Arundel

by Kenneth Roberts

  “Half a barrel of flour,” said Natanis, “that Mr. Pitt was asked to get.”

  I heard Colonel Enos bawling behind me, so climbed in. “Here!” he shouted, as we pushed upstream, “set me down to my camp!”

  “Begging the colonel’s pardon,” I said, mindful of Major Bigelow’s military forms, “but the colonel can go to hell.”

  He was bawling furiously for Treeworgy when we had our last sight of him, nor did I care if I never had another.

  XXIII

  I HAVE, it seems to me, a fairish eye for beauty, and I have heard it said there is great beauty to the Chain of Ponds that lie against and on the Height of Land, giving rise to this river that had thrown its coils about us and battered us until we were bruised and lame. Yet they seemed hideous to me when we fought our way across them through the gales and snow of late October, so I think there is more to beauty than swelling hills or tumbled rocks or limpid waters; and I wouldn’t give one acre of my ragged sand dunes in Arundel for all the mountain ponds you can show me in a week.

  Nor, for good reasons, did I see beauty in any of that tom and crumpled region that lay between us and Canada, one of the reasons being that the snow stung our eyes so that for a part of the time we could see nothing but the trees about us, and another being that we made our way through such a smother of brush and fallen logs that we had to screen our eyes to keep them from being whipped out, and a third being that I long ago learned from Natanis that speed is gained and strength saved, in arduous marching or climbing, if the eye is fastened on the ground that lies before the feet, once the trail be known.

  Therefore I saw less of that country than I might have seen had I gone into it to dawdle over the killing of moose or bear, with stout shoes on my feet, and a full belly thrice a day, and fires to drive the ache from muscles and joints. The main shape of it, none the less, I shall always remember; for I often find it in my dreams, when objects are swollen and distorted, unreachable and ungraspable.

  What I see is a stupendous stone wall, an overwhelming enlargement of those we build in New England out of the gray rocks that fill our fields. The wall, in my dreams, lies across a bog in which the hoofprints of a million giant cows have frozen and thawed and run together; and from one division of the bog to the other, across this monstrous wall, there runs a long and twisted stalk of woodbine. Along the stalk, in my dreams, I see a throng of little red ants, groping and hesitating, fumbling here and there, straying and struggling, backing and filling, but ever moving onward.

  It is like this stone wall that the cruel, stone-toothed Height of Land divides the bogs of the North. To the south are those of the Chain of Ponds, like vast hoofprints in the mud of ages, from which all the waters run to the south. To the north are those of Lake Megantic, forming the Chaudière and other streams that fall into the St. Lawrence. Our trail across it was like the tangled, twisted stalk of woodbine; and we, climbing the trail, were like the ants, creeping feebly, but somehow creeping forward.

  Eager as were Natanis and Hobomok and I to overtake Treeworgy, when we left Enos shouting into the whirling snowflakes, we were held back by the snow and the gathering dusk. We passed Greene, and in time came up with Burr riding in a bateau with his friend the chaplain, Reverend Spring, a jovial young man from Princeton College, who was cursed with chilblains, an ailment he was encouraged to conceal because of his heartening effect on the men, and his failure to hear and see matters better unheard and unseen by a chaplain.

  “Here,” I said, as we drew alongside him, “Enos has gone back with his entire division, and here’s some flour for you.”

  Burr broke into a flow of profanity at Enos that could have been achieved only by someone familiar with the Bible.

  “Amen,” said the Reverend Spring, feeling cautiously of his toes.

  “Anyway,” said Burr, after he had spoken freely about Enos, “I’m glad to see Mr. Pitt did his duty. We give you our hearty thanks, Mr. Pitt.” He lifted his hat to Natanis, who grinned amiably. “How did they do it?” he asked me.

  Natanis spoke rapidly in Abenaki.

  “Well,” I said, “I’d been content not to know, fearing there might have been some chicanery about it, but it seems to have been the merest chance. Mr. Pitt happened to be near some of Enos’s men when a fearful screaming broke out in the forest, a horrible screaming such as had never been heard before. The men’s attention was so caught by it that they must have dropped the flour, as well as a musket and three blankets that we sorely needed.”

  “Oh,” said Burr profoundly, “that explains everything!”

  “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” said the Reverend Spring, huddling his feet carefully in his blanket.

  We were off at dawn the following morning; and though the driving snow had ceased, we were hindered and blocked at the carries by the bateaumen of Meigs’s division, who clambered with difficulty through the slush. Not until noon did we come to the first of the Chain of Ponds, all of them bordered by mountains that seemed to me to blanket us with chill and darkness. I couldn’t breathe easily or deeply among them, as I can among the sweet salt marshes and the silvery, curving beaches of Arundel.

  Up these we went, crossing round ponds and oval ponds and ponds with points like fingers stretching out to catch at us, and ponds shaped like hourglasses strung together on a thread of a river that twisted and dwindled and hid in bogs and leaped out at us over ledges again: small ponds, medium ponds, large ponds, until we were sick of ponds—a sickness that has stayed with me to this day. I have but one good thing to say of them, and that is this: if a man have a fondness for ponds and cannot find one to suit him among them, he must be hard indeed to please.

  We found Morgan’s men groping around the shores of one that they insisted had no inlet at all—until Natanis showed it to them. They followed along behind us, and Natanis guided us from pond to hidden pond as surely as a Falmouth man passes from his home to the wharves. At nightfall on the last Thursday in October, and again I remember the day because the next day fell on a Friday, we came to the last of the Chain of Ponds, the last and greatest, and crossed it with the granite, tree-clad wall of the Height of Land looming dark before us.

  While Natanis and Hobomok cooked trouts, I went to those of Morgan’s men who had landed near us and learned that Treeworgy, with an Indian, had passed them at mid-afternoon.

  “Did they tell you about Enos?” I asked.

  “Nay,” said a drawling Virginian, busy patching his breeches with a squirrel skin, “he went past us like a pig after a snake. What about Enos?”

  I told them the tale, while all these tall men came around me and listened, chewing silently on sumach leaves or willow bark, even forbearing to spit until I had finished.

  “Well,” said one of them, “I hope he rots away, a little at a time, starting now, or dies plenty painful.” He embellished his speech with frills and trimmings that made Burr’s attempts, which I had so much admired, seem lady-like. There was a general chorus of deep, passionate cursing from the rest of the Virginians, until there was nothing about Colonel Enos or his ancestors left uncursed.

  I have heard it said that cursing is not what it was in my grandfather’s day, when it was considered, both by the damner and the damned, a serious business to damn a man for a fault or a sin; whereas it is now the fashion to damn anything and everything, whether it deserves damning or not; so that a man will damn a twig that slaps his cheek or a bird that twitters overloudly when he is desirous of sleeping. This may all be so; but I could ask to hear no more polished and intricate cursing than Colonel Enos received. If there was no efficacy in it, then there never will be efficacy in any sort of curse anywhere.

  At dawn of Friday, the last Friday in October, we set off to cross the Height of Land; and while I had held Morgan’s riflemen in high esteem as soldiers, the thing they did that day has set them, in my mind, above all others. Whenever, since then, I hear them bragging somewhat concerning their powers, which they are prone to do, I
feel that they have earned the right to brag.

  The supplies of all divisions were sadly shrunk, the provisions near gone and much of the ammunition spoiled by the leaking of rain and river water into the powder kegs. Therefore Colonel Arnold, to ease the crossing of the terrible five-mile wall of the Height of Land by his half-starved army, had sent back word that each company need carry only one bateau for medicines and a few essentials. The others could be abandoned at the last of the Chain of Ponds.

  Yet Morgan’s riflemen, angered by Enos’s desertion and determined to make rapid progress when they reached Canada, as well as to save the few military stores they had so jealously guarded, said they would carry all seven of their bateaux across the mountains on their backs. This they did, and in doing it they wore the skin from their shoulders, so that the bones showed through.

  When we passed those men, creeping slowly up the trail, dragging at the bateaux like ants tugging at something infinitely vaster than themselves, I thought to myself that Roger Enos’s excuse for leaving us might prove satisfactory to all the world, but could never be anything more than the whimpering of a frightened puppy to those who had gone on.

  Knowing that the trail which Morgan’s men were following had been made by Lieutenant Steele, Lieutenant Church, Cap Huff and the twenty axemen, I feared to follow it too far lest someone recognize Natanis and so make trouble for him, and also lest I be ambushed by Treeworgy, who couldn’t be far ahead. Therefore Natanis led us off the trail and into a winding trace, like a deer path. Along this we struggled as well as though we were on the snagged trail, though this, God knows, is not said in high praise.

  What hell may be like, I don’t know; but if it’s like the Height of Land I hope I may be spared from it. I have seen evil forests in my life, but never so much evil compressed into such small compass as here.

  The trees were dwarfed and starved, without a first-growth tree among them; and all of them grew from the rotting bones of other forests which had been beaten to the earth, Natanis said, by the terrible windstorms that rage across them. There were blow-downs everywhere, tangles of dead pines, with new growth binding them together, so that there was no getting through them. Nor, as one climbed higher on this terrible wall, did the moisture drain from the earth, as might be expected. Everywhere there were mire holes: wet gullies through thickets whose dead twigs snapped into our faces: devilish bogs at the bottom of ravines, and sheer precipices rising out of dark bogs with other bogs at their tops.

  Along our narrow deer track, twisting around mire holes and skirting blow-downs, Natanis moved without hesitation, though it was a path I could never have followed by myself. When I said so, he showed me the Abenaki trail marks, faint ones so that they might not be used by the Montagnais or any other Northern Indians: triple slashes, little more than scratches, inclined to the left or to the right, or straight up and down, depending on the direction followed by the trail ahead. There were, he said, three main Abenaki trails across the Height of Land from the Chain of Ponds: one zigzagging across from the pond we had just left and coming out on Seven Mile Stream, which is the stream flowing from the northerly side of the Height of Land into Lake Megantic; one going to the right of this and coming out on the easterly shore of Lake Megantic; and the third going to the left and coming out on the westerly shore of the lake. These, he said, were necessary for hunting parties, and had existed for years, with cross trails connecting them. It was the first of these, he said, that we were traveling. The trail opened for the army was straighter and shorter than any of the Abenaki trails.

  After we had topped the Height and commenced our descent we came to a mountain meadow, one that seemed to me a lovely sight because of its resemblance to a fragment of New England dropped into all this hellishness. It was dotted with clumps of elms, large and stately, and over it lay a thick mat of grass, so that it had a familiar look, like Ipswich common, or the green at Newburyport. Natanis warned me not to be misled by this unexpected sight into thinking all our troubles lay behind us. The meadow, he said, was without a mate anywhere in that country; and from its beauty the Abenakis believed it to be the spot where the great lord Glooskap was born. Its lower end, he said, gave rise to the Seven Mile Stream, which, after seven miles of winding, fell into Lake Megantic; but the country through which it flowed was worse than the Height of Land, thick with trackless bogs lying deep in water, so that even the Abenakis shunned it, skirting around it on the high land to the east and west.

  Through this meadow ran a new-made trail, so we knew Church and Steele and his men, as well as Arnold himself, had passed this way into Seven Mile Stream and so to Lake Megantic. We went beyond the meadow, watching carefully for Treeworgy, dropped our canoe into the twisted channel of Seven Mile Stream, and slipped silently down it through the worst swamps that ever I saw, there being no banks at all to the stream on its lower portions, only trees and shrubs standing in water, with here and there an islet choked with brush.

  The trees and bushes ceased toward dusk, and we knew we had come to the lake. In the distance was a plume of smoke, rising straight in the cold air from the right-hand shore. We saw bateaux in the water, and made out five or six campfires, so we were certain we had caught up with Colonel Arnold, which indeed we had.

  We skirted around the camp so that Natanis might land beyond it and be safe until we had need of him. Then we came back to the camp, Hobomok running me inshore quickly; so that if Treeworgy was there I might face him unexpectedly.

  Captain Oswald stood on the point talking with Lieutenant Church and Lieutenant Steele when the canoe shot in. They fell silent as I jumped ashore and went up to them. “Is Treeworgy here?” I asked, trying to look into the gloom beyond them.

  Steele stared silently across the lake. Church, scratching his lugubrious face with his forefinger, said sadly: “What you want of him?”

  Both had failed to give me any greeting at all.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. At once I thought I had the answer. “Treeworgy told you about Enos, of course! Where is he?”

  Steele walked away. Church looked mournfully at the ground.

  Oswald said: “You’d best hold your tongue until you’ve seen the colonel.” His voice was hostile.

  “Why, what do you mean?” I said. “What the hell ails you, treating me like a criminal!”

  “Over there,” Oswald said, pointing to an Indian cabin made of bark, sheltered from the north by a heavy clump of spruces. Light gleamed through its cracks. He and Church turned away, leaving me alone.

  I walked over to the bark house with a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. It never occurred to me to wonder how the cabin had come there. I pushed aside the blanket that hung at the door and found Colonel Arnold inside, his field desk balanced on his knee. When he looked up and saw me, he snapped down the cover of the inkwell and threw the desk together with a bang.

  “By God!” he said, “you’re either a brave man or the damnedest fool alive to come into this room with me!”

  “What in God’s name is the matter?” I asked, near sick with apprehension.

  Arnold’s eyeballs gleamed white in his dark, puffy face, which had lost all its pleasing contours and become nubbly, like the green squashes we grow in Arundel. He made a hissing sound, and picked up a heap of papers from beside the stump on which he sat.

  “Here,” he said, slapping one of the papers and glaring at me until I thought his eyes would pop. from his head. “You advised Colonel Enos that it was his duty to return to Cambridge with all his troops and provisions! What have you got to say to that, damn you!”

  “It’s a damned dirty lie!” I said, cold and shaking all over, and feeling as though I had no stomach inside my hunting shirt.

  “Do you dare to stand there and deny—”

  “Deny! Deny! I say it’s a lie! I fought him, for God’s sake! What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve got it here!” Arnold shouted, banging the stump with his fist. “I tell you I’ve got it do
wn in black and white! Here! Did you or did you not say this to Captain Williams before Colonel Enos, when asked for advice? Did you or did you not say that if you were in their place you’d pack up and go home, no matter how much food you had?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” I said. “Yes! But in sarcasm! In sarcasm!” A hurly-burly of thoughts raced through my head, making me near speechless from desire to speak them all and inability to know where to start. “By God!” I said, “it was Treeworgy! Treeworgy heard me!” “Yes,”

  Arnold said, his face furious, “Treeworgy heard you say it!”

  “I tell you I didn’t say it! I said other words that changed the meaning!”

  “But you used those words!”

  “Yes, but not as you imply. Wait: I can’t remember what I said! I tell you I fought Enos and Williams! This Treeworgy—he’s responsible, damn his dirty lousy soul to hell—they never would have gone back but for Treeworgy!”

  “Oh,” Arnold said, moving his thick shoulders under his coat and glaring at me cold and unwinking out of pale blue eyes. “Oh, so now you turn it all on Treeworgy! What was it Treeworgy did?”

  “Damn him!” I said, half crying with desire to tear him to pieces. “He took my food and my musket and my canoe, and raced up here to lie about me!”

  Arnold watched me with hard blue eyes. “Good reason, too! He heard you advise them to go back. He thought you intended to go back as well.”

  “He thought no such thing! I did not advise them to go back. I’d see anyone in hell before I advised him to go back! If I advised them to go back, why have I come on myself? What would Treeworgy say to that? Where is he, the damned gray rat?”

  “I’ll tell you what he’d say,” Arnold said. I tightened my muscles, thinking he meant to jump up and take me by the throat. “I’ll tell you what he did say. He said he took your canoe because he thought you were a coward and would go back with Enos, so that you’d have no use for a canoe. He said if you came on in spite of that, it would prove what he disliked to think: that you’re a spy!”