Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  “Then maybe Used to be Bear has gone back to being a bear. But you shouldn’t go berrying when you’re unwell.”

  “I know; I thought that it might not happen this month.”

  “Also,” Philippe said with his lips against her cheek, “stop all this running. It’s not good for you.”

  The next month Fanny’s menses did not occur. She decided to wait another month before telling Philippe, but he remembered.

  “We must name this child Henry,” said Philippe, who knew Fanny’s father well from the game of Spy and now from Fanny’s stories. “That will please Armand de Grestain because it will remind him of the victor of Agincourt.”

  Although they spent nearly all their time together, Fanny and Philippe only spoke to each other when they were in the cave or near it. Like the Abenakis, Philippe had a superstitious reluctance to speak in any language except signs or the calls of birds and animals when he was in the woods.

  Fanny’s imitations of the crow, the jay, the red squirrel, the distress call of the rabbit, the bawl of the doe in heat, were the truest Philippe had ever heard. One day when she had half the birds in the forest calling back to her, he broke his own rule and gave her an Abenaki name, Speaks to the Birds.

  Sometimes in the evening Fanny sang Fanchon’s songs for Philippe, who had, of course, known them all his life. They made jokes. Otherwise, they lived, as Fanny had hoped, in silence.

  On the day after they arrived, Philippe had woven a long conical fish trap out of willow branches and set it at the mouth of the Gorge. The thundering water filled the trap with fish every day. The first time Philippe dragged the trap ashore and dumped out the dozens of flopping speckled trout, Fanny picked out a large one for Philippe and a smaller one for herself and then began to return the rest to the river.

  “No,” Philippe said, taking a foot-long fish out of her hands and killing it by thrusting his thumb into its mouth and bending its head back against its spine. “The trap won’t always be full.”

  He had brought salt in his pack, so they salted some of the bigger trout. The rest they butterflied and dried in the air or smoked over the coals of a beechwood fire in a pit. By August, when the trout grew scarce, one room of the cave was nearly filled with preserved fish laid out on racks made from beech saplings.

  Fanny had planted the seeds she had received as wedding gifts in a sunny meadow between the cave and the Gorge, fertilizing them with dead trout and training the beans to climb on the cornstalks in the Indian way. She hoed the ground with a stick and strung strips of birch-bark on a length of rawhide to keep the birds off. Late in the summer this garden began to yield. They dried the vegetables and dug an Indian barn, a square hole in the ground lined with stones, in which to store them.

  As the trout ran out, Philippe began to hunt for game. In beechnut season this could have been a simple matter. On any morning, a dozen deer and scores of rabbits fed among the beeches; the branches teemed with squirrels and raccoons; grouse nested among the cavernous root systems of the older trees. An Indian, like Talks in His Dreams slaughtering the herd of moose, would have bagged as many of these animals as possible before they disappeared. Philippe killed sparingly, preferring to stalk deer in the woods and take small animals in traps. He set snares to catch rabbits and spread a rawhide net to entrap grouse.

  “Henry must have red meat,” he said.

  “Very well,” Fanny replied, “but no liver.”

  There were other hunters in the grove besides Philippe. One morning, coming home with a string of grouse from the net, they heard the buzzing of flies. Following the sound, they found the half-eaten remains of a deer hidden beneath a deadfall. From a safe distance away, Philippe examined the tracks and other sign and showed them to Fanny. There was a strong odor of cat urine.

  “We must come back,” Philippe said.

  That night they climbed high into a huge beech and waited. Philippe had brought the jaeger. Several hours after the moon rose they heard the sound of a baby crying, and then saw the cougar that had made this eerie sound. Soon the big cat itself appeared before their eyes, a skulking dun creature with a round intelligent face. It dragged the deer’s carcass into the open and fed on it in a leisurely way until it was satisfied. Then it hid its kill again, scratched a pile of leaves and dirt together, and urinated on it. After that, it lay down in the forest much like a house cat and washed its paws and face, which were marked in white. After its bath the cat stood up, twitched its long tail, took a single step, and dematerialized.

  “Is it so stealthy because it’s afraid?” Fanny asked.

  “No, because everything else is afraid of it,” Philippe said. “Like the Mohawks.”

  He hardly ever spoke of the Mohawks, but Fanny knew that they might appear at any time. Like all Indians, they traveled along riverbanks, and this river, called the Woronoco by the Mahicans, formed a natural east-west highway between the frontier of Mohawk country and the Connecticut River.

  Week by week, as Fanny’s pregnancy progressed, Philippe began to worry about the dangers of the forest. Her condition did not seem to affect her in any way except that she required more sleep. Nevertheless, Philippe warned her frequently to be careful.

  Adders and blacksnakes, and also a few rattlesnakes, lived in the rocks around the cave; they came out in the morning to warm their blood in the sun, then disappeared to hunt for field mice, chipmunks, and squirrels. Philippe, who in the early days had killed two or three rattlers with his tomahawk but otherwise ignored the reptiles, now warned Fanny every time she walked over the rocks to watch for poisonous snakes.

  He was afraid, too, that she might fall.

  “Have you ever seen me fall?”

  “Only off a ship,” Philippe replied. “But be careful, especially at night when you go out alone—it’s a long way down to the bottom of the Gorge.”

  The leaves began to turn—first the vermilion swamp maples, then the amber birches. The river was now too cold for swimming, but late as it was, Philippe had seen several big trout pointed into the current just below the big falls, and had set up his trap in an attempt to catch them for Fanny.

  One afternoon, when Fanny slept longer than he did after lovemaking, Philippe left her in the cave and went down into the Gorge to check the trap.

  Leaping from stone to stone across the river, he felt the intrusion even before he saw the signs of it. The air, the ground, the stones rising out of the water were not the same. He looked downstream and saw birds rising straight up into the sky.

  Someone had come and gone. Philippe drew himself back into the trees on the far bank of the river and made a half-circle, looking for tracks or other sign. He didn’t see any. Making another half-circle, he reached a point, under the cover of the trees, from where he could see the fish trap. He searched the rocks and trees, saw nothing, then watched the trap for a long time. It had been moved—not by much. The water could have nudged it out of position. But it had been moved.

  When he examined the trap, he saw that a human being was responsible. Several trout had been removed—only very small ones remained—and carried away wrapped in skunk-cabbage leaves that had been torn from the plants growing beside the river. Signs in the gravel told him that several more fish had been consumed on the spot, but not by the man.

  Philippe plunged into the forest and ran through the trees to the next bend in the river. In the mud he found the heel mark of a moccasin and other sign. These were fairly fresh; they had not yet filled with water. Philippe ran on, pounding through the woods without caution, to the next big loop in the river. This time he found an intact human footprint, but again he was too late to catch a glimpse of the man who had made it.

  There was no point in running farther; the man was traveling fast, the river turned every few yards so there was no possibility of getting in a shot at long range. Philippe knew that he could not make an accurate snap shot with the jaeger after such a hard run.

  Philippe knew, also, whose tracks he had found; he
had seen them, and the tracks that always went with them, before. To make certain that he was not deceiving himself about the identity of the man he was following, Philippe followed the tracks another mile or so, and found sign—a skunk-cabbage leaf floating in an eddy, the paw prints of a leaping excited animal—which told him that Hawkes had fed his wolf dog the rest of the trout on this spot, and then continued to travel west. What was this man doing here? Why was he traveling in the direction in which he was traveling? Why had he not searched for the owner of the fish trap? Why was he in such a hurry?

  Philippe said nothing to Fanny about what he had found. The moon was in its third quarter. He started to watch the approaches to the Gorge, always keeping Fanny close to him, and one morning just before the full moon they heard the deer whistling in fright in the beech grove and the squirrels scolding.

  Philippe knew that no enemy would approach so carelessly, so he stood out in the open where the Abenakis could see him.

  Soon Two Suns and his surviving son, Hair, appeared among the birches. They wore paint and carried new French muskets.

  Philippe read the letter they had brought to him from Grestain, then squatted with them as they told him from beginning to end how Hawkes and his one remaining wolf dog had killed five people from the Abenaki village on the Saint Francis River. All the victims had been decapitated and the heads had never been found.

  Meanwhile, an Englishman with a loud voice had sailed down the Saint Lawrence in a ship and was trying to buy Squirrel from the governor of New France.

  “I think he wants to buy you too,” Two Suns said to Fanny. “He wants to buy Hair’s wife, and the widow of Talks in His Dreams. He thinks they can remember when they were English.”

  They started for Canada the next morning, going downriver, then striking north along the Connecticut. Two Suns did not want to travel by this route until Philippe told him why it was safe.

  “Why is the fat ghost going west toward the Mohawks?” Two Suns wondered.

  Philippe had never before heard an Abenaki ask a question.

  10

  Hawkes had arranged to meet the Mohawks about twenty miles west of the Gorge, at a waterfall near the source of the Woronoco. He arrived just before moonrise, lighted a fire, and cooked the last of the trout that he had stolen from Philippe’s trap.

  He was eating this fish off the cooking stick when the Mohawks arrived. The wolf dog, the only one Philippe had left alive, snarled when he saw the Mohawks and the coarse fur bristled on its ruff. The Mohawks, who were seeing this animal for the first time, stared at it without fear. There were twenty of them and they knew that they could kill anything they wanted to kill.

  The Mohawks were darker and leaner than the Abenakis, and appeared to be taller because of their hairstyle, which consisted of a stiff roach growing from forehead to nape down the center of shaved scalps. Most of the warriors in this party were bare-chested despite the deep autumn chill that had settled on the country; heat still rose from the river in the form of mist as the water cooled after a day of strong sunlight.

  The Mohawks, smallest but most famous of the five nations of the League of the Iroquois, were the most warlike and ferocious people the English had so far encountered on the American continent. Until recently the Mohawks had regularly raided New England from their fortified villages west of the Hudson, killing, torturing, and capturing slaves. The English paid the Mohawks a fee for destroying the enemies of England.

  Scalps were the reason why Hawkes was meeting the Mohawks. After the attack on Alamoth, the General Court in Boston had offered a bounty of forty pounds for each Abenaki scalp. He knew that he would never be able to marry Thoughtful and live in peace with her on the lands that Oliver Barebones had given back to her as long as the Abenakis believed that she was an Abenaki and Thoughtful agreed with them. As Hawkes saw it, the only way to overcome this difficulty was to lure the Abenakis from Thoughtful’s village into battle and kill them all. He could not do this single-handed, and the half-trained, half-hearted English troops had shown on many occasions that they could not do it either.

  Only the Mohawks could do it.

  Hawkes looked around the circle of painted faces. War had made these Mohawks prosperous; each carried a good musket in addition to a bow. Some had pistols; all were equipped with excellent knives and hatchets. One or two had arrows fitted to bowstrings and Hawkes saw that the arrows had iron points; a metal-tipped Mohawk arrow was capable of passing completely through the body of a deer or the torso of a human enemy. These men were better-nourished and better-clothed than any other Indians Hawkes knew about.

  The friendship of the Iroquois for the English, and earlier for the Dutch, had been based on the relationship between trade and warfare. With firearms obtained from the Dutch in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Iroquois subjugated the Huron, the Tinontati, the Erie, the Illinois, and other Iroquoian tribes to the west and north of their base in central New York, driving these powerful peoples out of their palisaded villages, their lands, and eventually, out of history. At different times they terrorized all of what later became Virginia and parts of North Carolina, transplanting an entire Iroquoian tribe, the Tuscarora, from Carolina to New York State. Meanwhile they carried out their incessant raids against the French and the Algonquian allies of the French in Canada.

  Hawkes began to talk in signs; the Mohawks’ language bore no relationship to the Algonquian tongues spoken by the Abenakis and many other tribes, including the Blackfeet, the Cheyennes, the Arapahos, and other plains tribes still unknown to white men. The Iroquois were different from the Abenakis in many other ways. Husbands left their own villages when they married, to live in the villages of their wives’ clans; the Iroquois traced their descent through the female line rather than the male, they were hardly Christianized, they were successful farmers, and they were highly organized politically, with chiefs and councils and laws and a rudimentary religion that encouraged military virtue and otherwise served the political purposes of the united tribes. Hiawatha, one of the two founders of the League of the Iroquois, was a Mohawk. (The other was Dekanawida, who may have been born a Huron; like other American peoples, the Iroquois, whose population was repeatedly decimated by European diseases such as smallpox, sometimes adopted slaves into the tribe.)

  The Mohawks watched impassively as Hawkes made the sign for his own name, for Abenaki, for war, for the Connecticut River, for French Officer, for scalps, for forty pounds sterling, and for hunter’s moon, which was the next moon after the present full moon.

  A long silence ensued. Then one of the Mohawks said, in English: “Why will the Abenakis come down the Connecticut as you say they will?”

  “Because I killed five of them and cut off their heads to make them angry and two weeks ago I followed two Abenakis who were carrying a message to the Frenchman who has been living near the other waterfall with his woman. His name is Christopher and he’s the one who led the Abenakis against Alamoth.”

  Christopher was the name the English had given to Philippe Saint-Christophe after the massacre at Alamoth. By now even the Mohawks had heard of him.

  The Mohawks remained silent; nothing in their code of manners made it necessary for them to give any sign that they understood the words being spoken to them by a non-Mohawk. At this point in the conversation an Abenaki might have suggested killing Philippe, who was only a five-hour run away, stealing his woman, and then ambushing Two Suns and his son.

  The Mohawks were a more advanced people who knew that the future existed; they understood strategy. Every warrior present realized that the possibility of killing a lot of Abenakis, and taking their scalps at forty pounds each, depended on letting this smaller party escape. Without Philippe to lead them, the Abenakis would not come south in profitable numbers to a place where Hawkes and the Mohawks could attack them.

  “What will we be given?” the English-speaking Mohawk asked.

  “You already know that. Forty pounds for every scalp.” “How man
y scalps?”

  “I can’t say. When they attacked Alamoth there were about a hundred and fifty in the war party.”

  The Mohawk interpreted this to the man who appeared to be in command of the war party. He responded in two loud bursts of Iroquoian.

  “What else will we be given?” the English-speaker asked.

  “Three hundred pounds,” Hawkes said, naming the total he had earned by rescuing Thoughtful and scalping the five severed Abenaki heads. “Half now, half after we kill the Abenakis.”

  “That’s only fifteen pounds each.”

  “It’s all I have.”

  The interpreter spoke to the leader, a leathery bowlegged man whose eyes popped slightly when he talked. He had the loudest voice—almost as loud as Ash’s but much higher in timbre—that Hawkes had ever encountered in an Indian.

  “Where are the other two dogs?” the English-speaker asked.

  Hawkes was not surprised that the Mohawks knew about the wolf dogs; probably they also knew that the dogs were dead and how they had died. Indians generally knew such things. They also knew that white men lied, and Hawkes realized they were testing his honesty.

  “Christopher shot them,” Hawkes said. “He has a musket that is accurate from a long way off.”

  “How far?”

  Hawkes looked around, trying to find a landmark two hundred paces away. He settled on a dead tree on the bluff beside the waterfall; its jagged form was silhouetted against the moon.

  “As far as the dead maple, maybe farther,” Hawkes said. The English-speaker interpreted that. The chief barked again.

  “We don’t believe you,” the English-speaker said, “but we want the whole three hundred pounds now in case you’re killed by the Abenakis or they capture you.”

  “All right,” Hawkes said, “but I get Christopher’s gun.”

  “Done,” the English-speaker said.

  The Mohawks spread a blanket over a flat rock and Hawkes poured out the coins. The English-speaker, who seemed to be the clerk of the expedition, sat down opposite the leader and counted the money, stacking it into twenty-one precarious piles of fourteen coins each. The English-speaker poured the six extra coins into Hawkes’s hand without explanation. Evidently this was some sort of gesture of honorable partnership.