Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  “The crew will desert if we try lobsters again,” Joshua said. “They became sailors so that they wouldn’t have to be fishermen.”

  “That will be a tremendous disappointment to my husband’s brother-in-law,” Fanny said.

  “If I were you, Fanny, I’d keep my profits out of sight.”

  This was the second time in twelve hours that Fanny had been given this advice. She felt the weight of the six hundred pounds in the palm of her hand. She had never thought of money as having value, but now, she thought, with this sum Philippe and I can have a house in which to be alone.

  “I’ve brought you a lot of letters from Oliver,” Joshua said.

  He handed them over, a thick packet wrapped in oilskin and a second, much thinner bundle.

  “Oliver wants you to read the small one first,” he said. “Then you’ve seen him.”

  Joshua shook his head. “Ash brought the papers to Boston.”

  Fanny sat down on a box and read the deed transferring Oliver’s share of the ship to her.

  “Why?” she said, after reading it.

  “Perhaps he tells you why in the letter.”

  Fanny broke the wax, which was sealed with Oliver’s old signet ring, a B made of bones, that Henry had given him, and not with the Pennock seal that Oliver had used after he came to Alamoth.

  When Fanny saw the formless handwriting wandering over the page, she knew that Oliver had written the letter while drunk. “I don’t want Rose to have any claim on the Pamela,” he wrote, “but if her child is needy at some future time, and you know of this and are satisfied that the girl is not a monster like her mother, then help her. Meanwhile take the money and the ship and return to England. Peters and Adkins will help you. Do not come here under any circumstances or the fools will hang you as a spy. You can be happy in England; Henry was and so was I.”

  He signed himself “O. Barebones, Gentleman.” Fanny lifted her eyes from the page. “What does this mean?” she asked.

  “According to Ash, Oliver has decided to die.” “Decided to die? How? There’s nothing the matter with him.”

  “There doesn’t have to be. People do it all the time. I’ve heard of savages just lying down and dying on a whim, but never an Englishman.”

  He left Fanny alone while she read the rest of the letters. It was one long letter, really, a confession filling dozens of pages that described Oliver’s great error in falling in love with Rose and marrying her.

  “The joke is on Rose,” Oliver wrote, “because Hawkes has now murdered a few Indians to provoke the French into sending out this Christopher at the head of an Indian war party against him. Then he’ll kill them all with the help of the Mohawks, who are happy to work for scalp money—kidnap Thoughtful, and make her his wife.”

  Fanny ran up the ladder to the deck. Joshua was at the rail. She opened her mouth to speak, but she was not sure what sort of noise she might make if she tried to form words.

  13

  Beavers had dammed the little stream that the Abenaki war party had been following, creating a shallow pond that flooded many acres of forest. When he and his men came to the edge of this sheet of water, Philippe sent three scouts ahead. They waded thigh-deep among beaver lodges and the limber trunks of birches. It was a windless day. The passage of the scouts created ripples on the calm surface of the slew, breaking up clear mirror images of white trunks and golden foliage. Many trees had been girdled by the beavers and were dying; the rest would perish more slowly by drowning. An unusual number of beaver lodges rose up out of the water—low tangled half-submerged structures made by the animals out of mud and brush—and Philippe could see that the scouts were counting the pelts as they waded by.

  The scouts disappeared into the woods on the other side of the lake. Philippe waited until the water was absolutely calm again, with the paper birches etched on the gunmetal surface, before he ordered the rest of the men forward. While watching their scouts advance, they had virtually disappeared among the trees and grasses, so that when Philippe gave the signal and the Indians all moved at once, the whole aspect of the forest altered. One moment there was nothing to be seen but trees and water and the vaporous autumn sunlight, and in the next, an Abenaki was standing beside nearly every tree. Philippe had watched this occur many times, and it always seemed to him when it did that a very old secret was being revealed to him. He watched the Abenakis fan out into the pond, seventy-five men walking through three feet of water without making a sound.

  The silence was so unspoiled that Philippe could hear the brook spilling through the dam fifty paces away. Even the birds were still. But why should they be, with so many human beings underneath them? Philippe looked at the sky to see if any flew overhead.

  A man named Smoke, who had been almost the last Abenaki to enter the water, had also noticed the silence. He, too, looked upward for birds. When his head tilted back, Philippe saw the streak of vermilion paint in the part in his braided hair.

  Smoke uttered a sudden loud grunt, which was followed by a burst of rapid grunts from other Indians in every part of the pond: “Uh … uh … uh … uh.…”

  Smoke sank to his knees, then fell forward into the water with a splash. All around him, other Abenakis were falling down too, clutching at the iron-tipped Mohawk arrows that had thudded into their bodies.

  The unwounded Abenakis were frozen in place. They did not even look around for the source of the arrows because there was no place they could have come from.

  Philippe, shouting the Abenaki war cry, threw the jaeger to his shoulder and sighted on the beaver lodge closest to the place where Smoke now floated on his face with a sluggish fountain of blood pumping out of his back.

  The lodge rose out of the water with a violent motion, sailed through the air, and splashed back into the pond. The Mohawk warrior who had hidden himself inside it now stood in the open, drawing his bowstring back to his ear.

  Philippe placed the front sight of his rifle on the bridge of the Mohawk’s nose and squeezed the trigger. The Mohawk was thrown backward by the impact of the bullet and landed spread-eagled on the surface of the water among earlier splashes created by chunks of bone that the bullet had blown out of the back of his shaven skull.

  There were six Mohawks in the center of the lake, naked wet shrieking men with stripes of vermilion and white under their hate-filled eyes and bristling roaches of varnished hair rising up from their scalps. They stood in a loose circle, facing outward, methodically launching arrows from six-foot bows at the silent, unmoving Abenakis.

  Philippe saw an arrow enter the stomach of a very young Abenaki named Gull, pass completely through his entrails, and emerge from his back, encased in a twisting sheath of blood. The bloody arrow wriggled like a snake into the water. While he watched, Philippe reloaded his rifle. He knew that he could accomplish this in less than a minute. By the time he was ready to shoot again, twenty dead or dying Abenakis were floating in the water. The rest appeared to be too stunned to defend themselves.

  Philippe saw a flash of movement on the other side of the lake. Two of the three Abenaki scouts were running at top speed toward the fight. Half a dozen Mohawks burst out of the screen of trees behind them and killed them with hatchet blows.

  The Abenakis in the water started to run back the way they had come. The Mohawks let them go. As they approached the dam, it erupted in flame and smoke as the remaining Mohawks, who had crawled up the streambed after the Abenakis and concealed themselves behind the tangle of brush and fallen trees, fired a musket volley. Half a dozen more Abenakis were felled. The Mohawks did not reload, but clambered over the dam with bows in their hands.

  A flight of iron-tipped arrows from the dam killed five or six Abenaki archers. The Mohawks in the water launched another flight and more Abenakis fell. Philippe realized that he had been hearing the same soft grunts all during the fight that Smoke and the others had uttered when the first Mohawk arrows, driven by a bow that developed a hundred pounds of force, thudded into his liver
. The surviving Abenakis, perhaps thirty in number, began to sing.

  The only dead Mohawk was the one Philippe had killed with the jaeger. The smoke from this shot was still drifting over the pond in the form of a puffy blue-white cloud. On the other side of the lake, the Mohawks were scalping the men they had hatcheted to death.

  In the trees behind them, Philippe saw the broad figure of Hawkes in his Puritan hat with his wolf dog panting beside him. Philippe lifted his rifle and sighted on Hawkes’s heart, and as he did, saw a Mohawk running straight for him through a gurge of water, and shot him dead to save his own life. Then he turned and ran into the forest, fixing the long bayonet on his jaeger as he pounded through the drifts of rustling autumn leaves that lay among the maples and birches and stunted upland oaks.

  Nobody seemed to be pursuing Philippe, but probably that only meant that the Mohawks were circling to intercept him. He stopped to reload his rifle and listened hard. Behind him, the Abenakis ceased singing all at the same time and after a few minutes one or two of them began to scream.

  In the ambush at the beaver pond, the Mohawks took fifty-one Abenaki scalps, many of those from men who had not yet died, and twenty-four prisoners. The monetary value of this victory, counting the prisoners, who would be scalped after being tortured, was three thousand pounds. Only two Mohawks had been lost, the ones that Philippe shot.

  The Mohawks knew that Philippe, who could be ransomed back to the French, was worth more than all the Abenaki scalps together. Even while he was running through the trees, they began to discuss ways to capture him alive.

  “You don’t need to chase him,” Hawkes said. “He’ll chase you.”

  In the pond at his back, the other Mohawks were inspecting the floating corpses to make certain that they had scalped them all. On the opposite bank, one of the dozen Abenakis who had been stripped and hung upside down from the trees was being flayed alive. He thought that he was singing his story, but the sounds that he made were much louder than that.

  “Christopher can hear what’s going on,” Hawkes said.

  “He ain’t going to leave his men. He thinks it’s his fault all these Abenakis are dead or being skinned alive.”

  The English-speaking Mohawk asked a question.

  “His fault? Why?”

  “Well, he’s a white man. So he reckons he should have been smarter than you. And besides that, he’s ashamed. He ran away from a fight.”

  The English-speaker translated this to the Mohawk leader, who thought it over for a while and then began to guffaw.

  The Mohawks struck south for a few miles, then turned west on a warpath through the mountains that they had been using for generations. Because they had no interest in keeping Abenakis alive as slaves or breeding stock, the Mohawks tortured one prisoner every night. The Mohawks were learned anatomists, and these flayed, blinded, and otherwise mutilated Abenakis nearly always lived for many hours. The steep terrain, with only a thin membrane of dirt and moss stretched over monoliths of ancient rock, captured and amplified the sounds of this sport.

  Philippe, listening, was never more than a mile away in the darkness, and next morning he would find the victim’s raw carcass hanging by its ankles in the grove where the Mohawks had camped.

  Philippe looked very closely at the flayed Abenakis, remaining with them until he knew who they were and remembered their stories. He was a professional soldier, and identifying the dead was a duty to him. He would sit down on the ground near the corpse and stare at it as it twisted on its rawhide bonds, the ruined face appearing and then disappearing as the body turned. What made recognition difficult, he realized, was not that the nose and ears and privy parts of the dead had been sliced off, but that they had no eyes. Philippe would imagine one set of Abenaki eyes after another in the sockets of the red skull until, at last, he visualized the right pair, and then the whole face would take its original shape in his memory. After that happened, Philippe would sing the dead Abenaki’s story, pray for the repose of his soul in French, and apologize for having led him into defeat and death. Then he would haul the body up into the tree in which it had died and tie it to the trunk with rawhide thongs.

  On the fifth morning, Philippe came into a campground by a deep brook. The Mohawks had killed a deer the day before and what was left of its carcass—the head, with its frightened yellow eyes, and the hide—was hung by the antlers next to the flayed Abenaki on the low limb of a maple tree. The Abenaki’s red marbled body was covered with blue jays.

  “Go!” Philippe said in French.

  The birds rose up, beating their wings with a fluttering sound, then flew into the tree. As Philippe examined the Abenaki, putting eyes into the skull, the jays scolded him from the upper branches of the maple. This dead Abenaki looked slightly different from all the others, and after a moment Philippe realized why: for some reason the Mohawks had not cut out the tongue. The tip of it, pink and moist, was gripped between the teeth inside the lipless mouth. One by one, the jays began to come back, clinging to the Abenaki’s body with wings still moving and bold eyes watching Philippe, then flying away with morsels of flesh in their beaks.

  “I am sorry that you are dead,” Philippe whispered to the corpse.

  The corpse’s tongue flickered in its mouth and it said, “Is that you, Wind Hunter?”

  By now a dozen big blue birds clung to the corpse. Philippe leaped to his feet and chased them away. Then he opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. He cut down the Abenaki, whom he recognized by his voice to be a young man of seventeen or eighteen called Sings in the Snow. Philippe meant to lay him on the ground, but then he realized that this would cause terrible pain, so he held him in his arms instead. Close up, Sings in the Snow smelled clean and slightly salty, like the meat of a freshly killed deer, and he was very light in Philippe’s arms.

  He turned his eyeless face toward Philippe. “Please kill me,” he said. “Use the bayonet as you did with the big buck that jumped onto the ice.”

  Sings in the Snow did not whisper; his voice did not tremble. He spoke in the ordinary tones of one Abenaki speaking to another.

  Philippe tried to reply, but no words would come. His throat closed, his tongue and lips would not move; he had forgetten how to speak and he closed his eyes and struggled to remember, as one will try to recall a name that has escaped the memory. But words would not come.

  The dying Abenaki seemed to understand what had happened. Was he so close to death that he already had the wisdom of the dead?

  “If you can’t talk to me, it’s all right,” Sings in the Snow said politely. “But kill me. The Mohawks left me my tongue, so I have told my story. Also, I am sorry for all my sins and ask our Lord Jesus Christ and His merciful Father to forgive me.”

  Suddenly Sings in the Snow twitched violently in Philippe’s arms and uttered a loud sob. Philippe had never before heard an Abenaki make this sound. Philippe put Sings in the Snow down on the rocky ground as gently as he could, but when he felt the coarse grass, the pebbles, the dirt, the dead twigs against his exposed nerves, he screamed in a voice that sent the blue jays up into the air.

  Philippe picked up the jaeger, fixed the bayonet (Sings in the Snow screaming all the while), and drove the blade through the other man’s heart. Sings in the Snow sighed when he felt the steel.

  Philippe fell to his knees beside the body and tried to say a prayer for the dead, but no words came. Later, after he had tied Sings in the Snow to the trunk of a hemlock, he tried to speak again, but even in the privacy of the tall evergreen his tongue refused to obey his brain.

  Finally Philippe started westward again along the trail left by the Mohawks. There was no reason to speak now, so he did not try to form words. But he knew that he had lost the power of speech. It did not matter to him that this was so because he expected to be dead very soon. He followed their tracks day after day, and from hiding places higher up on the mountainside than the pretty glens in which the Mohawks always seemed to camp, watched the festive
glow of their big fires on the leafy ceiling of the forest. The Mohawks made no attempt whatever to conceal themselves; on the seventh day, coming close to their line of march, Philippe heard one of them conversing easily with Hawkes in English, as if the two had fallen into step while strolling through a public park.

  “Where’d you learn to talk such good English?” Hawkes asked.

  “At Harvard College,” the Mohawk replied. “There were a fair number of us there in the Indian college, studying for the ministry.”

  “You’re a minister?”

  “No, I didn’t finish. Only one Indian ever did. I think he was a Mohegan. His Christian name was Caleb.” “Did they teach you Latin and Greek?”

  “Scriptures and good manners, mostly,” the Mohawk replied.

  This matter-of-fact conversation penetrated Philippe’s shocked mind. Hearing human voices speaking a civilized language, he began to think rationally again. The truth about the massacre became evident to him: Hawkes had laid a trap and Philippe had walked into it and lost nearly every man of fighting age in Two Suns’s village. Why? Was Hawkes revenging his dogs? Did he have some other equally mad reason for this slaughter?

  Philippe told himself to stop asking questions that were designed to absolve him, Philippe, from blame for this military disaster. It did not matter what Hawkes’s reasons had been: he had achieved a brilliant victory, an English victory over the French. Nothing could be more sane than that. He was clearly the most dangerous enemy of France now at large in this part of America. The shame of defeat, the horror of his men dying without a fight or being tortured to death with a ferocity that could only mean that the Mohawks considered them to be cowards, had clouded Philippe’s mind. Now, thinking clearly again, he formed an intention.

  That night he slipped past the Mohawks, and when he was well clear of them, ran west along the warpath until daylight. After sleeping for an hour he ran on, arriving at dusk at the summit of a mountain from which there was a view in all directions of somewhat lower hills. The sugar maples that grew down the mountainsides and the valleys in their tens of thousands were now in full autumn colors along with all the other brilliant trees.