Follow the River

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  The shoreline swung as the canoes began their slow turn.

  And suddenly the smile froze on Mary’s face, and then melted, and her blood drained out of her head.

  No. No, wait, now … Not that way … NOT THAT WAY!

  She turned a stricken face backward. Goulart was stroking over the canoe’s left side with his paddle, looking quizzically at her bewildered expression.

  “Q’est-que c’est?”

  It was some time before she could speak. By then the canoes were clearly riding the current downstream toward the west. “I … I thought we were going to the salt lick … I thought …”

  “Oui.”

  “But …” she moved her lips and found no words. She pointed back upstream. “Salt …”

  He rested his paddle and pointed downstream. “La bas,” he said. “Much salt. The Lick of the Giant Bones. You will see. Incroyable!”

  The statement was nonsense to her. It did not matter. She had been foolish enough to hope again. And now they were not taking her closer to home after all. They were taking her father away.

  She sat in the belly of the canoe feeling herself again grow small and hard inside as the paddles dipped and the water purled along the thin bark hull that supported her on the surface of the deep eternal water of the great river. After a while she turned halfway to Goulart and asked: “How far?”

  He shrugged, looked skyward, translating distances into English in his mind. “Maybe,” he said, “one hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred miles.”

  He heard her groan.

  “Have no worry, Madame,” he said. “You are in the care of Goulart.”

  They went swiftly with the current for four days, and every hour of the passage only tormented Mary, because each league they skimmed over with such ease was a league farther from home. She watched the magnificent wooded bluffs and cane-covered bottomlands glide by and estimated that the canoes were traveling down the river at least three or four times as swiftly as she would be able to walk up its banks. She did not even pretend to join in with the high holiday spirit of the expedition, with Goulart’s clumsy, bearish attempts to be jolly and charming, with the Indians’ peaceful good humor. They all seemed to be exhilarated by this effortless float down the beautiful river in the finest weather. But Mary was wrestling with her notions of the possible and the impossible. The summer was drawing to a close. Even if she could somehow manage to escape from this party, and keep herself alive in this steep and tangled wilderness, and find her way back by way of dubious landmarks along these rivers, surely such a trek would take as much as two months—into the raw and icy weeks of early winter. Her reason told her such a walk would be utterly impossible, even for a strong man, certainly for an unarmed woman. Reason told her that she must stay with the salt party, return with them when they were done, stay in the Shawnee town through the winter, and hope for a chance to escape the next spring.

  But something as strong as her reason told her that she could not stay with the cruel Shawnees, could not become Goulart’s squaw, could not forsake her existence as a Draper, as the wife of William Ingles. Their family had been devastated and scattered, and unless she and Will could find each other and rebuild the family, there was really no reason to go on living.

  On the fourth day in the canoes, having traveled generally in a westerly direction, they passed the mouths of three rivers, one pouring into the O-y-o from the north, the next from the south, and the third from the north.

  “This they call ‘Pio-quo-nee,’ ” Goulart said, pointing to the first. “It mean, ah, river of high banks.”

  Mary made a note of its name and its appearance. She was studying landmarks again. He called the river mouth on the left bank the P-thu-thoi, which Mary remembered was the word for buffalo.

  And the third river, which they passed in the afternoon, he called La Roque, or stony river. The Indians, he said, called it the Miami-zuh.

  Mary saw these rivers as landmarks to remember, but also as further obstacles to any attempt she might make to escape. They were obviously too wide and deep at their mouths to wade. If I was to follow the O-y-o shore, she thought, I sh’d have to turn up one side of these river mouths and go up that side till I found a shallow place to cross, then come back down t’ other side.

  That, she realized, would add an inestimable number of miles to a march already impossibly long, and her mind shrank from it.

  Afternoon shadows were long when the canoes swung close to the left bank and curved into the narrow mouth of a creek. The O-y-o had turned southward during the afternoon, and now the ascent up this creek, whose waters had a strange tangy odor, was leading them eastward. The sinking sun at their backs laid a yellow pallor over a strange, desolate landscape before them as they moved up the stream.

  It was a shallow, swampy valley, the ground on both sides of the creek treeless and bristling with yellow-gray reeds and clumps of thick scrub. The ground was mucky and full of stagnant puddles. In the shadows, rustlings and splashings told of the flight of many animals. The air grew acrid as the canoes slipped up the sluggish creek. Limbless tree trunks stood rotting at the fringes of the marsh. It looked, Mary thought, like a valley that had sickened and died.

  About three miles up the valley the paddlers began talking rapidly. The setting sun’s eerie light showed a basin of about ten acres looking more dead and bleached than any landscape Mary had ever seen. The flat ground was chalk-gray, pocked with thousands of hooofprints and footprints, and what appeared to be tree stumps and curved limbs jutted from the low ground. Smelly, murky water oozed up through the morass and dribbled down white rills into the water of the creek.

  “Voyez!” cried LaPlante’s voice from another canoe, “the Giant Bones!”

  Mary shivered, realizing now that the bleached shapes littering the ground and protruding from the ooze were not stumps and dead branches, but huge skulls and ribs, tusks and bones. They were in a vast graveyard of fantastic beasts, beasts even bigger, surely, than the incredible elephant, of which Mary had seen a picture long ago in a bestiary. And now in the leaching twilight she saw that there were, mixed among these gigantic skeleton fragments, the bones and skulls of smaller animals. Near the edge of the creek where the canoes were now being run aground, an elk antler more than four feet long stuck up from the shallows.

  The Indians quickly set up a camp as the dusk deepened. For Mary and the old woman they made a hasty open-faced shelter by tying buffalo hides to a great curved tusk. Mary lay under the shelter that night nursing her baby, while LaPlante and Goulart sat with the Indians around a roaring bonfire. Goulart was using some enormous skull as a chair.

  The Frenchmen and the Indians talked long into the night, in strange, wondering tones that made her think they were talking of these enormous beasts that must have shaken the earth as they walked. She grew drowsy and pulled her blanket up to cover herself and the infant, and lay there watching the firelight gleam along the arch of the great tusk. She tried to fasten her thoughts to the matter of escape. Instead, her mind roamed back to this strange ghostly place and to the huge animals. Do they still come here? she wondered. It was curious that she had never heard anyone in her whole lifetime speak of giant animals, except the elephants, which were not on this continent. If they used to come here for the salt, she thought, surely they still do. What would the Indians do if such a beast came walking in during the night, likin’ to crush us underfoot? she wondered.

  Maybe that’s why they build such a big fire to sit by, she thought.

  She went to sleep listening for the tread of gigantic feet, anticipating the trembling of the swampy ground. She awoke once in the night from a dream of a bellowing bear thirty feet tall. She was shaking and covered with sweat. The roar from her dream was still trailing off through the real night, and she recognized it as the yowl of a wildcat somewhere in the distance. The fire had burned down to red coals. The night air was cold on her sweaty face. A patch of sky sparkled with icy-looking stars. One of the Indian bucks
rose from his robe on the ground, stacked more wood on the fire, then lay back down. The wood caught and blazed up with a crackling and fluttering. She smelled its smoke and the rotten smell of the lick and the stale sweat of her own body. She shuddered again. To escape from this circle of firelight into that cold, black, rushing, howling wilderness was unthinkable.

  At least it was unthinkable in the middle of the night in the middle of a haunted swamp.

  To LaPlante and Goulart, salt making was business, and so it was obvious that they intended to make much salt. Mary and the widow Stumf were put to work at dawn the first morning at the big bone lick and they worked until the sun had set. They scooped out a shallow well at a place where the brine burbled vigorously out of the ground, and here they dipped pails to fill a row of kettles kept steaming over hardwood fires on a rise of firmer ground. They also gathered the wood for the fires, and scraped the salt from the bottom of the hot kettles when it was done. A miasma of unseasonal September heat lay over the dismal valley, and Mary found herself constantly sodden with sweat. LaPlante and Goulart occupied themselves with eating and overseeing; the Indian men usually were out hunting, or sitting in the camp playing a game with toss sticks on a deerhide painted with circles and symbols. Mary gritted her teeth in anger whenever she had to lift a heavy kettle, radiating iron heat, to the tune of the men’s chatter and laughter. Ghetel would see the fury on her face, and would try to mollify her by making comical faces and gestures in imitation of the game-players’ outburts. But Mary, though she had worked hard all her adult life as a pioneer wife, had never felt so much like a slave as she did in the operation of this salt factory. Even Otter Girl, who prepared the food and helped tend the fires and the baby, had a leisurely existence compared with that of the two white women. Mary again began to contemplate escape. As she poured brine into a kettle she would see in the steam a scene of poignant beauty: Will and herself, reunited, sitting hand in hand by the willow-shaded spring at Draper’s Meadows. She began to bring up Will’s strong, kindly, bearded face and his broad chest more than ever from her memory into her daydreams.

  In these long and unclocked hours, everything evoked memories of their life so long ago, so far away. The grainy feel of new-made salt on her hands took her back to the previous autumn, when she and Will had worked shoulder to shoulder, salting a beef for winter.

  It was hot now, and it had been cold then, but she could remember it as clearly as if she had stepped back into that season. Johnny Draper had brought the precious salt by horseback over the Blue Ridge to Draper’s Meadows, along with a keg of gunpowder and Bettie his bride. Mary could remember the feel of rubbing the coarse salt into the cold, clammy surfaces of the raw beef, outdoors in the cabin yard on a gray day just a bit above freezing. She could remember the sting of salt in a splinter cut between her thumb and forefinger. She could remember laying the salt-encrusted slabs of meat into a hickory barrel, sprinkling salt over them, then laying on another layer of salted beef, then more salt, until the barrel was nearly full. And she could remember mixing cold springwater with salt into a strong brine the next day and pouring it into the barrel until the meat was covered. She remembered Will putting a big, flat, scrubbed piece of creekbed stone on top of the meat in the barrel to keep it sunk, and then covering the end of the barrel with a bigger flat stone to keep raccoons from raiding it, and leaving it all out there in the autumn cold to pickle for a month.

  And the smell of the hickory smoke here under the salt kettles: It made her remember the little log smokehouse, where Will would then hang up the salt beef with ropes to cold-smoke for three or four days. Oh, all the happy autumn hours and days they had spent, after the harvests, working like one, putting food and firewood by for the winters! And every fall when they were done, Will would say the same thing:

  “Mary darlin’, five cords o’ wood and a heap o’ grain and a good cured beastie do make a man feel rich, O yea!”

  And when they were in the smokehouse season, Will would always come to bed pungent with hickory smoke … Mary shut her eyes and smelled the smoke from the fires under the brine kettles and remembered Will lying next to her, breathing deep and easy in sleep, smelling for all the world like a smoked haunch. And she remembered him kissing her in the mornings and rolling onto her for what he called “a bit o’ bawdry” before the children awoke … Sometimes just the smell of woodsmoke would make her want Will so badly she’d get loose in the knees. I wonder how many a woman spends the time I do athinkin’ on her husband …

  And the more she dreamed of Will, the greasier and uglier Goulart became, the more repulsive his patient and furtive scrutiny of her seemed.

  The old woman’s life before her capture had been centered on kitchens. She would tell Mary about the breads and strudels and snickerdoodles she had baked, the soufflés, the stews and pot pies, the roast lambs and fowl, the buttermilk pancakes she had made for her big family in the old country. She would describe, in all the detail her poor heavy English could convey, sauces and glazes made of cream and eggs and other things for which she had no English words but which sounded mouth-watering even in her own guttural language simply because of the loving way she spoke the strange words. Sweating over the steamy salt kettles, her rags and wattles gray with ashes, she would create visions of rich and various banquets, then act as if the thought of them were making her faintish, then would knit her brow and complain about the Indian men’s appetite for roast meat. “Uakkkh,” she exploded one afternoon. “We must get some good things for a cake, or I die!”

  So she harangued the Frenchmen for a few minutes, making them roar with laughter, then came back to Mary. “Come,” she said. “We gather things.” She picked up her blanket and a pail. “To carry,” she said. Mary hoisted the baby onto her back and followed.

  They wandered out of the valley, onto the wooded slopes. Mary looked back from the brow of a hill and saw the Frenchmen and Indians loafing while Otter Girl stirred brine in the steam. Then she looked down the other slope. There was nothing but forest and meadow. To the west she caught a glimpse of shining water: the O-y-o. Her heartbeat sped up. It would be so simple to walk away now, she thought. There’s no Shawnee town around us. There are no cornfields and beanfields full of Indians to see me going and raise an alarm.

  The thought stayed in her mind and grew. Her heart raced. The baby, as if sensing her agitation, began crying.

  They found a stand of hickory trees. On the ground under them lay hundreds of nuts, their four-sided hulls falling off. Gray squirrels scattered as the women came under the trees to kneel, pry off hulls and toss the hard little yellow-brown nuts onto the blanket. They soon had about five pounds of them.

  Then they discovered walnuts. They gathered perhaps ten pounds of those, picking up the green balls that had begun to deteriorate and blacken in places and would be easy to hull back in camp. Then they discovered a huge white oak.

  “Acorns,” Mary said. “Roast them and they’re wonderful. And I know a way we can make acorn meal in the kettles.” She was growing enthusiastic about their food-gathering now—not simply because she desired a variety in the camp menu, as the old woman did, but because she was beginning to see a possibility of staying alive on a long autumn journey through the wilderness.

  The Frenchmen were delighted when Mary and Ghetel staggered back into camp with a pail of wild grapes and a blanket full of nuts, carried like a bag by its corners. They immediately sat down on giant skulls and bones and began cracking hickory nuts with their tomahawks, and picking out the meats with the points of their knives. They went at this with total absorption, munching and exclaiming over the nutmeats, until the Indian men were persuaded to join them.

  The next day Mary made acorn meal. She shelled a large quantity of the acorns, ground them on a great concave bone, using a fist-sized tooth as a pestle. Then she boiled the mass in fresh water and squeezed it out through cloth to leach out the bitterness, and spread it to dry in the sun. That evening Mrs. Stumf used part of the m
eal to make a delicious pan bread, mixing it with cornmeal and chopped walnut meats and flavoring it with a paste made of the wild grapes. “Ach! For some sugar or honey,” she groaned as she sampled a crumbly corner of the big cake. “I die for some sweet!”

  That was the last she got of her cake. The men devoured it in two minutes. The rest of the evening Mrs. Stumf sulked around the camp with her mouth set tight and a hard edge on her eyelids.

  In the next two weeks the Frenchmen encouraged Mary and Mrs. Stumf to forage in the countryside and experiment with what they brought in. The women would go out, each carrying a blanket now, and gather all they could carry. The baby cried almost constantly. It seemed to be bothered by the motions of walking and climbing and stooping.

  “Hush,” Mary said back over her shoulder one day. “Y’re no man, t’ be a-wanting to lay about the camp all the livelong day, good f’r nothin’; y’re a woman!” But the baby still cried.

  One cloudy evening, foraging on a hillside south of the camp, the women lost their way. They kept getting into thickets they had not encountered on the way out, and were almost frantic by dusk. Suddenly one of the braves appeared before them, so abruptly that Ghetel yelped and dropped her load of edibles. The Indian led them a short mile back to camp. He had come out to look for them when they didn’t return. He had followed their trail southward out of the camp, then had found them by hearing the baby’s cry. Mary, who was still contemplating escape and had been on the verge of enlisting the old woman to go with her, took note of those facts.

  Goulart fussed at her that evening. He behaved as if it had been a severe imposition on the men to have to stop their loafing and game playing and nut cracking to go out and search for lost women.

  The next afternoon, when the kettles were all boiling and the women were about to go into the woods, Goulart came to Mary and handed her a tomahawk. It had a thin hickory handle and a light, sharp steel blade, and a thong looped through a hole in its handle.