Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  9

  The dogs discovered the fire and woke Hawkes around midnight. They had all been sleeping together for warmth in a snow cave cut into a big drift about fifteen miles southeast of Alamoth. Although he was a light sleeper, Hawkes was so tired that he did not rouse immediately. He had been running on snowshoes for fourteen hours before he went to sleep. The morning before, moving west from Boston through the oak and chestnut forest, he had come upon a hunting party of Squakeag Indians. Game was scarce because of the snow, and they were a long way from their usual hunting grounds, which lay to the north of Alamoth on the Connecticut River.

  After Hawkes gave them bacon, the Squakeags told him that they had been chasing a big buck across a field of snow three days before, wearing it down nicely because they were on showshoes and the deer was plunging through deep snow, when suddenly it leaped onto the frozen river. Though the Squakeags had no reason to suspect that they were not alone, they did not chase after it, but crawled to the edge of the high snowbank, covered their heads and faces with snow, and looked cautiously downward.

  What they saw made their blood run cold: a war party of Abenakis, all wearing paint and shooting arrows at the buck. The wind made the arrows miss. A white man flew over the ice, running without moving his legs, and killed the deer with a long knife. After this the Squakeags traveled as far to the east as possible to get away from the Abenakis and to see if they could find another deer.

  “Have you seen any deer?” they asked Hawkes.

  “The dogs killed a doe yesterday,” he said, giving them tobacco. “Follow their tracks.”

  Hawkes strapped on his snowshoes and started running westward. He counted a thousand paces, then walked a thousand paces, then ran another thousand. The open forest was ridged with big snowdrifts, some of them twenty feet high, so that crossing them on showshoes was like climbing and descending an endless field of sand dunes.

  The dogs sank into the snow up to their bellies, floundering and whimpering. Hawkes had stopped to rest and eat nocake only once between dawn and moonrise. Even as he ran, sweating and holding his side, he did not think that he could reach Alamoth in time to warn the town about the approaching war party, but he believed that he might arrive in time to fight.

  Finally Hawkes could go no farther without sleep. He dug the snow cave, flooring it with balsam boughs, and crawled inside with the dogs, closing the entrance behind him. His animals, three wolf dogs and two mongrels, were as exhausted as Hawkes was. It was the mongrels, not the weak-nosed wolf dogs, that smelled the smoke and heard the sounds of the massacre on the night wind and woke Hawkes. He watched the glow in the sky for a minute or two, then started a fire of his own and cooked what was left of his bacon. He wanted to have as much fat in him as possible, to give him endurance for what lay ahead.

  Hawkes angled northwest on a course that would bring him to the river at the first big falls above Alamoth. He knew that the sentries at the English towns south of Alamoth would have seen the fire, and that a rescue column would begin marching north on the river as soon as it could be mustered. In his opinion this was a waste of time, and would probably be a waste of life—English farmers never had much luck battling Indians in open country.

  The Abenakis would travel on the river for a while if it remained clear of snow. Then they would split up into small parties as they always did and scatter westward along the dozens of streams that led to Lake Champlain.

  Hawkes’s plan was to intercept the main body above the big falls before it separated. After that, he would follow just one of the smaller parties—the one led by the Frenchman, because it would be entrusted with the most valuable captives: Rose, Fanny, Ash if they took men, and most of all, Thoughtful. Probably there would be five or six Indians in this detachment. Hawkes believed that he could kill the Abenakis one by one, using the dogs, then capture the Frenchman, rescue the captives, and return to what was left of Alamoth.

  With luck he might capture the Jesuit too—there was always a Jesuit. The ransom for two French captives could amount to hundreds of pounds.

  Dawn broke. Hawkes kept moving, using the column of smoke that hung over his left shoulder as a reference point. By sunrise he was traveling almost straight north along the back crest of the ridge that stood above the river. This was easier going than east-to-west travel had been because he was running in the direction of the snowdrifts instead of across them, and the dogs could run freely between the drifts.

  The dogs were hunting hungrily, running down rabbits and tearing them to bits. Once, passing a deadfall, the mongrels smelled a hibernating bear and found the vent melted in the snow by the sleeping animal’s breath. The wolf dogs had already begun digging, making the snow fly and woofing happily, when Hawkes came upon them. He called them off, kicking them with his snowshoes, in the nick of time. He felt sorry for the dogs—they loved a bear fight—but he could not afford to spare the time or have them injured now.

  By noon Hawkes knew that he was opposite the falls and a little to the south of them, so he turned due west again until he came out on the ridge above the river. The forest was dense here, with big white pines buried to their lowest branches in drifted snow. Hawkes knew that the main party of Abenakis must still be several miles to the south, coming up the river, but it was possible that an advance party had reached the falls.

  All Indians except the Mohawks, and especially the Abenakis, wandered off in all directions on their own. There was no such thing as a formation, a command, a common purpose. Every Abenaki did whatever came into his head whenever it happened to come into his head, and no other Abenaki would ever interfere with what he did. Hawkes had seen them sit down in the middle of a skirmish, or walk away into the trees singing with arrows flying everywhere. No one minded.

  Until now, Hawkes had not bothered with stealth and woodcraft. He changed tactics. There was nothing Hawkes could do about the tracks he and his dogs had left up to this point, but as they entered the grove of big pines, he took off his snowshoes and ordered the dogs to walk, all together in a pack, before him—or, rather, behind him, because he was walking backward, brushing away their tracks with a pine branch. Once inside the trees, Hawkes told the dogs to lie down and stay quiet. He dug another snow cave, hollowing it out with a snowshoe, and sent them inside.

  Hawkes looked up at the tips of the pines, towering above him, and located the tallest tree. Strapping his musket across his back, he began to climb, slowly and carefully, so as not to shake the tree and cause snow to fall off its upper branches. Any such disturbance would be noticed by any Indian who happened to be within a mile of the tree.

  The climbing brought a different set of muscles into play. Hawkes realized, for the first time in hours, how tired he really was. During the night he had developed an unusually severe stitch in his side. He had run through it, making his mind as blank as the snow, but it had taken hours, or what seemed to be hours. Now that he had stopped moving, the sweat on his body was turning clammy.

  He shivered. His mouth was dry. He picked up a handful of snow from the tree and put it in his mouth. The snow had been lying on the pine needles for several days, and it was full of dirt and dead matter. His nose filled from inside his mouth with the odor of pitch. He spat out the dirty snow.

  Hawkes continued to climb, very slowly. The trunk of the fir grew smaller, no bigger around now than Hawkes’s stout body, and he could see the whippy tip of the tree twenty or thirty feet above his head. He paused and leaned back, looking upward for the best branch to stand on. He wanted to be high and have a clear view of the river and the valley below, but at the same time he wanted to be concealed.

  The sun was strong now. It winked on something bright above Hawkes’s head. He leaned back again, trying to see what it was. It might be ice, but how could there be ice in the top of a tree when there had been no thaw?

  The object flashed in the sunlight again. Hawkes inched his way all the way around the trunk of the tree, looking upward, trying to make it out. He did n
ot dismiss the possibility that an Abenaki was waiting for him at the top of the tree. It was unlikely—the mongrels would have smelled him—but it wasn’t out of the question. An ambush in the top of a tree was just the sort of attack, combining a good joke with the ignominious death of an enemy, that the Abenakis loved.

  Hawkes got out his hatchet and began to climb as fast as he could without knocking snow off the tree. There was no point in concealment now if there was someone in the tree with him. He gritted his teeth, swinging his weight upward, and made a picture in his mind of an Abenaki warrior standing with his back against the trunk—the paint on his face, the hatchet in his hand. He had learned from the Indians that if you pictured what you were going to see, you were not so surprised when you saw it.

  But in the end he was surprised at what he had discovered. A skeleton, the corpse of the drowned Frenchman, was bound to the trunk, still hanging where Two Suns had tied it. Every vertical bone was still bound firmly in place—even the skull, which was fastened to the tree by a thong passing through the eye sockets.

  The glitter Hawkes had seen had been made by a silver crucifix, two inches wide, that swung from a chain on silver beads among the skeleton’s ribs. Hawkes took the crucifix, lifting the skull off the neck bone in order to remove it, and put it into his pocket with Lebbaeus Williams’ letter. Thoughtful might like it, not to wear but to look at, to remind her after she and Hawkes were married, of the days when she lived among the papists.

  Hawkes climbed up a little higher in the tree and looked up and down the river. A mile or so to the south, the main party of the Abenakis was dogtrotting toward Hawkes in a long straggling file. Behind them, a smaller party halted on the ice, waiting for something.

  Hawkes had time. The Indians would have to leave the river and climb through the snow to the top of the falls. They could not possibly do so before dark. He climbed down and crawled into the cave with the dogs. The air inside was as warm as skin. Hawkes ate some nocake and some snow from the ceiling and closed his eyes, making pictures in his mind of his pursuit of the Frenchman who had stolen Thoughtful.

  10

  The Abenakis took forty captives from Alamoth, eighteen young women, twelve children, and ten men to carry the meat from the slaughtered cattle. Five of the women were pregnant. The Indians wore snowshoes, but the captives had none, so they sank into the snow with each step. Those who carried extra weight, mothers with small children and people of both sexes who had slabs of raw meat on their backs, floundered and fell. The Abenakis beat them with clubs and kicked them, making them run.

  At the river, the Abenakis unpacked their sleds and fed the captives nocake, placing a large pinch of the parched and mortared corn on each tongue. The male captives, using the bloody axes with which they had butchered the cattle, were directed to chop a hole in the ice for drinking water. Few of the English had ever drunk water by choice. Now, at the Indians’ insistence, they swallowed far more than any of them had ever drunk at one time before.

  Each captive was then given a pair of dry moccasins to wear and a pair of snowshoes to carry. Finally, the Abenakis gave each of them a bit of beef tallow, still warm from the animal, and watched them chew and swallow it, clubbing those who hesitated.

  By now it was three hours after midnight and the half-moon was well down in the west. Strangely, the women whose faces had been painted were more easily identifiable by moonlight than the others. Fanny recognized Betsy Ash, Hepzibah and Totsie, and a dozen other girls and women she knew. She went to Betsy.

  “They didn’t take Edward,” Fanny said. “He’s with Oliver in the Manor.”

  Betsy showed no interest in Fanny’s words. Her face was painted yellow, with a bold stripe down the bridge of the nose. Now that she and her unborn child had been captured, she seemed calm, withdrawn. She wore nothing but a nightdress and petticoats. Fanny took off her cloak and draped it around the other woman’s shoulders.

  “Edward’s alive?” Betsy said.

  “Yes.”

  “Did he even know what had happened while he was praying?”

  Fanny hesitated, then shook her head. “He couldn’t know. He was in the hiding room.”

  Betsy shrugged her shoulders and Fanny’s cloak fell into the snow. She was holding up her large belly in her two hands.

  The column began to move up the river. Philippe formed it into three elements—a rear guard that sent scouts downriver to watch for any rescue column that might be in pursuit, an advance party that traveled fast upriver to make certain that the way ahead was safe, and the main body, consisting of about forty Indians and all the captives. The male prisoners pulled sleds loaded with beef, the two small cannon, and the powder and shot.

  The women and children went with the Indians who owned them: Rose with Used to be Bear, Hepzibah and Totsie with Talks in His Dreams: blue paint with blue paint, red paint with red. Except for Rose, who was dressed for a stroll through St. James’s Park, the women were as thinly clad now as when they were taken out of their beds, in voluminous woolen nightgowns with linsey-woolsey petticoats and pantaloons beneath.

  The Abenakis started off at their usual dogtrot, gesturing to the women to move at the same pace. Some understood and tried to run. Most simply started walking with the ground-thumping, deliberate gait of country-women. The Indians signed for them to go faster. When the women did not obey, their captors pushed them forward, running along behind and switching them on the buttocks. But as soon as the switching ceased, the women stopped trotting.

  The one exception was Rose. With her superb athletic gifts, and because she was in excellent physical condition as a result of spending four hours a day on horseback and several more skating on the oxbow, she kept up to Used to be Bear with ease.

  Fanny, who knew from Thoughtful’s stories what was required, also moved at the Abenaki pace. Because she had been almost the last to start, she found herself jogging through the entire stalled column. Women lay on the ice sobbing and gasping for breath or crouching in fear over their children. Each one, on seeing Fanny’s unpainted face and her skirts and petticoats pulled up through her belt to her thighs, gave her a look of hatred.

  She heard shrieks of pain and terror behind her and ran back downriver. At the very end of the column, Talks in His Dreams was driving Hepzibah Clum across the ice, beating her across the back with his unstrung bow. Trying to escape, Hepzibah plunged into a knot of Abenakis who were digging in the snowbank at the edge of the river. Her big globular breasts leaped under her nightgown as she ran. Talks in His Dreams followed, flailing.

  Fanny shouted at him in French and began to move toward him. Suddenly she felt herself seized by the arm and pulled off balance. She looked up to see who had grabbed her. It was Philippe, who had been standing among the Abenakis by the snowbank. The Indians had stopped what they were doing—they seemed to be digging a hollow in the snowbank—to watch the beating.

  “Don’t interfere,” Philippe said. “He’s doing her a kindness.”

  “He’s killing her.”

  “No, he wants her to live; she has value to him. If she doesn’t run, if they all don’t run, they will die.” “Then why don’t you tell them so in English?” “Do you think they would believe me?”

  Fanny realized that the Abenakis thought that the English were stupid: they did not even know that they would freeze to death in their thin clothes if they didn’t run to keep their bodies warm.

  Talks in His Dreams dragged Hepzibah back onto the ice. His hands was clapped over her mouth to stop her from howling. Her eyes, looking out of the red paint that covered her face from hairline to chin, were rolling in fright and pain.

  “Perhaps you should explain it to them,” Philippe said.

  About a quarter of a mile ahead, Rose and Used to be Bear were dogtrotting steadily along, surrounded by Abenakis. Fanny was already warm. She took off her coat, rolled it up, and began to run after Rose. She caught up with her around a bend in the river and fell into step beside her.

>   “How long do they expect us to do this?” Rose said. She was still wearing her fur-lined cloak and did not seem to mind the warmth. “I’m getting a stitch in my side.”

  Fanny repeated what Philippe had told her. “The women don’t understand, Rose. If they don’t do what’s wanted of them, the Indians will kill somebody.”

  “They’ve already killed half the town. Savages. Look at this one, he might as well have fur and teeth like a dog. How could this happen? Where were the men? Where are they now?”

  “Rose, the women will listen to you. They admire you. You must tell them.”

  Rose did not respond. Dawn was breaking, and in its more intense light, Rose’s blue face with its white lips was breathtakingly beautiful.

  “I can’t bear the stink,” she said. “The fire, the dead meat, these savages, even you, Fanny—you’re sweating like a butcher.”

  “Rose …”

  Rose looked at Fanny, now that there was enough light to see her. “Why aren’t you painted like everyone else?” she asked.

  Behind them, far down the river, they heard a faint popping sound. It was not faint to Rose, of course.

  “Thank God, muskets,” she said. “We’re rescued.”

  She turned around and started running in the other direction. Used to be Bear pursued her, caught up with her, thrust his arm beneath her crotch, and heaved her through the air. Rose, shrieking, landed on all fours and slid on the ice, tearing the knees out of her red stockings. Before she stopped sliding, Used to be Bear picked her up, lifted her skirt, and gave her a loud whack on the bottom.

  Then he stepped back and grinned at her.

  “Fanny!” Rose cried. “Tell him to stop!”

  Fanny spoke to Used to be Bear in signs: “She was going back to tell the other women they must run like the Abenakis.”

  “I thought she was running away,” he said. “It’s hard, having a woman who can’t talk. Will you teach her the signs?”