We waked the two soldiers and fed them once more, telling them to follow when they felt strong enough, and that they’d find more food hanging from a tree at the end of two miles. We gave them their blankets and muskets and went on.
In a short time we came to a brawling stream. “This,” Natanis said, “flows into the easterly end of Finger Lake, and the army must cross it eventually lower down. We’ll cross it here, where it’s small, continue down toward the fording place, and wait there for the army.”
The stream emerged from the rocky spurs of the Height of Land into a hideous flat country, tangled with alders and a hellish growth of shrubbery. Its width may have been four rods. There was ice against both banks, but the water flowed smoothly with nothing fearsome about it.
When we stood at what Natanis said was its first shallow place, and looked toward Finger Lake, which we could not see for the growth of brush, there was a tremendous stretch of swamp at our left. Through this swamp Greene and his men were still wading. On our right were the rough, broken-faced spurs of the Height of Land.
We held a council; and this was what we decided: When the army crossed the stream, it would continue over the rocky ridges beyond, because there was nothing else for it to do. Natanis, therefore, would cross two ridges and lie on the far slope, waiting for Greene and the guide to come up. With him would go Paul Higgins and myself, to lie hidden among the rocks and do what we could in case the guide, who had seen Natanis before, should attempt to shoot him. Hobomok, with the other Abenakis, would remain at the river; and when Jacataqua passed he would go to her and tell her to make her way up to the head of the line to tell Greene she had seen an Indian: one who would guide the army quick and straight to Lake Megantic. When this had been done Natanis would show himself. If for some reason it could not be done, Natanis said, he would speak to Greene at all hazards.
I wonder now, as I look back at it, that we should have troubled ourselves to use such care with men who were lost and starving and weak with the flux; but it may be I have forgotten the wariness that enters into a man when he has been accused of spying, and when scouts have been ordered to kill him, as in the case of Natanis. Nor did we have any faith in the guide Hull, whom we knew to be one of the worst, neither reliable nor inventive; and men of this sort are prone to sudden frights and to the reckless use of firearms.
So we climbed two ridges, bad ridges, rough and rock-strewn, and slippery with snow, and waited on the second, lying where we could look back into the deep depression between the two, a depression at whose bottom the snow had been melted by the wetness of the ground.
“In less than two hours’ time,” Natanis told us, “I can lead these men to the northwest a little, and then to the northeast and then to the southwest, and put them on the path that borders Lake Megantic. There they’ll find the tracks of those who went ahead.”
In time, far in the distance, we heard a faint, thin piping, a reedy chirping such as you may hear in the late summer in Arundel, if you lie in the tall grasses of the sand dunes and listen to insects going about their occasions. This, Paul said, was made by the army passing through the river.
It may be I shall come to be an old, old man; and my memory may slip from me as it does from some when they are ancient; but there are certain things that can never fade out of my mind. One of them is my recollection of the men who crawled slowly over the ridge across from us. It was not so much the leaders, Colonel Greene and the doctor of the army, young Senter, and the guide Isaac Hull, though they, God knows, were slow and fumbling in their movements, looking helplessly about and talking together, striving to see beyond the tangled shrubs and trees that surrounded them. It was the men who came after them that I can never forget: haggard, dirty, ragged men, slipping and tripping where no man should slip or trip, lifting their feet painfully and slowly as if their legs were shackled to the ground, crawling and groping down the rocky slope like helpless insects blinded by a sudden light.
We saw Jacataqua and her yellow-faced dog come over the ridge, sliding and running in the snow, and catch up with Greene. The. guide Hull sat down when she spoke, holding his head in his hands. Greene looked back up the slope, as did all the others. We could hear a murmuring from them, a babbling like the babbling of children.
Natanis came out from his hiding place and went lightly down the hill and up to Greene, who was looking for him to come from the rear. We could see Natanis smile and point; see Greene nod, he and Senter holding together for support; and beside them sat the guide Hull, his face still resting in his hands.
Led by Natanis the ragged column blundered onward. Our eyes clung, with a sort of sickness, to the miserable horde that crept among the boulders on the ridges and in the valley between: to men slowly coming to the top and falling together in a heap as they started to descend: to men standing stock still, wavering on their feet as they stared into the valley before them, as if calculating whether their strength would suffice for the descent, then moving downward, slipping, sliding, pitching head foremost into the snow, their muskets flying from their hands: to men moving to help them and falling on them in turn: to men dragging themselves upward by holding to bushes: to men losing their hold and rolling back to the bottom again, lying there motionless until a little of their strength came back: to men who had no eyes for those who had fallen from the line, but plodded on, stumbling, crawling, limping, their gaze fixed on space, brooding over God knows what: to hatless men: to men whose garments hung on them in rags: to men whose feet were bare and left blood spots on the snow.
Last of all came those who had fallen out, but had summoned another ounce of energy when the stillness of the forest had closed in on them, thin ghosts pitching and weaving along the trampled trail, dragging themselves on hands and knees when they fell, then getting to their feet once more: silent men: horrible men; but men whose faces showed no suffering and no terror; only the resigned detachment that comes, it seems to me, to all those whose marchings and whose fightings exceed the limits of their endurance.
When there was no more movement in the depression between the ridges Paul Higgins and I went down into it and picked up the two men who lay there. We built a fire and left them beside it, then went back along the army’s trail to see how it happened that Hobomok and the other Abenakis had not come up with us.
On high ground near the river a fire was burning, and by it sat Jacataqua, roasting the last of our bear and raccoon meat. Beside her crouched her yellow-faced black dog, gnawing voluptuously at a bone; and lying by the fire were seven men, soldiers, seemingly without life.
“Don’t eat too much of that,” I said to her as we came up.
“Do you think I’m a pig?” she asked, without bothering to look at me.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Steven,” she said, waving a greeting to Paul Higgins, who stared at her gloomily, “everything happened: every damned bad thing in the world.”
At this Paul and I touched wood. I’m not superstitious, nor do I put any faith whatever in that foolish custom. If there were more bad things on the road for us, it was not reasonable to suppose that the touching of a piece of wood could save us from them; yet it seemed to me that nothing capable of averting evil fortune should be overlooked.
“Where are the others?” I asked.
“Gone after other sick men. Two fell in a bog about a mile back. One man sat down at the edge of the lake and couldn’t get up. I think the two in the bog are dead.”
“What about these men?” I asked, looking at the seven by the fire.
“Crossing the river,” Jacataqua said. “That was bad! Some, to keep their clothes from being made wetter, took them off when they crossed. When they fell down, they found the water so cold they couldn’t get up.”
She added that four dead men had been left in the stream. “We can’t waste strength on dead men,” she said.
There was something lonely and bitter about her. It put me in mind to ask why Burr had left her and gone with M
organ’s men.
She shrugged her shoulders. “He may be a great gentleman among white men, Steven, but he’s strange about food.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what we do to an Abenaki who has food and won’t share it with a man who has none.”
Paul and I nodded.
“Yes,” said Jacataqua, “that’s the first thing we’re taught, so I’m troubled about Aaron. He never shares his food unless he must.”
Paul grunted. “Many good white men are like that. White men have strange savage customs.” He spoke, as he so often did, as though his father and mother had been Abenakis instead of white colonists from Devonshire in England.
“I think,” Jacataqua said, “that if Aaron had to choose between me and five pints of flour, he might take the flour.”
“I know nothing about it,” I said, “save that men are peculiar. I cannot understand how a woman can endure to take up with one of them for more than a week at a time. Neither do I see how such talk as this will feed these men when they wake. Let’s go along the ridge and see if there’s anything to kill.”
“I’ll go,” Jacataqua said. “Tarso can help us hunt.”
“Tarso?”
“Anatarso,” she explained. “Humming-bird.”
“Anatarso!” Paul groaned, as if to say he preferred to starve, rather than hunt with a dog named Humming-bird.
None the less, Humming-bird nosed a rabbit out of a thicket, showed us a covey of spruce partridges in a tree, and gave tongue among the rocks until we climbed up and found two porcupines. I know of things that I had liefer eat than porcupines; but their livers are delicious, and the rest of them might be worse. After we had shoved a stick through them lengthwise and burned off their quills in a fierce flame, they were juicier than beaver, and certainly better than seal.
When Hobomok and the others returned they brought three men with them, all three unconscious from exhaustion.
On the following morning, the last day of October, we left behind us at Dead Man’s Camp ten live men, with two of Paul’s braves to send them, when rested, on their way to Lake Megantic.
It was Paul who named it Dead Man’s Camp, since those for whom it was made would have been dead except for the grace of God and Paul’s Abenakis.
XXVI
WE CAME out of the forest into a clear space on the high easterly shore of Lake Megantic. Natanis was there, with one of Paul’s messengers from the lower Chaudière. They were warming themselves in the sun and looking back across the head of the lake at the great barrier of the Height of Land, shining and sparkling in the early sunlight.
We could see the marshes at the mouth of Seven Mile Stream protruding into the blue lake, seemingly as fair and dry as fertile meadowland; and up above the mouth of the stream, on the lower slopes of the Height, like lace on a woman’s breast, shone the white patch of the Beautiful Meadow. Above this, in turn, rose the spurs of those terrible mountains. They were harmless-looking now, against the pale blue of the autumn sky; but I could not forget the bloody footprints in the snow and the rigid body of James Dunn on the mound in the swamp. To me the mountains seemed hideous and menacing, like the bared teeth of some jealous monster, snarling at those who dared invade this Northern country.
“That’s over,” Natanis said, as if in answer to my thoughts. “I think the Great Spirit must have watched over your brothers. They escaped from the swamps and went down the Chaudière.”
“All of them?”
“All except the stragglers and the sick. Arnold went first, with a few men; then Morgan with his bateaux. Your friends were led out of the swamps by Goodrich and Dearborn yesterday. Behind them, this morning, went those we brought out last night. There will be no further losing of the way. The Chaudière will carry them straight to the St. Lawrence. There can be more trouble, though, and some is already here!”
One of Paul Higgins’s messengers ran to us, drew a ball of knotted twine from his wallet and began to read it to us, unrolling it from his left hand into his right, fingering the knots and seeming to get a meaning from each one.
“The white chief,” the messenger said, “was wrecked at Talons du Diable, three leagues down the river. His boats were broken in pieces. At Great Falls our people carried what was left of his boats for him.
“Later the tall loud-voiced captain whose men carry rifles came down with seven bateaux. All seven were smashed in pieces. One man was drowned. Many would have been drowned if our people had not saved them. These men have no food. We are hunting game for them, but game is scarce.
“A captain with a black dog is sick. We think he will die if he cannot have food.
“One company had all its food in one bateau. The bateau was wrecked before the company could come up with it. All the food was destroyed. The company is hungry.”
The messenger rolled up his string and replaced it in his wallet.
“Is there enough food in Sartigan for all these men?” Paul Higgins asked.
“Plenty.”
“How far is Sartigan?” I asked.
“From here, seventy miles. Five miles beyond where the Rivière du Loup flows into the Chaudière, and then across the Rivière la Famine. From the beginning of the Chaudière sixty-five miles.”
“Is there no food nearer?”
“Sartigan is the first house,” Natanis said.
If I understood the messenger rightly, it was Goodrich’s company whose food had been destroyed. They must have gone foodless for two days. I thought to myself that if Phoebe must march without food for another sixty-five miles she’d be no more in my hand than the carcass of a night heron, all feathers and boniness.
I could feel, in the flesh of my palms, the ridges of her ribs as I had felt them in the dark swamp, and her thin little body fitting loosely into her brass-studded belt; and there was something terrible in the thought that she might become so wasted she could never be smooth and golden again, to slip over the stern of a sloop like a golden otter sliding up a river bank.
“Someone,” I said, “must go for Cap Huff and Natawammet, and not stop to catch fish or hunt wildflowers.”
“I’ll go for them,” Natanis said. “You can follow your friends down the Chaudière.”
I hitched my pack and musket into place and hurried north along the Megantic shore with Hobomok, Jacataqua, and the dog Anatarso.
Of all the rivers I know, it seems to me the Chaudière is best named. Dead River is painfully alive for most of its length; the Sandy River hasn’t enough sand, in some parts, to polish a shilling; and although Cobosseecontee means “where the sturgeon is found,” there are no sturgeons in the Cobosseecontee River except at its mouth in the spring of the year. But the word “chaudière” means “caldron” in the French tongue; and the river Chaudière is a boiling, hissing caldron of water for its entire length, its bed made up of jagged rocks and ledges, with here and there a sudden roaring cataract set among rock-walled turns so sharp that the water, whirling in them, seems to smoke.
In other rapid rivers there may be white patches of quick water, followed by stretches of smooth; so that a canoe, driven by skillful paddlers, reaches for one goal of dark water after another, giving the paddlers time to think, and so come through safely. In the Chaudière the water runs white for miles, all curling waves and foam from bank to bank, with spines of rock rising above the smother like the backs of salmon in the quick water of a tide river in early spring, as they go up to lay their eggs and die.
Thus paddlers shoot for miles through this furious water, and in the end become numb to the whiteness and the danger. Their alertness relaxes, their canoe is slashed to the vitals by the sawlike teeth of a ledge or toppled headlong down an avalanche of foam, and it’s a miracle if they, as well as all their belongings, aren’t boiled to a pulp by the Chaudière.
Nor does the foul nature of this stream cease with its rocky bed and its swiftness. There are high bluffs on each side of the river channel. Sometimes the river runs far from
the bluffs; but again it turns abruptly against them, raging and snarling, so there is scarce an inch of shore on which to find a foothold. Thus there are times when one who follows the banks of the Chaudière on foot is pushing and twisting his way through the cedar and hemlock swamps of the lowlands, wading through streams and over piles of dead trees, spewed out by floods in years gone by; and there are other times when he is clambering up a precipitous bank, catching at roots or briars to keep himself from slipping, or plunging down the face of a precipice into a tangle of underbrush at the base.
I have traveled this trail with a full belly and warm clothes, and found it a tax on my patience. When a hungry man, weak and ill clad, has passed over it, no threats of hell’s tribulations can frighten him thereafter.
At the end of Lake Megantic, where the Chaudière starts on its devious and rocky way, we made a fire near the trail, and went into the woods to hunt.
It may be that the passage of the troops, who were perpetually banging on kettles and shooting off their muskets for the fun of hearing the noise, had frightened the game away. Whatever the reason, we found nothing in our two hours’ hunt but two great horned owls—whose only edible parts are their hearts and livers—three spruce partridges, a porcupine, and three crows. These things were not worth saving for those ahead of us, so we cleaned and cooked them. While they were broiling we saw Natawammet trotting toward us along the trail, and behind him Cap Huff, puffing and blowing to keep ahead of Natanis, who pressed close on his heels.
There was a look of almost painful neatness to Cap when he joined us. He had taken on weight since I saw him last, and had shaved off his beard. The rips in his buckskins were patched, and he was wearing new moccasins, made out of raccoon skin with the fur inside, the soles reinforced with pieces from his old moccasins, so that taking him by and large, he was a soldierly figure indeed.
When I complimented him on his appearance he said indifferently that most of it was Natawammet’s doing. He spoke of Natawammet as Nat, raising his voice to a deafening bellow when he addressed him, in addition to using childish phrases and a wealth of gestures. It was seemingly his impression that if he could roar as loud as a clap of thunder, Natawammet might understand him easily.
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