The Blooding of Jack Absolute

by C. C. Humphreys

  ‘Mohawk,’ the man smiled, pointing again to himself.

  The younger man had stood, came now and talked, gesturing back down the valley. The older man thought for a moment then nodded, and the younger, grabbing up the wounded Abenaki’s musket, began to run in the direction they’d fled. The boy took a few steps after him but a word from the elder – Jack assumed he must be the father of them both – halted him, his disappointment clear.

  Até was trying to stand and the boy went to help him. There followed a rapid conversation in what Jack took to be Iroquois, the older man asking the questions. When at last he seemed satisfied, he nodded again to Jack and signalled past him, up the slopes.

  Até came to Jack, hand pressed to the side of his head where his ear was rapidly shading to blue. ‘He is Jote. He has a camp over there.’

  The man and his son had gone to the tracker’s body, swiftly stripping it of clothes, weapons, jewellery and, in one swift motion, scalp. In a moment the corpse was naked, save for a little breech cloth. Clutching the prize of a new knife, Jote pointed with it back up the slopes.

  ‘London, England,’ he laughed.

  ‘Don’t I wish,’ said Jack.

  – SIX –

  Castaway

  Jack lay still, wondering if it was sound that had woken him again or the cold. One side of him was warm enough, pressed, under the deer skin, against Jote’s youngest son. The other was against the hide wall of their forest shelter for, as the least important members of the party, he and Até took the extremities. His fellow former slave was against the far wall; a preferable position to Jack’s, who was also up against the flaps where any breeze would penetrate. Between them, descending in order of age and importance to the chief in the middle, were the rest of Jote’s family – the two sons, one daughter, a wife and his wife’s sister, the latter two swaddling him. He was given to snoring most untunefully, in short, sharp grunts; but now Jack listened and heard nothing from any of his companions but gentle breaths. Perhaps it had been a noise from outside then that had roused him, an animal call from the vast forest? He tipped his head and, suddenly, he knew, the knowledge bringing a rush of excitement, memories of childhood, waking like this not to sound but to its absence, to the silence of a world wrapped and muffled.

  Still caught in the thrill, the difficulty he had parting the hide flaps confirmed his belief. For it had snowed heavily in the night and a wall had drifted against their shelter. Soft, separate flakes, huge as cherry petals, were still drifting down from a sky showing a hint of dawn. Stealthily, Jack pushed out through the drift. He had always loved snow, the opportunities for play and mischief it created, and he wanted to have it to himself for a while, to not have to restrain his exuberance before the ever-solemn Mohawks.

  He plunged out into the clearing. The snow came up over the moccasins they’d given him, to his ankles, bare beneath the deer-skin leggings. He shivered but it was less cold than it had been, for the icy winds that had swept against them on their three-day march – deeper into the forest, roughly south-westwards, he believed – had dropped. And some vigorous running on the spot soon warmed him, together with some slips and slides back and forth across the now-concealed track.

  He didn’t know how long he’d been observed in his frolics. He’d been spinning round a tree when he noticed the figures, dark against the tent. The whole family was standing there, in the same order they’d maintained inside, Até apart on the edge.

  ‘Ah.’ Jack coughed, brushed his coat. ‘Snow, eh? Wonderful stuff.’

  The family continued to stare until Jote said something. Then one by one they ducked under the flaps. Até was the last and he beckoned Jack to follow, waiting for him at the entrance to catch up. ‘Snow,’ he said, sourly, when he did. ‘Not so wonderful.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Até just ducked inside, Jack following him. The family made a semi-circle, passing some dried meat between them. He sat eagerly, waiting his turn for his exertions had made him hungry. In their time with the Mohawks they had always been treated well, receiving equal shares; so he was much surprised when the ball of deer jerky halted with Jote’s youngest son and was tucked away. He saw that Até, too, had received none and he felt the coldest flush of the morning.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked, his voice suddenly raspy.

  Jote began to speak rapidly, gesturing beyond the walls. Até nodded, waited till the man finished speaking, then spoke himself, in single sharp sentences. The man shook his head clearly at each of the questions, finally making a clear gesture, unmistakably conclusive. Até slumped back.

  ‘What is he saying?’

  Até faced him. ‘They must leave us.’

  ‘Leave us? What do you mean? They are taking us to General Amherst. For the many gifts they will get.’

  ‘They said they try to do this. If snow did not come.’ He tipped his head to the outside. ‘It has come.’

  ‘But surely …’ Jack tried to keep his tone calm ‘We can’t be that far away.’

  Até shrugged. ‘Two weeks maybe, with no snow.’

  ‘But this snow may melt. Will melt. We can press on.’

  Jote had been following the conversation with his little English. He said something and Até nodded. ‘He say, this snow not melting kind. Staying kind. Much more in sky. They are within three days of their winter camp. This is the way of many of our people, families go to their own hunting grounds. My family will be in theirs, many, many weeks away. Jote will go to his.’

  ‘Then we will go with him.’

  Jote, leaning forward, squeezed Jack’s upper arm. He said something, shaking it, nodding around him. Até translated. ‘He say that we are both big men. We eat like big men. At his hunting grounds, there will be little to eat, maybe enough for his family. Maybe not even for them. If we go with them, we will all die.’

  Jack was suddenly remembering his happy life as an Abenaki slave, stewed dog for breakfast, the warmth of labour. He shook his head. ‘Then you and I must continue. To Amherst.’

  ‘We would never get there. It is too far when the snow covers all the tracks. And even if I knew them and could see them, we could not walk on them. Also they will not give us food for such a journey.’

  ‘No food?’ Jack could not help how shrill his voice became. ‘By Christ, you don’t mean they are going to abandon us here to freeze and starve?’

  Jote was still squeezing Jack’s arm. He patted it as he let it go, spoke rapidly to the two women who began to burrow among the piles of goods lining the tent’s edge.

  ‘They will give us what they can spare. They will leave us in a part of the forest that might have game enough for two.’

  Jack could hear, behind the calm way he spoke the words, a real fear in the young Mohawk. It took away his own voice, the desperate questions he needed to ask, the pleas he wanted to make. He could only watch as a few items were pulled from pouches and bags and thrown onto the floor in the gap that was widening between them.

  He recognized the ball of fat Jote’s wife scraped from a birch tub, rolled between her hands, then placed on the floor because he’d been forcing himself to eat this ghastly pemmican whenever it was offered: reeking, crystalline bear fat and dried moose meat, studded with little dried berries that exploded bitterly when cracked. Next to it was placed a musket flint, and finally, and only after Jote overcame an argument from his sister-in-law, the Abenaki tracker’s knife.

  When the women sat back, Jack looked at Até. ‘That’s it? Food for a day, a flint and a rusted blade?’

  ‘It is much for them, together with the clothes they have already given. My people live by trade and we have nothing to exchange, except the tomahawks that we will need.’

  ‘Nothing …’ Jack was still staring in shock at the three items upon the floor. Then he remembered something and, reaching into the bag he’d taken at St Francis, he pulled out the sole possession he retained from his English life.

  ‘There,’ he said, throwing do
wn the copy of Hamlet, ‘I’ll trade that for the musket that goes with the flint.’

  Até, despite the fear still in his face, laughed. He spoke and the family found it even more amusing, clutching their sides in their mirth. Jote picked up the book, held it upside down by a corner of its green leather binding. Through his laughter he said something to Até who nodded and turned to Jack.

  ‘Jote says he likes your joke so he will take this. But it is not worth a musket and a musket will not do us much good anyway, when we have nothing to trade for powder and ball. So I have asked for something better.’

  Jote’s sister-in-law had returned to their belongings. She pulled a bigger item out, dropped it beside the other three. Jack was appalled. ‘A k … kettle?’ he stuttered. ‘You’ve swapped Hamlet for a fucking kettle?’

  Até nodded. ‘A kettle will keep us alive, white boy. More than any gun. And he has no use for your book.’ At Até’s nod, Jote picked up the volume and swiftly ripped the paper from its cover, throwing the pages, still bound in one piece, back onto the ground. ‘But his wife can sew the skin into a tobacco pouch.’

  Jote led them slowly on, waiting patiently at various points for the two who struggled to keep up. Unlike him, they did not have what looked to Jack like elongated tennis rackets strapped to their feet. He and Até either plunged into drifts up to their knees or slipped on icy, bare rock amongst scrub brush. At least the deepening cold was banished by the exercise and Jote had relented about the jerky; once out of sight of his camp and his women’s sharp tongues, he let the two boys chew a couple of fibrous strands apiece. Yet it was little enough to fuel their struggles and Jack was very grateful when, with a pale sun peeping through rents in the snow clouds indicating midday, Jote halted in a grove of beech. Jack dropped onto a pile of their leaves, leaned his back against the base of a trunk and watched apprehensively as Jote and Até conferred. Then, what he most feared, happened. He’d still hoped that Jote would suddenly declare it the sort of cruel joke the Mohawks were given to, would clap them on their backs, lead them back to the warmth of the tent and a meal. That hope ended when Jote raised his arm in a parody of an army salute and loped off down the trail. The snow swallowed the sound of his footgear slapping its surface and soon all that was in their ears was the wind soughing through the trees, beginning to bite now they were stationary, and their own deep-hauled breaths.

  Jack looked up at Até. ‘Where are we?’

  The other shrugged. ‘Here.’

  Jack bit back a response. He’d learnt, in their brief acquaintance, that the other’s taciturnity would only be deepened by anger. And he needed some reassurance now, anything to counter the rumbling in his stomach that was fashioned only partly of hunger.

  ‘I mean, are we close to any settlement, any farms? Montréal?’ The thought of surrendering to the French was suddenly very appealing.

  ‘I do not know. This is not my country. But I do not think so. If anything was near, Jote would have left us by it.’

  ‘Instead he’s just abandoned us – in the middle of nowhere?’

  ‘In the middle of somewhere. In the middle of …’

  Até gestured around and the anger surged again within Jack. The young Mohawk had an air of glacial superiority that would have put a belted earl of England to shame.

  ‘He’s left us “somewhere” with nothing. Nothing!’

  ‘No. He’s left us with two more things.’

  ‘Really? And what is this bounty, pray?’

  Até moved to a tree beside the one Jack still squatted against, its far side out of his vision. Até pointed and, grumbling, Jack rose.

  From the lower branches of the beech, skulls dangled. They were deer, small antlers still attached and they were hanging by what looked like thin string. He reached out to one and, at his touch, it dropped to the ground to join a couple of others already there. Até pointed to one still hanging. He ran his forefinger down the string and touched the tendon of his neck. ‘They hang by this. It rots, skull falls, shows this animal has not been hunted here for a while, so will be plentiful. Many on ground here so … we can hunt it.’ Jack was about to ask pointedly, ‘With what? The kettle?’ but Até now lifted a wooden ladle that rested, open-faced against the trunk. ‘And this is for water, shows water here is good. If like this,’ he closed the face, ‘water bad. Must boil.’ He pointed into the forest and, now he listened, Jack could hear the faintest tinkling there of an ice-choked stream.

  Até pulled the ladle off and bent to the base of the tree. Gesturing to a piece of bone that looked like a shoulder blade, he said, ‘Dig here,’ attacking the ground as he spoke. Jack did as he was bid, the two of them scraping the snow away, the ground beneath not quite frozen solid, allowing them some purchase. They dug until a hole went the depth of Jack’s lower leg before the note changed and his bone struck wood.

  ‘Me,’ Até said, and began to scrape around a shape that Jack soon saw to be some sort of container. It was quite large, a foot across and two deep, made of birch bark and woven with some reed.

  ‘Buried treasure?’ he whispered.

  ‘Abenaki hunting post, left for their tribe if they are away from camp and in need. So, are we not their slaves? And are we not in need?’ Jack saw the ghost of a grin cross the Indian’s features before he set to prising off the lid.

  The contents were meagre. No weapons, no snares, no real food save for a smaller container of bitter dried berries that they devoured swiftly between them. There were two small furs, threadbare but a little warming when shoved inside a deer-skin jacket that was doing little against the ever-deepening cold; and a long coil of rope, which Até seemed to consider the best discovery of all.

  Jack sat back, shivering. The little exercise, the little hope, both passed now. He looked across at Até, whose face betrayed a similar disappointment.

  ‘You said two things.’

  ‘Yes.’ Até’s face had brightened again. ‘Come.’ He led Jack over to the trail up which Jote had disappeared. ‘Look.’

  Jack did. There were the marks of Jote’s unusual footwear there, beside the smaller imprints of Até’s moccasins. He scanned back and forth. ‘I can’t see anything.’

  Até pointed, his voice impatient. ‘There!’

  Jack followed the finger. There was something else, now he looked hard, another series of marks beside the footprints. They led away, into the trees. He looked up. ‘Deer?’

  Até snorted. ‘You went to school, white boy? They never teach you difference of animals?’

  ‘Only in Latin,’ Jack muttered, bent again. Now he looked he could see that the prints were not cloven, as he had known deer tracks to be in Cornwall. These were not made by hoof then but by some big, five-toed paw. A claw’s mark headed each one. But the cold was numbing brain as well as body, the name danced just out of reach. What other creatures lived in this strange forest?

  ‘I give up,’ he said, straightening. ‘Why don’t you tell me, brown boy.’

  Another snort. ‘This is made by Ne-e-ar-gu-ye. In your tongue it is … is …’

  As Até searched his mind, Jack remembered the words. ‘Ursus ursidae!’ he said, but for the life of him, he still could not think of the name in English. He knew no Iroquois and he was sure Até’s Latin was just as poor. Then both of them suddenly remembered the word in English.

  They said it together, ‘Bear!’

  If one should allow a sleeping dog to lie, Jack thought, how much more so a bear?

  His shivering, which was ceaseless due to the cold anyway, only increased at this thought. But Até’s logic had been incontrovertible.

  ‘I track bear to hole, yes? I fix way to kill him, yes? What you do? Nothing!’ he’d said, then added, a rare smile coming, ‘And since you say I cheat in our race, now you show how fast you are.’

  He didn’t feel fast this late afternoon. A night freezing on pine boughs under a tree had yielded little rest and the morning spent trying to dig deadfalls (and then having to abandon all o
f them three foot down due to the granite seams), had left him with a headache worse than most sustained after a long night’s carouse at Covent Garden and legs as wobbly as if he’d spent the whole afternoon notching a score on Tothill Fields. All fuelled by foul pemmican, fingerfuls of it scraped from the ball and deposited on the tongue, swallowing the rank grease, struggling to prevent it coming straight back up. Despite its loathsomeness, they had somehow managed to finish the whole ball between them. It was the last of their food. Thus Até’s rejection of Jack’s demand that they build themselves some sort of shelter for the night and tackle the beast on the morrow.

  ‘We may be too weak then. You may not be able to run fast enough. And if the bear catches you, then eats you, he will leave no scraps for me.’

  Jack thought he was probably not joking. Hadn’t Bomoseen told him that Mohawk actually meant ‘flesh-eaters’. And he wasn’t referring to mutton!

  Jack’s shivering had become almost an ague. What was the blasted savage doing? He peered again over the lip of rock that was the entrance of the cave. He still could see and hear nothing down there but the smell was as rancid as the grease he’d lately consumed. The bear was there.

  A whistle came and he turned to see Até beckoning him. Slipping off the rock, he ran down to him and the Native took his arm and pulled him into the canopy.

  ‘You must take him only this way, pft! Straight! You understand? Grandfather Ne-e-ar-gu-ye will be very angry he has woken up so soon after he lie down for the winter. But because he is sleepy he will not think so good and perhaps he will not run so fast and so perhaps will not catch you.’

  ‘Perhaps?’

  Até ignored him, still dragging him down the faint trail till he jerked him to a halt about sixty paces from the bear’s cave. Pulling Jack with him to the ground, he pointed forward. ‘You see?’

  At first, Jack could detect nothing unusual, just another piece of foliage across the path. But looking closer he realized that the leaf-covered thing he took for a creeper or tendril was, in fact, part of the rope Até had pulled from the Abenaki container. It ran about knee-height off the ground, was wrapped around a birch trunk and tied to a stake embedded about four foot further on. Beside the stake a small birch sapling was pulled back to the forest floor, its end still rooted near the path, its tip straining under the rope. Something stood proud from that end and, stepping closer, Jack could see that another sharpened stake had been thrust through the sapling near its head, and bound tight in with further rope.