The Blooding of Jack Absolute

by C. C. Humphreys

  ‘But where—’

  Até raised a finger to his lips, then parted the bush into which the rope disappeared, and pointed to a small hooped stake driven into the ground like a question mark. The end of the rope was held by another stick wedged against both curves of the hook.

  ‘See?’ Até grinned. ‘Grandfather chases you. You jump rope, fall. He stops, hits rope, knocks the small stick, and … wang!’ He made a flowing gesture of the sharpened stake flying up, showing it embedding in his own head. ‘Dead bear!’

  ‘This …’ Jack was almost too astounded to speak,‘… this is your plan?’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘What’s … ?’ Jack could think of a thousand things, not least the idea of him ‘falling’ down and the bear obligingly stopping before advancing slowly onto the rope. But he decided to show Até an even more obvious flaw. So he just leapt up in the air and landed hard on the ground. The stick fell from the hook, the rope slackened and the released sapling surged up and juddered to a halt a foot from Até’s face.

  ‘Not now! With bear!’ Até yelled, immediately going to the sapling to reset it, tugging the rope across it, keeping it taut as he dragged it around the birch and back to the hook. Jack stopped him before he replaced it.

  ‘I’ve just shown you! It won’t work.’

  ‘It will. My people use this snare all the time.’

  ‘Oh, I’m quite sure. And have you? How many times?’

  ‘Plenty.’

  ‘You …’ Jack pushed down his rising temper. ‘My running will set it off. You have to make this,’ he pointed to the hook, the trigger of the mechanism, ‘harder.’

  ‘It work well.’

  ‘If you think it works so well, then you run it.’

  Até shrugged. ‘I fix. You run.’

  Suddenly, all those other reasons, not least the bear’s close pursuit of him, came flooding into Jack’s mind. He shook his head. ‘I can’t,’ he said softly.

  Até didn’t even look up from the rope as he whispered, ‘Then we die here, white boy. Die pretty damn quick. You feel,’ he jerked his head toward the sky, ‘much more snow coming, tomorrow. Maybe next day. This is last chance for food before it comes.’

  Jack shivered violently. Not just from the returning cold. From the knowledge that Até was right. If they didn’t kill the bear, the winter would indeed kill them pretty damn quick.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he said, through his rattling teeth. ‘Damn you for a brown-faced lunatic, but I’ll do it.’ He stood, stamped his feet and stared back to the cave entrance. ‘How exactly does one wake up a bear?’

  With fire. The musket flint they’d been given was for that purpose. Até struck sparks off it with a tomahawk onto some cattail down wrapped in a cone of birch bark. Once this torch flared it was thrust onto more bark, some twigs; soon a fair fire crackled away. Jack was reluctant to leave the first warmth he’d felt in an age, but Até was insistent.

  ‘Here,’ he said, handing Jack the kettle, and several branches of wood. Then he used the ladle to scoop embers into the metal bowl. ‘You go now. These …’ he gestured to the sticks, ‘will burn. You drop into hole then run. But make sure bear is awake first.’

  Jack looked at Até, looked at the kettle in his one hand, the branches in the other. Then, shaking his head, he moved up the trail to the cave.

  It was one of several on that rocky hillside. Indeed the whole area was pitted with them, as if some giant had jabbed his fingers into the earth then dragged them away in lines. Some of these trenches had already half-filled with snow, making walking treacherous. Others were deeper, led to cliff faces like the one just beyond the cave, that tumbled into an ice-clogged rivulet below. Jack peered over the precipice, conscious of the slickness of stone beneath him, then looked in a circle all around. There was only one way for the bear to follow him – down the path on which Até stood now, waving him on. Beyond the beckoning Native, the land rose again in folds and troughs, more caves and cliffs and snags for fleeing feet.

  Cursing, he turned to his task. Dipping the branch end into the embers he blew hard, watching it catch, leaves crisping into brief, yellow flame. Lobbing it over the edge of the hole, he set the kettle down and ran back a half dozen paces.

  Nothing. Neither sight nor sound came to where he stood, feet pointed down the path. He looked back at Até.The Mohawk waved him on to another attempt. He blew again, watched the birch catch, stepped up to the hole. Was that the faintest whiff of scorching or just the embers in his pot? With the branch crackling well, he tipped it over, ran back …

  Still nothing. The only noise came from the faint rippling of water under ice, the squeak as Até shifted his feet on snow. ‘Go on,’ he hissed, miming the tipping of the whole contents of the kettle into the hole.

  Jack ground his teeth, shook his head, stepped forward, the metal bowl crooked under one arm, kindling this branch like the others, watching it flame. This was the biggest and driest of the three. If that failed to rouse the bear, well, Até could bloody well go down into the hole himself and invite it to a quadrille!

  Because he was looking into the kettle he didn’t see the trail of smoke rising from the ground. Because his nose was running from cold and fear he couldn’t smell. Thus it was only when he bent over the hole that he suddenly was made aware that his previous efforts had been successful.

  ‘NAAARGH!’

  The roar was the worst thing he had ever heard; worse than the death rattle of the man he’d killed with a bayonet, worse than his uncle’s screams, dying under his horse. It came from less than two feet away, from a head three times as wide as any man’s. Though the eyes were small, they were entirely black, while the teeth were as big as dagger blades, yellow and lined in greenish slime. Jack took all this in during his long, slow fall backwards, while the predominant impression, before terror melded all of them, was of a reeking and terrible breath.

  The dropped kettle rolled down the slope, a trail of sparks tumbling from its rim. Somehow he still clutched the flaming branch and it was this he thrust up as the bear exploded from the earth and ran at him as fast as he’d ever seen anything move. The animal, with a further horrible shriek, grappled the branch to itself, its jaws snapping the wood, scythe-claws ripping it into a cascade of sparks in seconds; seconds that yet allowed Jack to roll completely over in a backwards somersault, slide on the icy rock till his feet encountered the earth of the forest floor, somehow getting a purchase there. His first paces were to one side, then to the other; then, somehow, he was in the forest, stumbling forward.

  He couldn’t look, his vision blurred along with all memory – what the hell was he searching for on the path ahead? Then, just before he hit it, he remembered, his front leg rising to clear the foliage-covered rope by a foot, his trailing leg doing so by half that. He crashed down, slid along, contrived somehow to flip over, his legs scrabbling on contact with earth and snow.

  The bear must have been a claw’s flick away at that leap, for it was near on top of him now, rising on its hind legs, opening those horrific jaws to roar once more. It stepped forward, a pace, another, its shin pushing against the rope.

  It’s going to work, Jack thought. Bugger, it’s going to work!

  Then there came a snap, the whistle of tension released as the sapling shot up, the stake driving hard … into the bear’s shoulder.

  There was a moment of near silence. The bear suddenly looked almost human, puzzledly turning its face, paws rising to the wood embedded in its flesh. Then it jerked the stake from the wound, placed it in its mouth, shredded it. In a second, it had turned back to the prone man.

  ‘Jesus!’ Jack yelled, pushing himself to his feet, staggering back, colliding with a tree. Once more the creature roared, the note soaring higher … when a tomahawk suddenly sprouted from its back.

  ‘Yah!’ yelled Até, triumphant. Yet the bear just glanced in the direction the weapon and yell had come from, shrugged, as if it had been bitten by something small,
then swung the huge head back to Jack once more.

  As the bear moved forward, Jack pulled the leather bag from around his neck, hurled it. The bear batted it aside and came on. There was no time to curse, to do anything other than swing round the tree and run. His own tomahawk, thrust into his breeches, he did not even reach for. He thought of leaping into a tree, scrambling up, but even in his panic he knew that if the bear was twice the runner he was, he was assuredly three times better the climber.

  The bear chased Jack, Até chased the bear, the three in a line back up the slope, Jack hurdling branch and bush, the only thing keeping him ahead of the bear, who crashed into the vegetation, through it, roared at it. He had no idea where he was going, was surprised when he saw the kettle again, when he leapt over the gash of the bear’s cave. Beyond it was the chasm, wider, surely, than any leap. But the bear’s breath on his back gave him no choice.

  ‘Aah!’ he yelled, sailing into space. He hit the lip on the far side, wasn’t far enough on it to get a purchase; hands grabbed at tufts of weed, jerked them out by their shallow roots. He slipped off the edge … and his foot encountered a branch, some bush clinging to the cliff face; his other foot followed and one hand he wedged into the smallest of cracks up above.

  The bear came. He heard it, felt it as it made the same leap he had, felt the vibration as its feet thumped onto the cliff’s edge beside his hand. He closed his eyes. There were two ways to go now: up into the bear’s mouth and claws, down into the chasm. He knew which he preferred.

  Then, just before he released his grip, there was another roar, higher-pitched, along with the sound of claws scrabbling on stone. Then something banged into him, forcing him against the rock, nearly dislodging him. He felt a sharp pain in the back of one leg, as if someone had run razors down it. And then there was silence save for the sound of something snapping below him.

  At first, all he heard then was his own gasping. Then footfalls slapped on the stone behind him and a voice came. Oddly, it took a moment to realize who was speaking because the Mohawk had never used his name before.

  ‘Jack! Jack!’ he yelled. Jack heard feet withdrawing, then running. In a moment, there was another thump from near his face and he looked up to see, first moccasins, then a hand.

  ‘Jack!’ Até was bending, grasping him by the wrist. He found it hard to dislodge his fingers, so tightly did they grip the rock, but Até pulled and soon he was sprawling beside the Native. ‘We did it, Jack! We killed Ne-e-ar-gu-ye.’

  ‘We … we did?’

  Jack pulled himself up, peered over the cliff edge. On the fissure floor, about thirty feet below him, a huge shape sprawled, motionless. ‘Well, kiss my arse,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe later,’ said Até.It was a time of firsts: the name and then this grin widening on the broad brown face. Jack found one to match it and suddenly they were both giggling, then laughing, then roaring.

  ‘I think I call you by Iroquois name from now on: “Sagehjowah.” It means “Man Frightened”. Your face, when bear pulled stake from shoulder …’

  ‘Not very noble, is it? Can’t you come up with something a little more … spirited?’ Now he was laughing Jack didn’t want to stop.

  Até shrugged. ‘You were fast. You run, you jump, you leap … this!’ He pointed to the chasm whose width, contemplated, made Jack shudder. ‘I know! I call you “Daganoweda”.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘“Inexhaustible”. You like?’

  ‘It’ll do.’ Euphoria passing, Jack realized it was a name he was already not living up to. He was exhausted … and very, very hungry. He may have survived; but the bear, whose death meant they might survive, was now lying far below them. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what do we do with him now?’

  Até rose, ran along the edge, down the slope, vanished. A moment later he reappeared, walking carefully beside the narrow stream along the chasm’s base. When he got to the bear he bent and cautiously toed the animal before removing the tomahawk still lodged in the beast’s back. Then he looked around him.

  ‘Bad?’ called Jack.

  ‘No, good. Good!’ Até waved his weapon at the rock face. ‘I do not know how you call this … a place in the rock. With …’ He mimed a covering. ‘We can do what we need here, better than up there.’

  Jack straightened, groaned. He hurt in so many places, not least beneath the blood-lined rents the bear’s claws had made in his leggings. ‘And what do we do?’

  Até’s grin returned. ‘You may be “Inexhaustible”. But Até-dawanete means … well, the closest in your tongue is “Clever Moccasins”. Now I show you how I got my name.’

  – SEVEN –

  A Dozen Things to Do

  With a Dead Bear

  ‘Now what?’

  Seven days after the slaying of the bear, and this was the first time he’d seen Até idle. Jack found it unnerving, especially since it was also the first time he’d been similarly unoccupied. He would have preferred another growled order, that he could grumble at, yet fulfil, for there was reassurance in every assigned task completed. Jack had begun to believe that they might, might, survive. The initial, terrible hunger had been sated. Yet now, with another storm wailing outside their shelter, Até was doing nothing. Except stare at him.

  He stared back, awaiting a reply to his question, expecting none. Indeed, he’d have been shocked if the other had spoken. It appeared that casual conversation was not something in which an Iroquois indulged. Até was not exactly rude; with questions he would reply in as short an answer as possible. Yet he seemed to have no curiosity to match Jack’s own. Jack had learned that his reasonable English was due to his being a nephew-in-law of a famous landowner in the Mohawk Valley, William Johnson, and that Até had been a favoured child, whose education Johnson had overseen and whose capture on the first raid of the war would have caused the white father much sadness. Beyond that, he was unforthcoming, with replies growing ever terser while questions simply never came. Exhaustion contributed; but the euphoria they’d shared after the kill had evaporated rapidly. The growled order, the grumbled response had become their only communication.

  It’s going to be a long winter, thought Jack. He’d learned that the Mohawk regarded it as a matter of pride to stare him down and the night before they had remained locked for an hour until Jack had decided it was stupidity itself. So he looked yet again, around the walls, seeking anything to distract. Every square foot was filled with bits of bear. The Native had rendered the animal into an astonishing array.

  ‘In Cornwall, we say, “use every part of the pig but the squeal.” Reckon you don’t even waste that much of a bear,’ he’d said. Até had just grunted, as immune to praise as insult, another conversation still-born; but looking around now Jack realized that if the Mohawk had contributed the brain for what they’d done, much of the brawn came from the Englishman for it was his labour that had created the shelters in these two shallow caves at the foot of the precipice where the bear had fallen. While he did so, the Mohawk had turned the one into a charnel house, so besmeared with blood and body parts did it become. Once Jack had helped hang the bear’s bound feet from a jagged outcrop on the cavern wall, Até had set him an endless succession of tasks. First, a fire was laid on the floor and a huge pile of fuel for it chopped and fetched. Then the entrance had to be closed off to keep warmth in and winter out, and Jack lost count of the trips he made, taking fire to the forest on the plateau above, using it to burn small balsam firs till he could hack through the charring and then drag the trimmed trunks down, to be propped against the cliff face and woven with thick hemlock boughs, gradually closing the butcher’s cave off. It was hard work for both of them but they were goaded by a louring sky that warned of more snow. The hanging bear – a disturbingly human shape now it had been skinned – was full of winter fat that filled the kettle fast and was then ladled off to cool in hollowed birch trunks for pemmican. In four small oblong cedar frames, Até bored holes with bear tooth, then pulled through
some of the stringy guts, knotted their ends, leaving them to dry in a webbing. Jack recognized the racket shape of them, knew that they were shoes like Jote had used, for the traversing of snow. Next Até had taken a supple piece of curved yew, cut notches in each end and fastened a length of drying gut into it. ‘Bow,’ he’d muttered. Then he began on the tanning of the hide, stretching it on a larger frame he bent from saplings. The two of them spent the whole day in their abattoir in silence, both naked, save for breech clouts, the heat inside so intense they often had to go outside and stay out there till the cold nipped their extremities. Then it was fast back to Hades.

  On the third morning the snow had started, light enough flurries for Até still to send Jack out, clothed now, to gather some final necessities. ‘For eating just meat will kill us, pretty damn quick,’ he’d said, adding his favourite phrase. Cattails were dug up whole by their roots and brought back in sheaves; a root he knew no name for in English was gathered, along with thousands of tiny seeds, which Jack wrapped in giant leaves he found on the pond’s edge. He’d pulled up whole plants with clover-like leaves and red berries, both tasting similar to wild mint. With the snow driving harder, he’d strayed up to a small lake, lured by another strand of cattails. By the time he’d gathered them, the snow was blinding and he stumbled in the rough direction he sensed he should take until he nearly fell off the edge that had doomed the bear. When he’d staggered into the living space, Até was stacking bits of bear against the wall. ‘About time, white boy,’ he’d grunted. Then he’d pulled the balsam door into place.