Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  “More Protestants. What are you? Fanny isn’t a French name.”

  “I was taught by a Jesuit. My real name is Genevieve.”

  “A Jesuit? Really? The Ursulines taught me. I’ll still call you Fanny.” Thoughtful pronounced it Fan-ny.

  “What are you called?”

  “My saint’s name is Catherine,” Thoughtful said, “but to my people I am Arosen Aongotee, which means Squirrel who became an Abenaki, daughter of Thorakweneken, Two Suns, and of his wife, Tewatewiseree, Thin Ice, who love me well,” Thoughtful said. “All the Abenakis love me well, and would sooner part with their hearts than part with me. Also, I am sister to the red squirrel who was the first to tell that I am the daughter of Two Sons.”

  Thoughtful had a surprisingly deep voice, almost a baritone, and she recited these words in a throaty singsong.

  “That’s how my story begins,” she said. “It sounds quite nice when you sing it in Abenaki, but less so in French because there are no echoes in French words.”

  Thoughtful told Fanny these things in the matter-of-fact tones of one who is recounting facts that are obvious and well-known. The two girls sat facing each other among the willows with the crickets singing all around them. Thoughtful had the pleased but faintly mystified eyes of someone who has just awakened from a long sleep. She had pulled her skirt up through her belt before wading into the brook for the kittens and now she wound one bare shin around the other, gripping her feet and rocking slightly in rhythm with her speech. As she had said, the dress she wore was much too large for her, and her slight, agile frame was not so much clothed as veiled by it; she moved around inside the cloth like a mouse in a glove. Her freckles and her wild red hair gave her a vitality that made Fanny want to smile at everything she said and did.

  “I think we are sisters,” Thoughtful said. “My family knows these things, as you will see when I tell you about my father, Two Suns. Now I will tell you my story.”

  The first thing any two Abenakis did on meeting for the first time, Thoughtful explained, was to tell each other the names of all their ancestors back to the creation of the tribe; then they recounted the events of their own lives. This ritual made it possible for every Abenaki to know exactly where every other Abenaki fitted into the history and genealogy of the tribe—an important matter for a people that was divided up into scores of independent villages and bands scattered over hundreds of square miles of forest in Maine and southern Quebec.

  “I’ll leave out all the names of Two Suns’s and Thin Ice’s ancestors and everything they did,” Thoughtful said. “It takes a long time to tell about them all.”

  Although Thoughtful had only recently learned her English name and those of her parents, she had always known who she was. The Abenakis realized—Thoughtful did not know how, they simply knew—that the leader of the English they had massacred at Alamoth was her natural father. They called him Takesinontee, Flying Leg, because of his dance in the fire by the pillory. Her mother was called Strong Woman because she had nearly killed an Abenaki warrior with her bare hands. Thoughtful’s life story was the very first thing she had learned in the Abenaki language, and she had heard the story told, and had told it herself, hundreds of times.

  “I come into it,” Thoughtful said, “when the ducks tell Two Suns about me. This happened in the summer that Two Suns helped kill the drunken bear and was bitten by the big ghosts that came as dogs.”

  Although he was not asleep, Two Suns was dreaming about ducks landing on Lake Champlain when the French came to his village on the Saint Francis River and asked for men to go down the Connecticut with them to fight the English. Two Suns tried to go on dreaming because the ducks were trying to tell him something—birds often talked to Two Suns in his dreams, though other animals seldom did—but he had to stop in order to listen to the French. He liked the French; everybody liked the French, who never lied to the Abenakis or cheated them.

  Ordinarily the Abenakis were glad enough to raid the English. But on this occasion they weren’t sure they wanted to go. After they had talked and thought for a day or so, they looked at each other and told the French jaghte oghte, maybe not, which is the strongest negative in the Abenaki language.

  It was July. The fish were asleep in the rivers, the deer’s antlers were in velvet, the ducks had not come back, the berries had not yet come onto the bushes.

  The Abenakis said: Summer is the wrong time of year for war.

  The French said they knew this. But they had learned that a new English village had been built on the Connecticut River above Deerfield, and they had decided to send a scouting party led by a French officer to spy it out, kill some of the English, slaughter all their animals, and burn their crops. The French would give each Abenaki who went one knife, one hatchet, one horn of gunpowder and fifty lead balls, one pound of salt, one small pig, and one rosary. This was much more than usual. In addition, each Abenaki could bring one English captive back to the village with him; any extra captives would be offered to the English for ransom by the governor of New France, and the money would be evenly divided between the Abenakis and the governor’s treasury.

  That night, the ducks in Two Suns’s dream told him that he had better go with the French; the ducks had been talking to some squirrels in an oak forest along the Connecticut River, and they had told about a female child that had red hair like a squirrel. The child already knew Two Suns by name; her own name was Squirrel.

  Two Suns told his wife, Thin Ice, about the dream. “I think this Squirrel must be our lost daughter,” Thin Ice said.

  Two Suns and Thin Ice had had two sons, named Hair and Talks in His Dreams, and they loved them both, but they had never had a daughter. Each time she was pregnant, Thin Ice thought that the girl was coming, but it was always a boy instead. Their daughter was lost somewhere. Now, thanks to the ducks, they knew where she had been.

  “You’d better go with the French and bring her home,” Thin Ice said. “If she’s very nice, steal another girl to give to the Ursulines.” Thin Ice thought that the ducks might not deserve all the credit for locating Squirrel; she had been praying for a daughter with the Ursulines for many years.

  “We’ve already told the French maybe not,” Two Suns said. “It’s hard to change after that.”

  “The others will change if you tell them what the ducks told you about our daughter.”

  When the Abenakis sent a runner to the French to tell them they had changed their minds, the French were surprised. Always before, the Abenakis had meant “never” when they said maybe not. But the French asked no questions; that was another thing the Abenakis liked about them. They realized that the Abenakis understood certain things that a Frenchman could not understand.

  The war party consisted of twenty Abenakis armed with bows and muskets, one Jesuit priest, and one very young French officer. The journey south, a distance of nearly three hundred miles, took sixteen days, traveling at night by canoe and portaging the long distances between the Saint Francis and the Connecticut Lakes, where the rivers begin to run south to Long Island Sound instead of north to the Saint Lawrence River. The Abenakis caught some pickerel and bass in the lakes and ate them, but while traveling the party lived on parched corn and water and some dried beans and dried salmon they found in an Indian barn near the junction of the Connecticut and the Ompompanoosuc rivers in central Vermont.

  “Indian barns?” Fanny said.

  Thoughtful blinked, surprised by the other girl’s bad manners.

  “All Indians dig holes and line them with stone and hide corn and beans in them for the winter,” Thoughtful said. “But that’s not part of the story. Ask questions afterward.”

  The Abenakis made up a song about how angry the Cowasucks, the tribe to whom the barn belonged, were going to be when they found it had been looted. They sang it while they paddled to show their contempt for the Cowasucks:

  The Abenakis stole our beans and fish.

  What bird told them where we buried food?

&n
bsp; We’ll kill that bird and break its eggs.

  Cowasucks are not afraid of birds, ho-ho.

  The Abenakis warned the young French officer and the Jesuit that there was a big falls a few miles north of Alamoth and recommended leaving the canoes and walking the rest of the way. The officer, who had never before been down the Connecticut, decided to scout the falls at night in a canoe. No Abenaki would go with him, so he went alone. His canoe overturned in the rapids above the falls and he hit his head on a rock. Two Suns and another Abenaki found his body below the falls in the morning and stood it up and punched it in the stomach and bent it over to make it spit out the water it had swallowed, but it would not wake up even after they held it over a fire to warm it up.

  The Jesuit arrived at this point and administered the last rites of the church. A young man called Bear, who was very strong, carried the dead Frenchman piggyback up onto the ridge and into a grove of stately pines. Two Suns climbed up into the branches and tied the body tightly to the trunk with rawhide thongs, so that the bones would not fall down after the porcupines and the birds and insects had eaten the flesh. The drowned Frenchman wore a beautiful silver cross around his neck.

  Because Two Suns had tried to make the dead man breathe again, and had then tied his body to the pine, the Jesuit gave him his blue coat and three-cornered hat. Two Suns put these things on and began to dream about his daughter as he walked along. A sentinel crow, sitting on top of a tree that had been blasted by lightning, told Two Suns that he was going to be bitten by a big dog that hated Frenchmen, so he took off the coat and hat and hid them under some rocks. The Abenakis were only hours away from Alamoth now. They continued south, traveling in the forest along the ridgeline. It was blackberry time in Massachusetts—the seasons came earlier this far south—and they stopped to eat from time to time.

  In a grassy meadow the Abenakis saw a drunken black bear staggering about, swatting the air and uttering loud growls. The berries on which the animal had gorged itself in preparation for its winter hibernation had fermented into alcohol in its slow-working digestive tract. The Indians were too close to Alamoth to risk shooting it with their muskets, so they followed the bear, which did not notice them. The bear kept falling down as it crashed through the woods until finally it came to a spring. There it fell down again and drank thirstily.

  While it was drinking, Two Suns fired an arrow into its side. The bear roared, swatted idly at the arrow, and went on drinking. Nobody had ever seen such a thirsty bear. It could not stop drinking even to die. The Abenakis surrounded it and killed it with the French knives that fitted onto the barrels of their muskets.

  They butchered the bear in the shelter under the hanging rock, eating the liver raw and cooking the flesh and packing the surplus fat into the bear’s intestines, along with the sugary half-digested blackberries they found in its stomach, as provisions for the journey back to Canada. Because they had eaten the entire bear, except for the skin and bones and the fat they had saved, the Abenakis had to sleep for a day and a night in order to digest their meal before attacking Alamoth. During this time, Two Suns had his dream about the ducks again.

  They decided to slip down the hillside in the dark and attack at first light. While waiting for night to fall, they crept to the edge of the forest and examined the peaceful scene below—the fields full of ripening corn and wheat, the cattle and sheep with deer grazing tamely among them, the town itself, dozing inside its palisade of sharpened posts.

  Two Suns and all the other Abenakis were devout Catholics. On the night before the attack, the Jesuit heard their confessions, served Communion, and gave them absolution. Then, after rubbing bear grease on their bodies and painting their faces, they slithered over the lip of the ridge, calling to each other in the voices of whippoorwills and frogs and owls, and descended through the meadows on the sleeping Protestants. The Jesuit, dressed in black robes and carrying a cross on a staff instead of a musket or spear, went with them. On their way the Abenakis hamstrung every cow they encountered; the animals just sat down with a grunt of puzzlement when their legs were cut from under them, and then fell over in the dark and lay still and quiet, as if they believed themselves dead.

  In Alamoth itself, the Abenakis achieved complete surprise. The Abenaki account of the battle that killed Thoughtful’s brother and mother was remarkably like the report of Captain John Pennock, except that it contained details that only the Indians could have known. The Indians had brought several springy birch saplings with them, each about ten feet long. Two Suns balanced himself on one of these while his sons Hair and Talks in His Dreams lifted him shoulder-high, flexed the sapling, and tossed him over the twelve-foot-high stockade.

  Two Suns landed on his feet with a loud grunt and found himself face-to-face with an English sentry. The man stood frozen in his tracks. He did not seem to see the Indian, and as this was clearly impossible, Two Suns whooped, “Thank you, ducks, thank you, crow,” and darted around behind his enemy. The Englishman still did not move but kept looking straight ahead as if nothing had happened. Two Suns severed his spinal cord with a tomahawk blow at the base of the neck and he fell in a heap, even dumber than the hamstrung cows.

  Half the population was outside doing morning chores and the rest were just rising. Hair and Talks in His Dreams crept up on two chattering girls as they milked cows. The Abenakis reached under the cows, snatched the milk pails from between the girls’ knees, and then popped their heads above the cows’ backs. The girls shrieked when they saw the paint and feathers, so Hair and Talks in His Dreams hit them lightly on the head and dragged them outside to look at them while they drank the milk. Hair’s girl had bigger breasts than Talks in His Dreams’s, but the other girl was pregnant, a stroke of good luck. Hair and Talks in His Dreams tied up the girls and streaked their faces with paint to show whom they belonged to, and set the barn on fire. Then they ran toward the fight in the center of the village.

  By now John Pennock’s troops had fallen out and were marching across the common all in a row, holding their muskets across their chests. A boy was beating a drum. Pennock was mounted on a big wild-eyed horse. The Abenakis, all drawn up into a knot, watched transfixed. They had never seen men fight like this, but the Jesuit had. He ran out onto the common and shouted to the Indians to scatter out of musket range and then come at the soldiers from all sides after they fired. At that instant, Pennock gave the order to fire. The crashing volley startled the Abenakis and killed the Jesuit, who stood directly in front of the troops with his cross held out before him, and wounded three or four English people who happened to be in the line of fire.

  Two Suns ran to within ten feet of John Pennock, who was kicking his horse into a gallop while whirling a saber around his head, and fired at him with the French officer’s musket. The shot went wide, as musket shots often did, so Two Suns fell to the ground and thrust the barrel of his musket between the legs of Pennock’s horse as it galloped by. The horse tore the musket from Two Suns’s grasp, nearly dislocating his wrists and elbows. The horse somersaulted, falling on top of Pennock. Hair and the big man called Bear jumped on Pennock, meaning to capture him, but the old man hit Hair in the face with the pommel of his saber, scrambled to his feet, and sliced off Bear’s left ear. Bear got down on his knees and looked for his missing ear while three or four other Abenakis captured Pennock. He never found it.

  After that, Bear was called Used to be Bear. Obviously he was not the same person if he had lost one of his parts, and that was why he was looking for his ear. If he had found it, he could have worn it in a bag around his neck and would still have been called Bear.

  Even though he was very old and had just been rolled on by a horse, John Pennock put up a terrific fight. Besides breaking Hair’s nose and cutting off Bear’s ear, he killed one Abenaki by kneeling on his back, grasping his chin with both hands, and jerking his head backward until the neck broke. He drew blood from two others, also with his bare hands, before Two Suns darted in and cracked him on the head
with a war club made from a stone with a hole in it that he had found a long time ago inside a curious circle of rocks when he had gone looking for mussels by the sea. It was then, after Two Suns had knocked the old man unconscious, that he and the other Abenakis locked Pennock in the pillory and lit the fire under him as a compliment to his bravery and strength.

  The fire woke up Pennock almost immediately. His clothes caught fire. Two Suns ripped away the burning cloth with the tip of a spear so that the old man would not die too quickly. Pennock was already dancing, arms and legs jerking, hair afire.

  The English were trying to fight, but everyone on both sides knew that the battle was over as soon as Pennock was subdued. It was a curiously silent fight after the first few minutes. Everybody ran out of breath almost immediately. On both sides, the muskets were useless after the first shot was fired—and even that rarely hit anything—so everybody fought with clubs and knives and axes. Two Suns enjoyed the noise and smoke made by the weapon, but like John Pennock, he used a blade when he really wanted to kill something.

  The Abenakis were already attempting to find the captives they had selected or to locate valuable ones, like pretty girls or strong boys, that had been overlooked. Hair, his nose running blood, and Talks in His Dreams seized their milkmaids and were dragging them out of harm’s way. The girls, misunderstanding, shrieked and struggled; English boys and men tried to save them and were tomahawked or knifed or speared.

  Several houses were afire. Flames climbed up the steeple of the church while the bell rang inside it. Two Suns was still watching Pennock in deep admiration of his courage. Only a powerful man who had killed many enemies could be so angry while he died.

  Clouds of swallows, driven out of the burning church, soared through the smoke. They were all scolding the Abenakis, and Two Suns was quite sure that one of the swallows was trying to tell him that Pennock was the natural father of Two Suns’s lost daughter, the redheaded girl, Squirrel. That made him very glad.