Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  Fanny looked him in the eyes. He held her gaze.

  “No. I have known about you for a long time and been sorry for you,” she said. “But that’s not what I mean. I love someone else. I could never love you, or anyone but him.”

  Ash staggered. He kept on looking into Fanny’s eyes. He saw that she was not lying. Still, he could not believe her.

  “Who?” he gasped.

  “You don’t know him.”

  “Because he doesn’t exist! You are telling me this to drive me away.”

  “You know I wouldn’t lie. He exists. He will come for me.”

  Fanny had no idea why she spoke these words. She had dreamt of Philippe often, always the drowning dream, but she had never spoken about him to anyone, or even imagined him in her conscious mind. But now she believed what she said. He had saved her life once; he would save it again.

  “God!” Ash cried in his great voice.

  Tears ran down over the scratches on his colorless cheeks. Then, without speaking again, he plunged back into the raspberry thicket. The barrier of thorns and springy canes held him back for a moment before he broke through and disappeared.

  21

  Fanny and Thoughtful spent as much time in the woods as possible, picking berries until the first frost and gathering beechnuts afterward. Thoughtful taught Fanny woodcraft—how to tell the hoofprint of a doe from that of a buck, how to recognize the scat of all the animals, how to tell where deer had been browsing by the ragged condition of the chewed leaves, as contrasted to the even edges left by nibbling rabbits, how to recognize the girdled pines left by bears who liked to eat the soft brown layer of stuff between the bark and the wood.

  Because of her musical gift, Fanny excelled at recognizing and imitating the calls of birds and animals.

  “You must never call out in your own voice in the woods,” Thoughtful had explained. “The animals do not like it.”

  When Thoughtful spoke in the forest, she usually spoke in signs. This was a simple language, easily learned, and soon Fanny knew it well enough to follow Thoughtful’s meaning and make the necessary replies.

  Fanny also learned to use her eyes in a different way.

  “Do not look at what you expect to see,” Thoughtful told her. “Look at what is there.” Gradually deer, rabbits, squirrels, partridges, snakes, and all sorts of other animals became visible to her in the dusty forest light. All around her, almost all the time, creatures stood frozen, in plain sight but invisible. The animals knew when their camouflage failed, and as soon as Fanny discovered them, they ran away. “It is because you sniff when you see them,” Thoughtful said, imitating the sound Fanny made when she was surprised by the appearance of an animal. “Be quieter or you will never kill anything.”

  Above all, Thoughtful taught Fanny how to stay alive in the woods—how to move slowly, how to hide, what roots and plants to eat, how to kill porcupines and skin them. There were always porcupines about, and they died very easily—a blow on the nose with a stick would kill them. They were composed mostly of fat, and with their skin and quills removed, they looked like cats carved from lard. Thoughtful roasted them over a little fire, caught the fat in a container made of birch bark, and poured the fat into the intestines of the animal. When it congealed, this sausage would be hung up in a tree as emergency rations.

  “Why are you teaching me all these things?” Fanny asked.

  “Because you don’t know them already,” Thoughtful said. “And because of Ash and Rose.”

  “What about them?”

  “They are both crazy. Sooner or later you will have to leave this place.”

  “Where will I go?”

  “Into the forest. You’re in the wrong place. Nothing here is as it should be, so everything must change. I was born here by mistake, and now I have come back here by mistake. There must be a reason for all these mistakes, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe Rose should have been born here instead of me.”

  “That is certainly true,” Fanny said.

  Thoughtful’s black-and-white kitten was big enough to walk now, and it had followed them to the forest. The girls were stretched out side by side on a springy carpet of pine needles. While she fed the kitten, pouring milk out of a crock the girls had brought along for their lunch, Thoughtful went on talking in her deep voice. Otherwise, the forest lay in a deep midday hush.

  They had been picking blueberries. Thoughtful produced a small wooden bowl and a spoon from the pocket of her apron and mixed nocake, blueberries, and milk together. When the parched corn had absorbed the milk, creating a spongy porridge, the girls ate it, passing the spoon back and forth. Fanny stopped after the first few mouthfuls, but Thoughtful ate like an Indian, as much as she could hold, and then lay down on the pine needles.

  “Before it snows,” she said, “we must hide some nocake under the hanging rock.”

  “What for?” Fanny asked.

  “In case everything changes.”

  As soon as she finished uttering these words, Thoughtful closed her eyes and fell asleep, as was her way. She lay on her back on the pine needles, a long narrow figure dressed in a gray linsey-woolsey dress with a prim white collar and Indian moccasins on her feet. Thoughtful’s clothes fit her better now; Fanny, with help from Betsy Ash, had cut some of Hope’s dresses down. Thoughtful still wore her beaded Abenaki headband.

  Fanny took off her apron and rolled it up into a pillow. Falling asleep without delay was one Abenaki skill that she had been unable to learn from Thoughtful. She lay for a long time with her eyes open, watching the clouds.

  In case everything changes. She knew that Thoughtful believed that the Abenakis would come again and rescue her. She spoke about Two Suns and Hair and Talks in His Dreams all the time, describing them to Fanny and talking about the life she had led. It was impossible to have secrets from her because she observed every detail of everyone’s behavior and knew, through some sense that only Abenakis seemed to have, exactly what was in everyone’s mind.

  “Ash is going crazy because he cannot have you,” she had told Fanny. “Abenaki girls would not let this happen. If you did not want him you would tell your friends and they would all lie down with him, one after the other, until he forgot about you.”

  “How many girls?”

  “As many as were your friends.”

  “But what if they didn’t like the man themselves?”

  “They would like him if he was Abenaki. Besides, the man would make love as though each girl was the one he couldn’t have. It would be pleasurable.”

  “Would you do that?”

  “Not here. But I was almost old enough to begin when the dogs killed Thin Ice and Hawkes carried me back to this place.”

  Smiling at her sleeping friend, Fanny herself fell asleep.

  She was awakened by a warbling bird call. She had never heard this particular bird before. No two notes had the same pitch.

  Thoughtful and the kitten were gone. There was nothing unusual about that; Thoughtful often vanished into the woods for hours at a time. The bird, which was quite nearby, called again and was answered by another warbler deeper in the woods. Fanny memorized the notes so that she could ask Thoughtful what it was.

  Fanny looked at the angle of the light and realized that she had slept for two or three hours. Her mouth was dry. She got to her feet, shook the pine needles out of her skirt, and walked toward the spring. In the brown dirt beyond the pine needles she saw the nailed soles and sharp heels of her own small footprints, and a little farther on, the print of a cloven hoof with a drag mark behind it, the mark of a white-tailed buck deer. Thoughtful had left no tracks. This was unusual. Normally she left a plain trail so that Fanny could follow it and find her.

  The strange bird was still calling. Fanny stopped for a moment and answered it. The call was difficult, but musically comical because it was so dissonant. The bird fell silent. Applying Thoughtful’s teachings, Fanny quartered around the spring, and waited by a tree to make certain that there
were no bears around. They were very dangerous at this time of year, when they were likely to be drunk on fermented berries, and particularly dangerous to women at the time of the month when they smelled of blood.

  Fanny and Thoughtful had never seen any bears among the blueberry bushes, but they saw droppings and fresh tracks nearly every day, and this was the spring in the little upland clearing where Two Suns and the other Abenakis had killed the drunken bear.

  Fanny planted her hands in the damp soil beside the spring and lowered herself toward the water. She drank, then raised herself and gazed at her reflection in the surface of the water, dark hair and skin burned darker than usual by the sun. She saw nothing else. Her hands were splayed in the mud. The fingers were stained with blueberry juice. Because they had had so much exercise on musical instruments, her hands were blunt and strong and slightly larger than they should have been in proportion to the rest of her body.

  The warbler woke up and called again, and was answered once more by its mate a few hundred yards away. Fanny, smiling, ran her fingers along an imaginary keyboard in the mud, turning the harsh treble call into a run on the spinet for the right hand.

  The bird stopped singing. Fanny kneeled and looked at her handprints in the mud at the edge of the spring. She splashed water on them and they disappeared, roiling the water. From this angle she was able to see the other bank of the spring, as she had not been able to do when she was drinking. A moccasin print was stamped in the mud. It was a print left by a man, and it was filled with water; someone had tried to erase it, as Fanny had obliterated her handprints, by splashing water on it, but had not succeeded.

  An Indian had been here today, while Fanny and Thoughtful were asleep only a few hundred feet away. Fanny stayed as she was, motionless, and searched the perimeter of the clearing. She saw nothing.

  The warbler called again and was answered by the second warbler. They were close together now, somewhere near the hanging rock. Fanny decided to try to see these birds. As Thoughtful had taught her, she walked in the opposite direction from the rock, and then circled through the forest, gliding from tree to tree and keeping what little breeze there was in her face so that no animal could catch her scent as she approached. The birds were now answering each other more urgently, uttering five or six calls, then falling silent before calling again.

  By now Fanny could see the hanging rock. She was approaching from the rear, so the ledge seemed close to the ground. She felt, rather than saw or heard, that something large was nearby. Looking down, she saw the spattered droppings of a bear; the loose stool was yellower than any she had seen before, and blueberries had passed, whole and undigested, through the animal. At least he would not be drunk on berries that had not had time to ferment.

  Fanny felt a loss of breath and realized that it was fear. Nevertheless, she wanted to see a bear, so she dropped to her hands and knees and crawled, slowly and carefully, toward the rock. She stopped every five or six feet to look all around her and listen. Finally she reached the hanging rock. The bird called again. She pursed her lips to answer, then decided to keep silent in case the bear could tell the difference between the real bird and a human imitator.

  Crawling on her belly, Fanny moved along the back of the hanging rock until she came to the end. She pressed her cheek against its cool surface and moved her face, inch by inch, until she could see down into the clearing in front of the shelter beneath the rock. All the while, she kept on hearing the calling of the warbler, very close at hand, and the second bird answering as it moved away.

  Moved away? There was something strange about that. Why would two birds of a feather call to each other, then separate?

  Below the hanging rock, four men stood in the clearing—three Indians wearing feathers and paint, and a white man dressed in a blue coat and a tricornered hat with a red cockade.

  One of the Indians, who had his back to Fanny, was imitating the bird and listening for the response. Each time his call was answered, he uttered a pleased chuckle and replied, and the other Indians poked him in the ribs, amused by the exchange of calls. They were smiling broadly under their paint, as if they were calling to another person of whom they were extremely fond.

  These Indians—tall, muscular, and armed with knives and hatchets, bows and long-barreled muskets—were nothing like the Nipmucks. They were wild, as different from the Indians Fanny had seen so far as a stage is different from a horse.

  One of the Indians, the one who was making the bird call, had only one ear. Fanny realized with a start that she knew who he was, who they all were. She recognized them from Thoughtful’s stories. The man who was making the bird calls was Used to be Bear, the Abenaki who had had his ear sliced off in the fight with Captain John Pennock. The other two were Hair and Talks in His Dreams, the sons of Two Suns, Thoughtful’s Abenaki brothers. Fanny realized that they must be calling to Thoughtful. But why was she going away from them instead of joining them now that they had come for her?

  As the Indians continued to imitate the bird call, then listen for the response, the white man turned on his face too. His eyes, his whole demeanor, was very alert. He was looking around, examining the perimeter of the clearing inch by inch.

  “If an animal or an Indian is looking in your direction when you are trying to hide,” Thoughtful had told Fanny, “close your eyes. If they are open, they will see the whites.”

  This white man obviously knew how to see like an Indian. Methodically his gaze moved along the rock, beginning at the end opposite to Fanny’s position. As his head turned, his face became visible in the shadow of his hat brim. He had not shaved for many days.

  Fanny recognized him. It was Philippe.

  She looked him straight in the eyes. He returned her gaze, soberly, steadily, just as he had done in Honfleur, and then his eyes moved on.

  Fanny backed away from the hanging rock, then ran through the forest, holding her skirts above her knees. Her petticoats flashed in the dusty light and it was this, she supposed later on, that had made it possible for Philippe to follow her so easily.

  She had been running for only a moment when she saw him running easily through the trees on a course parallel to hers. She ran on for a few more steps, then stopped. He stopped too, and looked at her for a long time. He was alone. Fanny looked behind her and all around, but she saw no sign of the Abenakis. Nevertheless, they must be near. Her heart pounded. She felt like a wild animal.

  When Fanny looked back at the place where Philippe had been, he had disappeared. Then she saw him walking toward her through the trees. He carried a peculiar short musket across his chest. His face was as grave as she remembered it. She stood where she was.

  Philippe walked up to Fanny and took off his hat.

  “I was sure it was you,” he said, “but I couldn’t believe my eyes. Why did you run away?”

  “I don’t know. I knew it was you.”

  “That frightened you?”

  “No. But how could it be you?”

  He looked exactly the same, except that his scar had faded.

  “Your wound is better,” Fanny said.

  He looked puzzled, then touched the saber cut on his jaw.

  “Yes.”

  They were standing in a grove of white birches, in a slightly swampy place that seemed cooler than the surrounding forest. The light, falling through the pale birch leaves instead of dense pines, was brighter.

  “Those Indians are Used to be Bear, Hair, and Talks in His Dreams?” Fanny said.

  “Squirrel has told you her story,” Philippe said.

  “Yes, but she’s called Thoughtful here. Have you come to take her back to Canada?”

  “Not yet.”

  “That will be a disappointment to her. She’s very unhappy here.”

  “She understands. Are you happy in this place?”

  For some reason, Philippe smiled as he asked this question. He had not smiled when he came up to her, he had not smiled when she knew the names of the Abenakis.


  “No,” Fanny said, “I am not happy here. Thoughtful says it is the wrong place, that everybody is here by mistake. Why are you smiling?”

  “Because I am glad to see you. Because now I know where you are.”

  Fanny lifted her hand, indicating the forest, the silence, the strangeness.

  “You sound as though you intend to come back,” she said.

  Philippe did not reply. They had been holding each other’s eyes all this time. It was Franny who looked away. She saw the Abenakis now. They had come out from behind the trees where they had been hiding and were watching Philippe and Fanny.

  “What else would one do?”

  With that, Philippe turned away and walked off among the chalky trunks of the birches. Used to be Bear, Hair, and Talks in His Dreams had already vanished, and in a moment Philippe was gone too.

  Fanny walked back to the pine grove. Thoughtful was waiting for her, sitting cross-legged with the kitten playing on her lap. She was talking to the kitten in Abenaki and smiling. When she saw Fanny, she smiled again.

  The two girls started down the hillside together. Behind them, the forest was perfectly silent again, but frogs were beginning to chirp beside the spring of the drunken bear.

  “What was that bird that sang a little while ago?” Fanny asked.

  “It has no name,” Thoughtful said. “It’s from the north. The Abenakis know it. I heard you call to it, but then it stopped singing because you sound so much like the bird itself that it didn’t know what you were.”

  They walked on with their backs to the forest. In the nerves along her spine, Fanny felt Philippe’s presence. Breathing deeply to keep herself from breathing too fast, she stopped and turned around. The edge of the woods, rank after rank of pine, was brightly lit by the rays of the afternoon sun.

  “They’re gone,” Fanny said.

  Thoughtful stroked her kitten.

  “Maybe not,” she replied.

  III

  THE RIVER

  1

  The great snow that covered Alamoth and all of New England that winter began to fall during the first week in November. Not even the Indians had seen so much snow so early in the season, but the storm came as no surprise to Thoughtful Pennock, who had been told what to expect by a wild gander. The month before, during the hunter’s moon, she and Fanny, wrapped in the same blanket, had heard the Canada geese honking and bugling as they came down the river. Wings beating in a powerful slow rhythm, flying very low, the geese passed across the disk of the moon in a miles-long unbroken skein.