Savage Liberty

by Eliot Pattison

  Brandt seemed shaken when he finally reached the ledge, nearly at the crest of the mountain, and stood motionless, staring at the six-foot-high platform that had been erected there years earlier. Duncan approached the old ranger, then halted as he noticed the sweeping vista opening before him. The view was one of the most remarkable he had ever seen. Ranks of long, green ridges, set apart by banks of low morning mist, rolled toward the eastern horizon. In the distant east he could see the lake where they had camped two nights before, flickering with the colors of dawn. His gaze settled on the northeast, where in the far distance he made out huge snowcapped mountains. Images from his youth leapt unbidden to his mind’s eye. Working on fishing weirs with the snowcapped Cuillin behind them. Taking cattle to high pastures where he and his cousins would race from the nightly campsite to fill leather bags with snow for the whiskey and sugar treats their old Aunt Peg would concoct for the drovers.

  Duncan stirred from his spell. As he reached the corporal, Brandt shrank back, then thrust a bony finger into Duncan’s chest as if to confirm he was no ghost. He did not speak until he faced the platform again. “This was her favorite place, the major always said. Where they camped and first lay together as man and woman.”

  “It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen,” Duncan acknowledged.

  “Oh, the things I seen the major do, the things I seen him endure. The wounds, the hardships, not just battling against impossible odds, but also getting other men to do the same, which I reckon is even harder. I never saw him flinch, never saw him cower. But that night she died, he was all done in. I found him on his knees under the moon, weeping like a wee babe.” Duncan, to his surprise, was glimpsing something noble under the surface of the unvarnished woodsman.

  Brandt bravely looked up toward the top of the platform. Strands of tattered feathers fluttered from the corner posts. The weathered skull of a deer capped each post.

  “He wouldn’t let anyone come here with him,” Brandt continued, “excepting one of his Mohawk sergeants, who knew the old ways of her tribe. They stayed up here all day and all night. They made a huge fire, like they was signaling the gods to come greet her eternal soul.”

  The platform itself was covered with a bearskin. At the near end, a braid of long black hair, tied with a faded red ribbon, dangled in the wind.

  “Where is it, Corporal?” Duncan asked. “Where is what you are retrieving for Major Rogers?”

  “Don’t know, exactly,” Brandt replied. “The place where no one would dare look,” It meant, Duncan surmised, that Brandt did indeed know. He was uneasily watching the braid of hair.

  “What was her name?” Duncan asked.

  “Hahnowa.”

  “Turtle?”

  Brandt nodded. “He called her Hannah.”

  “Do you have a flint and striker?” Duncan asked. When Brandt nodded, Duncan instructed him to light a fire and gather some cedar boughs. “There are words to be said,” Duncan told him.

  When the boughs were smoldering, Duncan lifted one and held it under each of the corner posts of Hahnowa’s burial platform, then swept the fragrant smoke over the bearskin shroud. “Jiyathontek,” he intoned toward the sky. “Here is the gentle Hahnowa of the Mohawk people, keepers of the eastern gate of the Haudenosaunee,” he declared, referring to the role of the Mohawk in guarding the eastern border of the Iroquois League. He set the bough back on the small fire and raised the single strand of white wampum beads Conawago had given him in Boston, the signal for truth. He wiped the beads over his eyes to symbolically brush away his mourning tears, then at his throat to confirm he would speak truly and freely from his heart. Finally, he lifted the wampum and held it over the dead woman’s skeletal remains. “Enghsitskodake,” he said at last. Thou shall be resting. He repeated the prayer three times, then turned expectantly to Brandt.

  The corporal held his hands in front of his chest, as if to push Duncan away. “Not me,” Brandt protested. “Yer the one who discourses with Iroquois spirits.”

  Duncan steeled himself, then hesitated. “Saguenay,” he said.

  “Saguenay,” Brandt repeated with a solemn nod.

  “It’s a place,” Duncan suggested, lifting the beads toward the corporal.

  Brandt clenched his jaw as he saw the beads, swallowing hard. “Ye talk about such things around campfires in the wilds. It was an old Oneida scout who first spoke to us of it. A beautiful place where all live in peace and harmony. No war, no famine, no disease. The major said you must mean heaven, and the Oneida said no, Saguenay is a real place in the north country that their ancestors often spoke of. A paradise where crops never fail and children are always laughing, he said, and everyone has thick fur robes for the long snow nights. A real place, he said, that no one has found yet.”

  “Saguenay,” Duncan said again, feeling a sense a power in the word now. “Saguenay,” he spoke toward the dead woman, as if to reassure her, then climbed onto the lower support of the platform. He clenched his jaw and pulled away the upper edge of the bearskin. It was far from the first time he had seen a dead Iroquois—he had once helped an entire village move all its dead when its elders had decided to relocate—but Hahnowa’s desiccated face was somehow different. Another would have been repulsed by the shriveled, long-dead woman, but Duncan saw the vestiges of a strong, handsome countenance and felt an odd bond with the dead beauty, sensing the pain Robert Rogers must have felt over her loss.

  She had died of a fever. In the tribes, that usually meant she had been killed by a disease brought by the Europeans, for which their bodies had no defenses. She had once been young and vibrant and in love. She had, he suspected, been the embodiment of the wild, joyful, and wise people of the tribes but had been cut down before bearing offspring, before aging, before knowing the fullness of life.

  “Bidh ainghlean da m’chaithris m’in cadal na huaigh,” he whispered, not realizing he had spoken the Gaelic prayer until the words had left his tongue. Angels shall guard ye in the sleep of the grave. “Forgive me, Hahnowa,” he added, and lifted her head. Her pillow was a rolled linen shirt, and in its center was a quillwork pouch the size of his open hand. He tossed the pouch down to Brandt, then rerolled the shirt and placed it under the woman’s head, rearranging the black braids over the doeskin dress that adorned her skin and bones.

  He whispered again in Mohawk, close to her ear. “Kayanerenh.” Peace. Then he covered the woman again with the weathered bearskin.

  Corporal Brandt stood frozen, gazing at the pouch, when Duncan climbed down. As Duncan reached for it, however, the old ranger jerked it away. “It’s the major’s,” he growled, backing away.

  “You mean the pouch is what he wants in his cell in Montreal,” Duncan said. The old Indian fighter nodded defiantly and pressed the pouch to his chest.

  “First I need to see it.”

  “Not likely,” Brandt said, stubbornly wrapping both arms around the pouch.

  “If you refuse, it may do him no good at all.” Duncan glanced at the embers beside them. “If you refuse,” he added, “then I shall stack more cedar on this fire so all the Iroquois gods take notice of you. They know I have done this with the best of intentions, and she would have wished it. But if you hoard it, you may have defeated its purpose as surely as if that British patrol had taken it. I will tell the gods that Ebenezer Brandt has stolen a treasure from the spirit of this Iroquois princess.”

  Brandt stared wide-eyed at the top of Hahnowa’s head, barely visible from under the bearskin shroud, then tossed the pouch to Duncan.

  DUNCAN URGED HIS BORROWED HORSE forward, toward the long mountain that dominated the western horizon—the last mountain, Allen promised, before the inland sea. The first half of the morning had been spent listening to Hayes and Allen debate the messages of Old Testament prophets, their talk often interrupted by the worried voice in Duncan’s own head warning him that with every mile, he was getting closer to calamity. There was still too much he did not understand, but he felt compelled
to run headlong toward the mysteries.

  A two-toned whistle sounded from behind him. Allen was growing worried about Ben, the young scout he had sent ahead, and every few minutes he interrupted his debate with Hayes to signal for the teenage boy, to no avail. Duncan had begun ascending the final slope when his horse slowed, skewing its ears forward. He raised a hand to warn the others; then his horse gave a long, whickering cry as a riderless mount appeared, galloping toward them.

  The frightened horse sped past him, then slowed enough for Allen to grab its reins. He flung them to one of his men and launched his own horse up the mountain at a full gallop. Duncan’s mount, less sure-footed than Allen’s nimble mountain horse, could not keep up, and Allen had disappeared from sight by the time Duncan reached the narrow pass over the crest of the mountain. He pushed his heels into the horse to urge him on, then just as urgently reined him in as the western lands opened before him.

  Less than ten miles away, the shimmering blue mass of Champlain stretched toward the northern horizon. Low, compact ridges unrolled toward the west, pointing toward the slice of glassy blue in the southwest that had been christened Lac du Saint Sacrement by the early French explorers. Duncan’s heart thrilled at the sight of the fertile, untamed landscape, unscarred by the hand of man.

  His horse whinnied, and Duncan absently stroked its neck as he gazed toward the southwest at a shadow on the horizon that might have been the Catskills, where Sarah would be settling back into Edentown. He watched a great bird, probably an eagle, climbing into the sky and realized it was studying something below. He stared down the slope and in quick succession saw a stag standing on a ledge, a family of grazing hares, and Ethan Allen desperately bracing the legs of a hanged man.

  “His arms, McCallum!” Allen shouted as Duncan galloped up to him. “Cut him down! By all that’s holy, cut the rope!”

  The young scout Ben had been hanged not by the neck, but by his arms, from a rope looped over an overhanging limb. His sleeves were soaked in blood from the open chafing at his wrists. A paper had been pinned to his shirt. Ben was moaning in agony, probably from the unnatural angle of his right shoulder. The youth gazed with a dull, unseeing expression as Duncan stood in his saddle to slice through the rope; then he fell into Duncan’s arms, unconscious. As he fell, the paper blew away, snagging on a nearby blueberry bush.

  Allen laid the youth on the ground, stroking his head as he knelt beside him. “Too young, too young for the perils of these trails. I told Ben’s mother, but she insisted he ride with us, for she feared otherwise he would run away to the sea and she would never look on him again.”

  “He was beaten,” Duncan explained as he examined the youth. “But he took no blade or ball in his body.”

  “But his arm,” Allen groaned. “Look at the boy’s arm!”

  “The shoulder is dislocated,” Duncan declared as he pulled away the boy’s shirt.

  As if to confirm, Allen pushed against the shoulder. The youth screamed in pain.

  “Roll up the shirt and put it tight into his armpit,” Duncan instructed Allen, who was watching their companions race down the slope now. “Now!” Duncan demanded. “The longer we leave it, the greater the pain.”

  Allen clumsily complied, then Duncan removed his own shoe, braced the bared foot against the youth’s rib cage, and slowly, forcefully, pulled the arm. The youth’s shout of pain abruptly stopped as with a loud pop the head of the humerus slid back into place. The scout gasped, more in surprise than pain now, then nodded his thanks to Duncan.

  “Best keep it in a sling for a few days,” Duncan advised, then opened his drinking gourd and began washing the scout’s raw, bleeding wrists. “I need a fire,” Duncan said to Allen. “I can make a brew to ease the discomfort.”

  Allen’s alarm was quickly turning to anger as he studied the boy. “No need,” he said, and retrieved a canteen draped over his saddle. Even from an arm’s length Duncan could smell the potent liquor when he uncorked it. “Mountain tonic. We mix in a bit of maple sugar to give it the flavor of the hills,” the frontiersman explained, then gently tipped the scout’s head back to help him drink.

  The youth gasped as the raw liquor hit his tongue, and his glazed eyes seemed to focus at last, acknowledging the worried faces that surrounded him. He grabbed the canteen and took a deep swallow. “Those dragoons,” the youth spat as he recovered. “They rode on me out of the woods, surrounded me, and asked if I rode with the mountain militia. They pulled me off my horse and started kicking me. They were angry, as if they had decided we had deceived them, and they said if we brought any old rangers north, we’d all get the same treatment. Then they pinned the broadside to me and rode off toward the lake.”

  “The soldiers from yesterday?” Duncan asked as Allen retrieved the paper. “How would they have known to ask about old rangers?”

  “The same, but with several others, newly arrived from one of the Champlain forts,” Ben said, then sipped again at the canteen.

  DUNCAN TURNED AS ALLEN CURSED under his breath. Duncan assumed that the broadside was about him, but then Allen held it up for him to see. Robert Rogers, it said at the top, under a row of skulls, to be tried as a traitor before a Montreal court-martial. Traitor to the good people of New York and New Hampshire. Turn not your back on our blessed King George, father of our people. Conspirators be warned away from this foul path, or be dead.

  “Cowards hiding behind lies to intimidate free people!” Allen snarled, and crumpled the paper between his big hands. “Good for striking a fire,” he growled, “no more.”

  The leader of the mountain boys left one of his men to tend the injured scout and escort him home, then urged their party on. In another two hours they had reached the flats along Lake Champlain, an hour later the little community at the landing place across the narrow strait from the fort at Crown Point, fifteen miles above Ticonderoga.

  “Pointe à la Chevelure,” Brandt declared as he reached Duncan’s side. The corporal had lost much of his absentmindedness during their journey, as if he were slowly becoming a ranger again, though there were still moments when he drifted away to one of his past battles. “First time I come here, there was a couple dozen houses here, old French style, some even with thatched roofs. French families had been living here for thirty, forty years.”

  Duncan studied the settlement more closely, seeing now that some of the houses were indeed old and weathered. Brandt had a powder horn with the chimney rock etched on it. Chisholm had one with an outline of Lake Champlain on it, with only one location marked. Duncan had wondered why it would not show the forts at Crown Point or Ticonderoga, why it had shown only an X and the letters Chev. “You mean this was a French settlement?” he asked. The full name, Pointe à la Chevelure, meant Scalping Point, indicating that the early settlers had likely been visited by the Abenaki.

  “Aye, farms built to support the old French Fort St. Frédéric, with its big stone castle tower.” Brandt pointed across the strait to where a large stone ruin was clearly visible on the shoreline below the walls of the new British fort. “The major and I was here in ’56, doing a secret scout. The war was on, and folks here had fled to Canada.” He gave one of his dry, cackling laughs. “One of those terrible lake storms hit. We stayed snug and warm all night in an abandoned French barn while the boys across the water struggled to keep their tents from blowing away.”

  Half a dozen boats, some little dories, others wide shallops big enough for horses or even a cannon, were tied to the timber pier that jutted out into the lake. A drowsy man sitting on a keg near the dock stretched his arms lazily and stood. “Crown Point ferry,” he invited.

  Allen scanned the men working around the waterfront, then grabbed Duncan’s arm. “No need to sail straight into that swarm of redcoats,” he said, gesturing toward the opposite shore. “Best we sail down the lake direct to Fort Ti. Give me a minute.”

  Before Duncan could protest that he needed no further escort, Allen beckoned to one of his men and they dis
appeared into a squat log structure built into the side of the hill adjoining the water. They reappeared a moment later carrying an inert body by the arms and legs. Just as the man summoned his senses enough to protest, they swung him into the lake.

  The man yelped as he hit the water, and he sank like a rock. Duncan had taken several worried steps toward the circle of ripples where he disappeared before the stranger emerged, spitting out water as he splashed to shore. He stopped while knee-deep in the lake to push his long brown hair up over his crown, and he shook his head with a stern expression. “Should’ve smelled ye from miles away, Ethan, considering how ye be the biggest turd ever dropped out of the ass end of a weasel.” He broke into a loud laugh and splashed to shore, embracing Allen in an energetic bear hug. When Allen released him, he wrung water from his shirt and made a beeline for a jug by the cabin door. He shook it, cursed, then held it upside down in bitter confirmation that it was empty. “Bring any of yer maple brandy?” he asked hopefully, rubbing the bristle on his chin.

  “Looks like ye need some honest work, Rufus Powell,” Allen suggested.

  “Ferry’s over there,” the man replied, pointing to the pier.

  “T’ain’t Crown Point we seek, Rufe, it’s Fort Ti.”

  The news seemed to surprise the boatman. Suddenly all business, he examined the low waves on the lake, the angle at which the breeze bent the nearby rushes, and the clouds overhead. “Can’t make it back today. Ye got to pay my overnight expenses,” he declared, holding up the empty jug.

  “Two jugs and a shilling a head,” Duncan put in, “provided we leave within the hour.”