Crow Hollow

by Michael Wallace

  The two English could only make slow progress through the snow, which frustrated the Abenaki. After about ten minutes, Kepnomotok made exasperated noises and ordered them to stop. His older son continued ahead, while the other two trimmed and tied crude snowshoes for their two prisoners.

  Prudence had used snowshoes before, but it took James a few minutes to get the feel of them. After that, they made good progress, their only obstacle the softening snow due to the warming air.

  Sometime later Tictok rejoined them on the trail. He carried a dead doe draped over his shoulders, already cold and stiffening, its hooves tied off for ease in transport. They must have killed it earlier when one of them had spotted the last trickle of smoke from the campfire and sent Tictok ahead to investigate.

  Shortly they came onto a packed trail that led down to the valley between two hills. They crossed a stream, frozen solid on top but still gurgling beneath the ice, then the trail twisted through the woods for another hour before it crested yet another hill and emerged into a larger valley. There, they came onto the banks of a large river.

  It was easily a hundred and fifty feet wide, and Prudence guessed it was the Connecticut again. Ice stretched from each bank, but the middle third was unfrozen and still flowed swiftly, carrying its burden of slush and ice south toward the sea.

  Moments later came the telltale thwack, thwack of someone cutting wood. And not the crisp bite of a metal ax, but the duller thump from one of the sharpened stone adzes used by the natives. Her heart quickened.

  The trail led around a granite outcrop that forced a bend into the river, and they came upon an Indian village in a meadow above the riverbank. It was a collection of some thirty dwellings, beginning roughly twenty feet above the water line and abutting the forested hills at its rear. The wigwams were rectangular, built of frames lashed together with vines, the sides made of woven matting. Arched roofs could shed rain but had been hand-scraped clean of snow, as they tended to leak when ice and snow melted during warm stretches. Smoke trailed into the air from squat mud-and-stick chimneys on one end.

  The homes were smaller than the Nipmuk dwellings she’d seen in Sachusett, and more tightly clustered. The village was smaller too. A porcupine-like palisade of crossed, sharpened logs enclosed the part that didn’t face the river, and a hand-dug moat added to the defense where the trail passed into the village. Even here, where the war had never reached, the fighting seemed to have encouraged the Abenaki to fortify their village.

  She glanced at James. “It’s strength they value and respect. Try not to look nervous.”

  “I’m trying, believe me. It isn’t easy.”

  “For me, either.”

  Tictok broke into a trot and ran ahead to the village, crying out as he passed between the opening in the palisade. Men, women, and children came racing out of their wigwams. The men wore bear and wolf pelts over their deerskin clothing, and both men and women wore wampum bracelets made of shells traded from the coast. Unlike the Nipmuk, only women wore feathers in their hair and on thongs around their upper arms. The Abenaki seemed to prefer blue jay feathers instead of the long black plumes of ravens and crows favored by the Nipmuk.

  Younger children came all the way forward to gape and stare unabashedly until the adults—themselves discussing and arguing in a cacophony of people all talking at once—pushed them out of the way. A couple of older boys watched from farther back with practiced nonchalance. The boys were dressed like men, with leather armbands, but no wampum.

  When the older boys spotted Tictok’s younger brother, they called him over to demand answers. He swaggered to join them, chest puffed, and began to elaborate the story in a proud tone, his hands gesticulating. The younger children gathered there, where the telling was more dramatic. Prudence scrutinized each of them, looking for her daughter. Her stomach fell. There was no sight of Mary or any other English child.

  “Puda-katan,” a voice said behind her.

  She turned and came face-to-face with two Nipmuk women from Sachusett—Hapamag and Laka, mother and daughter. Laka had been Mikmonto’s wife. She held an infant who suckled at an exposed breast. It was too young to be Mikmonto’s; the sachem’s head rested on a pike outside the Winton meetinghouse.

  “Laka, Hapamag. You’re alive!” Prudence said in Nipmuk. She opened her mouth to ask about the rest of the survivors, then stopped.

  A second, older child clung to Laka’s leather breeches and peered shyly around her legs.

  The child’s face was dirty, her clothes a simple hide shift like they put onto children of both genders, with no underclothes, until they learned to go outside to pass water. Her hair was cut high on the scalp, Indian-style, and everything about her mannerisms was no different than that of the other children.

  But she had blond hair and blue eyes.

  “Mary!” Prudence cried, reaching for the child.

  The girl screamed in terror.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The two Nipmuk women blocked Prudence’s desperate lunge for her daughter. And Mary showed nothing but complete terror at this strange woman who had come into the village and immediately tried to snatch her up. Because Laka was holding the baby, the older woman swept up Mary and cradled her in her arms.

  Mary was screaming, “Nuken!” Mama.

  But she wasn’t reaching for Prudence, she was reaching for Laka, who was trying to shuffle the baby and reach for Mary at the same time. The realization of what she was seeing struck Prudence like a fist to the belly.

  Abenaki surrounded Prudence and pushed her back. A man grabbed her wrist, while another hefted a stone ax. It was the man who had been chopping firewood when they’d entered the village.

  “Unhand her!” James cried. He fought his way toward her.

  Prudence was horrified at her blunder. She’d terrified her daughter and turned a tense atmosphere into a dangerous one. The two Nipmuk women had swept Mary away and were disappearing through the crowd.

  Tictok dropped the dead doe and drew his stone club as he rushed in to confront James with a look of triumph and joy. Prudence could read Tictok’s thoughts. Time to settle the matter left unfinished at the snow cave.

  She raised her hands. “No!” she said in Nipmuk, hoping they could understand. “We won’t fight. No!”

  James reached her side. She broke free of the grasping hands and threw her arms around him to hold him still. “James, please! No!” He stopped struggling.

  She braced herself for blows. It was how the Nipmuk had treated captives who misbehaved. Knock them around until they remembered their place. They even did this with other Indians who had become nominal parts of the tribe.

  But after some pushing, some shouted arguments, she soon found herself in a circle of Abenaki adults. Kepnomotok and his son argued in loud, angry tones.

  “Where is Laka?” she asked. “Where is my daughter? Does anyone speak Nipmuk?”

  There was no sign of the dead sachem’s wife or her mother, but the Abenaki pushed another woman forward.

  “Do you understand me, Puda-katan?” the woman said in Nipmuk.

  Prudence said she did, asked if she could speak to all of the surviving Nipmuk.

  “We are not Nipmuk,” the woman said.

  “But you speak it well. You must be Nipmuk, even if it is a different . . .”

  Prudence stopped. She couldn’t remember how to say the word “dialect.” This woman had a strange accent, but there was no question she was a native speaker. From another tribe, then.

  “We are not Nipmuk,” the woman insisted. “We are adopted. All Abenaki now. We speak it, we live it. We pray to the dead fathers of the Abenaki, honor the spirits of their lands and streams. The Nipmuk are dead.”

  Now Prudence understood. The Abenaki wouldn’t let Nipmuk into their lands, not without shedding their entire identity, even down to their spiritual rituals. Pagan though they may be, she’d seen how deeply those beliefs infused their lives. To surrender them must have been wrenching for th
e surviving Nipmuk.

  Yet how was that so different from what had happened to Peter Church and the other Praying Indians? The small English-style Indian villages that survived on Cape Cod and the outskirts of Plymouth? To live among the English, they must become English. Settled, Christian, subject to English law.

  “What did she say?” James asked.

  Prudence translated for him. At the same time, the other woman spoke to Kepnomotok in Abenaki, no doubt doing the same. He must be the sachem of the village. That was fortunate, as he seemed to be the only thing restraining the younger men from attacking them.

  “Ask her how many Nipmuk are still alive,” James said.

  “How many adopted are you?” she asked the woman.

  “Nine still live.”

  Only nine? The number was stunning after all the hundreds she had met during her captivity. She told James.

  “Any men from Sachusett?” he asked.

  “Why do you—oh, so we can find out about why they attacked Winton.”

  She asked the young woman, who grimaced and gave the slight toss of the head that counted among the Nipmuk as a head shake—no. She said she’d fled an English attack with her husband, hoping to gain safety in the north, but the Abenaki had killed him. They had killed two other men too. The only surviving Nipmuk were four women and five children, none of them boys.

  “Why would the Abenaki do that?” James asked after Prudence had translated. “What risk are a few men?”

  “For the same reason they forced Nipmuk to become Abenaki. First men ask for help, then they form their own village. Then they make war against you. The women and children have value. The men are only a threat.”

  James’s brow furrowed at this. At first she supposed he was troubled by the thought of men being slaughtered simply for being of the wrong tribe, but then he said, “Are they counting Mary as one of the nine?”

  “Yes, they must be.”

  A sick feeling settled into her belly. Mary had cried for Laka as if she were the woman’s daughter. And the Abenaki would consider her one of their own.

  Kepnomotok pushed through the crowd, gesturing for them to follow. “You come. Come.”

  Prudence looked around the group of Indians. Every person in the village seemed to have gathered, numbering at least a hundred. Many of the younger men still seemed agitated and were arguing with their elders. No doubt itching for some blood sport.

  “I believe,” James said, seemingly coming to the same conclusion, “that we’d be safer obeying the chief.”

  It wasn’t the sight of the village that transported Prudence to her captivity. It wasn’t the language, so similar to Nipmuk, yet different enough that her hard-fought language skills served her poorly.

  No, it was the smell of Kepnomotok’s wigwam. The fire in the pit at one end mixed with the smell of dry rushes, the scent of bear fat rubbed over flesh to keep it clean and help the wearer stay warm in the chill of winter.

  One of the sachem’s wives used two forked sticks to remove a clay pot from the coals on the edge of the fire. She flipped off a flat stone from the top that had been serving as a lid. Steam billowed into the air, smelling of corn and peas and venison, seasoned with wild leeks they collected in spring and then preserved in sea salt. Prudence knew exactly what the pottage would taste like; she’d eaten it many times.

  Kepnomotok took a stack of bowls carved from the burls of maple trees and handed them to a second wife, this one older, her thick black hair streaked with gray. She began to fill the bowls. The sachem sat down on a rush mat in the middle of the floor and gestured for Prudence and James to do the same. He pantomimed eating.

  The man seemed remarkably calm, given that two English were in his wigwam and the whole village was still in an uproar outside, their many conversations audible through the walls. In addition to his wives, a girl of twelve or thirteen sat quietly on the opposite side of the single-room house, her knees pulled to her chest, watching them with wide eyes. Tictok stood by the doorway, arms folded. Dried blood on his upper arm served as a reminder of the fight between him and James only a few short hours earlier.

  Prudence’s stomach rumbled with hunger, but she refused to look at the food or obey Kepnomotok’s command to sit. James followed her lead.

  “Where is my daughter?” she asked in Nipmuk.

  “Puda-katan, you sit.” Then something else that she couldn’t decipher. This was to his son, who scowled but came over, where he sat next to his father.

  “Sit,” Kepnomotok said, more insistently this time, as if her only objection had been that Tictok had not been seated.

  “No. Daughter first.”

  “Why don’t we sit?” James said. “Share a meal. Heaven knows we need it, and it will show that our intent is peaceable.”

  “Not yet, no. Follow my example.” In a lower voice, in case they understood English, she added. “It’s strength they respect.”

  James and Tictok stared at each other. The younger Abenaki gave a boastful appearance, as if taunting his opponent by the very act of sitting. That James didn’t sit, that look said, showed he was a coward.

  The young man’s posture reminded her of the Nipmuk sachem, Mikmonto, and that memory threatened to overwhelm her. Mikmonto had worn that same sneer when he’d come to her with hands stained in Benjamin’s blood. Her husband lay dead on the commons, but his screams for mercy still rang in her ears. Her kind, brave husband tortured to death. If not for fear of letting go of her daughter, she’d have fainted. The memory of it left her lightheaded now.

  Prudence couldn’t let that show. She had to master her emotions.

  “Call for Laka,” she said to Kepnomotok. Did he catch the tremble in her voice? “Laka.” She pantomimed holding a baby at her breast.

  The sachem hesitated, but he gave an order to his younger wife, who had finished hauling the pots from the fire. The woman pushed aside the deer hide at the doorway and stepped out. In the moment before the hide swung back in place, Prudence saw a dozen curious faces peering into the wigwam.

  The wife returned with Laka. The young Nipmuk woman still had her baby, but Prudence’s heart fell that Mary wasn’t with her. Prudence nodded at James, and the two English sat. The sachem’s other wife put down four bowls of pottage, one in front of each of the two Abenaki men, and the others for the two visitor-captives. She put down a clay pot filled with water for washing their hands, which all four of them used in turn before eating.

  James watched Prudence carefully and only picked up the bowl when she did. She waited for Kepnomotok to eat first, then Tictok, then nodded to James that it was all right to eat. The sachem grunted and looked satisfied that she seemed to understand proper eating behavior.

  After that, however, there was little etiquette. Prudence was so hungry that she devoured the food, holding the bowl in one hand and picking out the pieces of meat and vegetables as fast as she could without scalding herself. The natives didn’t drink much water—they believed that disease came from the water, not the air, and that cold water was more dangerous than hot—and so their soups and pottages always had a lot of liquid. When the larger bits were gone, everyone lifted the bowls and sipped and slurped until there was nothing left.

  The wives had retreated to the far side of the wigwam, together with the girl, who still sat quietly, watching. Laka stood behind Kepnomotok’s shoulder. She didn’t eat or ask to be fed.

  Prudence put down her bowl. One of the wives came forward to refill it, but she told them no, not because she wasn’t still hungry, but because she couldn’t stand waiting any longer now that she’d satisfied proper behavior.

  “Laka,” she said.

  “Yes, Puda-katan?”

  Bring me my daughter. You have no right!

  She didn’t voice this. “Do the Abenaki treat you kindly? You and the other Nipmuk who survived?”

  “There is food in our belly and our burdens are light.”

  It was the proper answer, yet pain flickered in her e
yes. Laka cast a significant glance at Tictok, who was still staring haughtily at James, ignoring the women, unlike his father, who was listening with his brow furrowed. In that look from Laka, Prudence understood. The young widow had become Tictok’s wife.

  And the baby at her breast? His too, no doubt. Prudence counted months from the time of the Crow Hollow massacre to now. It had been less than a year since Laka’s husband had fallen. Yet here she was, already with a child who must be two months old. No time to mourn her husband’s death.

  The Abenaki had imposed harsh terms on the desperate Nipmuk survivors. First, the men had been killed. Then the surviving women had been accepted only by becoming Abenaki, by submitting to immediate marriage with the men of the tribe.

  Both James and Kepnomotok asked for translations, which the two women did in the respective languages.

  “It’s a harsh land,” James murmured, when Prudence added what she’d surmised about Laka and Tiktok.

  “The sachem asks why you have returned,” Laka said.

  “For my daughter.”

  “She is Abenaki now. Do you wish to become Abenaki, Puda-katan?”

  “You know that I don’t. I am English.”

  “English are killers. They are moz.”

  Moz literally meant “moose” in Nipmuk, but the name for the animal came from the word “strip,” because of how moose stripped the bark from trees. And in this case, it didn’t mean moose, so much as despoilers.

  Nipmuk used the word to refer to the way the English would clear fields by girdling the trees so they would die, or how when the English arrived, the fish and game would become scarce. She’d also heard it from a Nipmuk from the coast whose village had been decimated after a Portuguese fishing boat ran aground. The villagers had helped the Portuguese crew, only to discover that the captain was suffering from smallpox. Scarcely a handful of heavily pockmarked villagers had survived the subsequent plague.