnny Strang.
Axel asked hesitantly about Johnny's family, learning that his companion was the youngest of five brothers who with their widowed father farmed a large holding a day's walk to the north. His mother had died bearing him. Though he did not quite say so, he was a virgin with females. In a male version of the characteristic inbreeding of hillbilly society he had been pressed into service to provide relief for his sexually frustrated brothers, Johnny admitted that he actually liked with males, though he himself preferred to be versatile and not endlessly on the bottom.
Axel was shocked at his companion's frankness yet enthralled by his beauty. Axel had not realized how lovely a young male body could look in the moonlight. Johnny had a lighter tan than Axel's late summer color, but his skin positively glowed in the light of the full moon. He was virtually hairless except under his arms and at the fork of his legs which he kept shaved lest he harbor critters down there.
Axel was enthralled but afraid to say anything, afraid that Johnny would not welcome an advance from a submissive boy like himself. I loved playing this character who was so refreshingly naive, so unlike my own more worldly and assertive self.
Axel was so obviously and anxiously working up to making an advance that Johnny almost laughed in his face. Instead he simply leaned forward and kissed the younger boy on the lips, pressing to maintain contact as Axel drew back in surprise, drinking in the sweetness of his companion. For his part Axel tried to both smile and kiss Johnny back at the same time, rather difficult anatomically.
"Oh, Johnny. I never realized..."
"That I had my eye on you, running around in next to nothing? Of course I did. Now hush, let's make love. Even if it is the last night of our lives, tonight we have each other."
Our characters' eagerness for each other was born not only of lust but of comradeship and an affirmation of life in the face of mortal danger. In the age old response to the threat of extinction, our sexual desires drove us to consummate our eagerness for each other. Each was happy to find that the other was not a clumsy virgin, but a lover of some experience. Our kisses and caresses grew more ardent, even frenzied, so much so that we both actually got hard, which had to be fixed in post-production.
[These days post production can fix all kinds of bloopers which producers used to shrug off hoping the audience would not notice at or at least not too often. Sharp eyed movie goers have pointed out a modern pickup truck driving along a road in a winter scene from the John Ford movie "The Searchers" and jet contrails in the sky in a pirate movie. An especially frequent giveaway was the pair of the tire tracks made by the camera truck as it rolled along in front of a group of stage coach robbers or a posse in the Old West or Knights in Shining Armor in Merry Olde England. In one notorious instance, as Roman soldiers march toward the camera, the tops of the high rises of Los Angeles can be glimpsed beyond the sky line of the hills surrounding storied Bronson Canyon.]
That night of passion very nearly was the last night of the lives of the fleeing militiamen. The next day the Shawnee tracked the young men to the site of their tryst the evening before. The lingering smell of sex brought smiles to their faces. So, a pair of young lovers. That would make their capture so much the sweeter for their cruel games. Alas by mid afternoon Axel and Johnny found themselves captives of the Shawnee.
Escape and Evade
That capture lead to Ramón's first big scene where he speaks against the notion of turning us over to the Shawnee women to torment. It was Shawnee braves who made the captures and they should be the ones to have fun with their victims, not stay-at-home womenfolk. Ramón proposed an exciting alternative, one which would entertain the warriors far more than merely standing around watching the women of the tribe visit appalling tortures on our bound bodies. The captives should forced to endure the ordeal of the Run of the Arrow. And so we were off on a run for our lives.
Now both of us were in great physical shape. Thanks to our nude runs on Dyson's estate our feet had developed protective callouses. We could run just fine as long as we did not bring down a heel on a pebble which could inflict a stone bruise.
As the script would have it, Ramón had more in mind than just giving us a chance. He very much wanted us to survive. So when he took his turn as their front runner, he actually caught up to us by taking a short cut only he knew about. Axel and Johnny thought they were done for, but with his limited command of English and sign language, Ramón told us to hide and indicated that he would lead the chase past us.
With gestures as much as words he indicated that our best chance to get back to the white settlements was not to head directly toward them. Going east would find us running into the thick of the pack of Shawnees chasing the main body of the militia, not a good idea for two boys entirely unarmed and without food or supplies of any kind, not to mention naked and barefoot, our hides already cut by brush and thorns.
Ramón advised us to head southwest rather than east which was the way Shawnee would expect us to head. Also an eastward track would be against the lay of the land, crosswise to every stream and ridge line. The grain of the land lies south and west. The idea was to run with the grain of the land for a day or two before we turned east. We could make better time that way and head back north only after we crossed the mountains. So the two youths we portrayed turned and ran southwest hoping to put some distance between themselves and the pursuit.
Now all of this location shooting took more than the two or three days we had been given to expect. Kyle and I tramped around the woods of North Carolina for over a week, stark naked every moment we were on the set after that first day with the militia. Alas insect repellent could do only so much.
Meanwhile the Indians held a powwow about the reports they had gotten from hunters who had spotted us or crossed our trail. By then the militia was long gone and out of their reach, so the Shawnee's main target shifted to recapturing Yellow Hair and Red Hair as they called the youths. It was known that both were barefoot and naked and unarmed. Such naked prey should prove easy to track down.
Axel and Johnny's progress was slowed by the need for caution in Indian country, by delays to disguise their trail, and by the necessity of foraging as they went. To avoid leaving tattletale barefoot tracks on softer ground they crossed rocky or stony terrain when they could, hard as it was on their bare feet or waded the length of small streams, up to their knees and sometimes up to their hips, occasionally cooling themselves off with a quick dip. That way they left no trace of their passage.
For the next scene the camera caught Axel from behind as he walked in front of Johnny letting the red-head ogle the alluring movements of his slender physique marking his much the loveliest faun in the forest, so very young and lovely. How lucky Johnny felt to have met such a boy in the middle of a war. Their pairing couldn't end there. They had to survive, to explore their love.
By afternoon, the youths could hear sounds of pursuit. The Indians had gained on them. Maybe a dozen were closing in. The two boys could not fight so many foes, not even when attacking from ambush, especially not with just hand-held or thrown rocks. Looking up the slope of Axel spotted a large wasp's nest hanging from a tree which inspired a stratagem which, with any luck, would shake off pursuit. He told Johnny to let himself be seen and to decoy the war party, make it chase him. As the war party arrived at the bottom of the slope, Axel chopped the wasp nest free and let it tumble down the hill to roll amongst the Indians. Consternation!
CGI in postproduction provided the angry wasps which swarmed out of their paper nest, buzzing and stinging -- unleashing pandemonium among their pursuers who scattered, slapping at the insects and yelping plaintively. It gave the boys a chance to put some real distance between them. They laughed as they ran, chortling over the way they had at least temporarily discomforted and discouraged the Indians.
That evening, they celebrated their close call with energetic lovemaking on the mossy bank of a creek, hidden from view by heavy brush. The moss was like a soft bed, as the boys rolled about, suppressing giggles, exploring their young bodies. Axel liked the springy support which the moss gave his back as he lay heels high, Johnny on top, thrusting into him lustily, both boys kissing and stroking each other. Though the moss left streaks, the stains washed off easily enough in the morning. The sand they used to wash with might have been harsh on the skin but left it clean and tingling.
By the next day, the Indians had closed the gap the wasps had opened up. One of them incautiously let out a yelp of delight, giving the boys warning of the close pursuit. They ran as fast as they could, looking frantically about for some further way to delay the party that was after them. If only they had the means to set a fire to create a barrier between their parties.
Suddenly deliverance was at hand. Down slope a black bear cub was rolling in a meadow, its mother nearby nosing about a small creek for crayfish. The boys threw stones at the cub then ducked behind bushes. Fortunately the wind was blowing toward them carrying it away from Mama Bear. She looked up in alarm as the cub bawled and saw only the Indians not the boys. She charged.
The Indians were caught by surprise and reeled from the charge of the angry and protective mother bear. Two Indians with flintlock muskets got off wild shots but missed. In her anger and fear for her cub, the bear mauled three of the Redskins. The rest armed only with bows and spears scattered while the bear and the cub ran into the woods. Meanwhile the boys took to their heels and got far ahead of pursuit since the Indians took quite some time to collect themselves and tend to their injured, eventually leaving three of their number at a nearby village to heal.
The boys were in high spirits as they ran along. With such a good head start they had an excellent chance of escaping back to the settlements, so they ran at as fast a pace as they could maintain, less worried about being spotted. Their lack of caution was understandable if not entirely excusable. As they crossed a stream, they came upon a young Shawnee woman digging roots for the pot. Her toddler had his back to the root ball of a large wind-fallen tree with nowhere to run. The mother might have tried to get away, but not without her child. The two youths were in a quandary. Their captives would surely raise the alarm, if they let them go.
"Yes, of course she will tell the warriors, but we cannot kill her or her child, Johnny," Axel insisted, his voice shaking with emotion. "We are soldiers, not murderers."
"You are right, Axel." Johnny said with a sigh. "I didn't sign up to kill women and children especially not a mother and child."
With some reluctance, they motioned to the mother to take her child and go. The young woman was mystified at this unexpected mercy from strangers but grateful. She picked up her child, paused, then reached into her pouch and gave them the pemmican she had brought with her for their lunch. As the boys ate hungrily she looked at the two youths, only then fully taking in their nudity. Axel and Johnny saw how she looked at them, the way a young woman looks at a young man, and moved their hands protectively over their groins. This sudden attack of modesty struck all of them as utterly comical in the circumstances and everyone burst into nervous laughter. Smiling and waving the Indians on, the youths resumed their march, trying to disguise their direction of travel.
The woman carried the news about her remarkable encounter with the much sought after Yellow Hair and Red Hair and the mercy they had shown her and her child. They must have known she would tell of their passing. Some of the local braves were for taking up the pursuit of the white boys, but the chief said that his villagers should let them go. The Indians had to honor the young whites had spared two lives they could so easily have taken to protect their own. The chief did inform the main pursuit about the boys. By then though the boys were nearly a full day ahead.
In the end, that one-day lead was enough. The boys kept stayed ahead of pursuit and finally reached civilization three days later, footsore and weary, scratched and dirty, and very hungry. They drew stares as they walked into a small settlement near the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley utterly unconcerned that they did not have stitch on. A middle aged man greeted the two youths.
"Come sit down and rest, young travelers, and tell us what has befallen you. It would have to be quite a story, if I don't miss my guess."
Then, raising his voice he shouted: "Woman of the house, food and drink for our guests, and blankets to cover their nakedness."
Wearily the boys sat down while their abused feet and other hurts were tended, relating the story of their escape. Afterwards a meal and a bath in the creek then slept the clock, both around in the same bed, looking very young and innocent and beautiful together, like a pair of angels. They woke up to the smell of coffee and bacon and eggs and flapjacks. It was good to be back in civilization.
At the settlement they got word that the Shawnee villages just across the Alleghenies had agreed to make peace, to declare a local truce with the settlers. Though the wider conflict which came to be called the French and Indian war raged on for years, extending eventually to Canada, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Indian subcontinent as the Seven Years' War, their little corner of the world kept an uneasy truce.
Ironically one of the two reasons the Indians opted for peace besides was the militia captain's restraint during the raid when he had spared enough of their corn crop so that they would not starve and be forced to raiding white settlements during winter.
The other reason was the now legendary pursuit and escape of Yellow Hair and Red Hair, two young warriors of courage, great physical beauty, and strong medicine. Though naked and unarmed they had outrun and outfoxed three separate war parties, even calling upon the spirits of the land to assist them by enlisting the denizens of the woods to aid them, to confuse and delay the pursuit, and yet they had gone out of their way to show mercy to an Indian mother and her child.
The story of their escapade passed into legend among both races.
In time, Ramón showed up at the settlement, located the boys, and joined their household.
Now that was story that even Indian activists could approve of.
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