The Way Lies North

by Jean Rae Baxter

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not? You have to wear them to get used to them. I’ll wait outside until you’ve changed.”

  How could she object, since travelling as a boy had been her idea? Charlotte unbuttoned her gown and unlaced her petticoat. She put on the shirt and tied the red kerchief about her neck. They felt good. Then came the breeches. She got them on, although they were awfully tight around her bottom, and pulled up the stockings over her calves. With her hair in a queue and the hat upon her head, her disguise was complete.

  But how could she leave the tent with the shape of her legs revealed from ankle to knee? Nick should not see her like this, and certainly not Papa. She lingered, dreading the moment when she would have to go outside.

  “Charlotte, aren’t you dressed yet?” Nick called.

  “I’m dressed, but I don’t look decent.”

  “Come out. I’m sure you do.”

  She stuck her head out of the tent, and in a moment the rest of her followed. The corners of Nick’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t laugh.

  “Will I pass for a boy?”

  He studied her for a minute. “Let me see you walk.”

  “Walk?”

  “Yes.”

  Charlotte marched back and forth in front of the tent. Others outside neighbouring tents were watching. Charlotte pretended they didn’t exist.

  “You walk like a girl,” Nick said.

  Charlotte blinked. “For goodness sake, what do you expect?”

  “You must learn to walk like a boy. Swing your arms, not your bottom.”

  “I don’t swing my bottom!”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “All right. How’s this?” She strode briskly forward, swinging her arms.

  “Better, but a bit stiff. You’ll need to practise. Try to forget that you’re a girl.”

  “How can I?” She sat down on the log beside the entrance.

  “Think how boys act. Little details. Right now you’re sitting like a lady. Knees together. Ankles crossed. Boys don’t do that. Try crooking one leg over the other.”

  She tried it. “I feel ridiculous.”

  “But it’s comfortable, isn’t it? You couldn’t sit that way in a skirt. Now here’s your next lesson. Stand up, slouch, and stick your hands in your pockets.”

  She got to her feet. “Like this?”

  “Perfect! Now let’s see how far you can spit.”

  “No! At spitting I draw the line.”

  “Nick,” said Papa. “That’s going too far. Martha would turn over in her grave.”

  “I will not spit,” said Charlotte. “I absolutely refuse.”

  Nick put his arm around her shoulders. “You’re excused from spitting if you can whistle.”

  “Not that either.”

  Nick laughed. “Charlotte, every boy can—–”

  Papa interrupted. “You can’t call her Charlotte, at least in public.”

  Well, that was true. Whoever heard of a boy named Charlotte?

  “What about Tom, as in tomboy?” she asked.

  “Fine,” said Nick. “Can you think of a name for me?”

  “I’ll try,” she said. “I’ll think of something.”

  The first day that Charlotte dressed as a boy, she felt everyone staring at her. But on the second day it seemed as though she had wrapped herself in a cloak of invisibility. People whom she knew did not know her. Even Louisa Vrooman walked by without saying hello.

  Charlotte devoted the third day to Nick’s disguise. In the camp kettle she simmered black walnut husks until the liquid was reduced to an inky black tincture that smelled of rancid nuts. Nick sniffed it suspiciously. “Looks like poison. Smells like poison.”

  “You’re not supposed to drink it,” she laughed. “What you should do is soak your head in it overnight. That’s how my mother dyed wool.”

  “You’d better just comb it through.”

  “Sit down,” she said. “We’ll get started.”

  His hair and beard soaked up the dye. One application made them look dirty. After two, they looked streaky. After three, they were dark brown.

  “That does it,” Charlotte said with satisfaction. “You look like a lumberjack.”

  “Have you thought of a name for me yet?”

  “Joe. May I call you Joe?”

  “Tom and Joe. Two brothers travelling together. That’s fine.”

  That evening it rained. They were eating supper in the tent, listening to rain patter on the canvas, when Nick announced: “We’re leaving tomorrow.”

  Papa nodded. “Since it must be done, best do it quickly.”

  Charlotte looked up. That sounded like her Papa of days gone by. She had sensed this change in him since Nick’s return, a look of hope returning to his eyes. It was hope mixed with doubt, but hope nonetheless.

  “Do you have enough food for the journey?” Papa asked.

  “I bought two weeks’ provisions from the Mohawks at Lachine,” Nick said. “Dried meat, smoked fish, parched corn and maple sugar. Food that travels well.”

  Lachine. Wasn’t that where Axe Carrier and his warriors went to spend the first winter? By now Drooping Flower was a married woman, maybe even a mother.

  “What else are you taking?” Papa asked.

  “A spade. An axe. My rifle. Sacks to carry the strongbox and silver. Apart from our bedrolls, that’s all.”

  “You’re wise to travel light,” said Papa. “There’ll be plenty of portaging. We came down the Oswego River in a long canoe. I don’t see how anybody could paddle upstream through those rapids.”

  “We’ll portage when we have to,” Nick agreed.

  “You’re following the route we took, but in reverse,” Papa said. “It will be slow paddling up the Oswego, but after you’ve crossed Oneida Lake and started down the Mohawk River, the current will be with you.”

  “The journey will take us two weeks, there and back.”

  “Two weeks,” Papa repeated. His gaze shifted from Nick to Charlotte, then settled gloomily upon both. “A lot can happen in two weeks.”

  “Try not to worry,” Charlotte told him. “I’ll be safe with Nick.”

  “You might as well tell a stone not to sink in water,” he said gruffly.

  “I’ll take care of her,” Nick promised.

  “Remember,” said Papa, “she’s all I’ve got.”

  Chapter eighteen

  “There are four actions to every stroke,” Nick told her when they set out. “Thrust, pull, lift, and swing. Get a rhythm going, and you won’t tire as soon.”

  Thrust, pull, lift, and swing. After three hours of it, her muscles ached, spurts of pain shot down her arms and across her shoulders, and her knees hurt from kneeling on the bottom of the canoe.

  “How much further before we stop for the night?”

  “We’re about halfway there,” Nick said. “If you want to rest, I’ll handle the paddling for a while.”

  “No. If you do it, I will too.” She refused to complain, even though her arms felt as if they were being pulled from their sockets.

  “Before the mouth of the Oswego, there’s a bay where we’ll camp for the night. We’ll be there in about three hours.”

  Three hours isn’t so long, she thought. The lake was calm, with sunshine sparkling on quiet ripples. If her arms were not so sore, she would be enjoying this. Thrust, pull, lift, and swing. But why couldn’t the sun move faster across the sky?

  Late in the afternoon Nick said, “Do you see that point straight ahead?”

  “Is that where we’re stopping?”

  “Just beyond.”

  As they rounded the point, she saw a small bay, not much bigger than a cove, with a beach of light brown sand. Churning the water with his paddle, Nick steered toward it. As the canoe ran up onto the beach, its bow ploughed the soft sand with a scratching sound. Charlotte scrambled out, stretched and looked around.

  Along the water’s edge ran a piping plover. Beyond the beach stood a line of poplars, s
haking their silvery leaves in the breeze.

  So this was the place where she and Nick would spend their first night alone together. The thought made her nervous. Restlessly she walked along the beach, right to the end. The sand felt warm under her bare feet. She was comfortable now in breeches. Walking, running, climbing in and out of the canoe — everything was easier than when she had dragged around in long skirts. But under those masculine clothes, Charlotte was still a girl. And it was just as Papa had said; she couldn’t fool herself or Nick about that.

  Near the water’s edge Nick was sitting on a gnarled, old log that the waves had washed in. Charlotte walked across the beach to join him. She sat beside him and laid her hand upon his where it rested on the log. He turned his head and smiled at her.

  “Well, here we are.”

  “Yes, here we are.”

  “I’m getting hungry,” Nick said. “What about you?”

  “Not especially, but we ought to eat.”

  She took a couple of pieces of dried deer meat and two cakes of maple sugar from the rucksack. After a day’s paddling, she should have been hungry, yet she barely tasted the food. All she noticed was the toughness of the deer meat — like strips of leather.

  While they were eating, a great blue heron flapped across the bay, trailing its long legs, and landed in shallow water beside a patch of reeds. For a time the bird stood motionless. Then suddenly its beak shot forward like a lance, and when the heron raised its head, a frog’s limbs waved wildly from either side. A twitch, a shudder, and the frog disappeared down the long gullet. The heron took up its position again, but as dusk fell, it abandoned the hunt and flew away.

  Nick stood up. “We’d better make a fire.”

  Together they wandered down the beach, picking up driftwood. By sunset they had collected enough. Nick got out his tinderbox. While he was lighting the fire, Charlotte fetched their bedrolls from the canoe. She unrolled Nick’s blankets on one side of the fire, and then her own on the opposite side. This was being sensible, she told herself. She hoped that Nick would suggest putting the blankets closer together, but he didn’t. Nick was being sensible too.

  As darkness fell, the beach seemed lonely and desolate. The sky was vast, the lake empty, and Carleton Island far away. Back in the tent, Papa would be thinking about her and wondering what she was doing. If he had a magic lens through which he could see her now, sitting on her blanket watching Nick pile driftwood onto their campfire, would he be reassured? “Don’t you trust us?” she had asked Papa. “Alone in the bush for two weeks?” he had answered in a tone that did not sound as if he did. But Papa must have believed them when they gave their word. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be here.

  When Nick had the fire built up, he sat down beside her and put his arm around her. Gradually the glow of sunset faded from the sky. A loon called. Sparks from their fire flew upwards to join the stars that twinkled far above. Moonlight danced upon the ripples of the bay.

  “If we were Indians, this could be our wedding journey,” said Charlotte.

  “Someday,” he said, and pulled her more closely to him.

  Charlotte sighed. “Yes. Someday.” Why not now? Why were the things she wanted always someday and never now? When Nick and Charlotte set out the next morning, her arms and shoulders were stiff and sore. But as she paddled, the warm sunshine and the exercise loosened her muscles. Her body was learning the rhythm of paddling: thrust, pull, lift and swing. The further they went, the more natural it seemed.

  Their course lay to the south, following the curve of Lake Ontario’s shore. Charlotte scarcely recognized the broad marshes at the mouth of the Oswego River. Many months ago, when she had travelled through these wetlands in the long canoe, there had been acres of dead reeds. But now green shoots stuck up through the still water. Redwing blackbirds, clinging to the stalks of last summer’s bulrushes, filled the air with their rasping calls. In the water, brown perch and bright sunfish swam leisurely away from the path of the canoe. Once, right off the bow, Charlotte spotted a fish as big as a man lying still as if asleep in the shallows, its pectoral fins slowly fanning the water.

  “Look!” she said softly.

  “Muskellunge. It could take your hand off.” At a nudge from Nick’s paddle, the huge fish vanished in a swirl of river-bottom mud.

  Late in the afternoon Nick turned the canoe towards shore. The reeds rustled as the bow parted them, like a comb parting hair. When the bow touched land, a dozen frogs leapt into the water.

  Charlotte rolled up the legs of her breeches and climbed out. Up to her ankles in slimy mud that squished between her toes, she hauled the canoe further ashore. The mud made a sucking sound as she lifted each foot.

  She did not see the bloodsucker until she sat down to wipe her feet with a handful of grass. Pulsing like a pump, it had fastened itself to her left foot, wedged between her big toe and the next,

  “Nick! Help me!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Shuddering, she pointed to it.

  “Oh, a bloodsucker! Don’t worry. It will drop off when it’s full. It’s just a leech, like doctors use to treat bruises.”

  “I hate leeches.” She unsheathed her knife.

  “Hey! Don’t cut it off. The mouth will keep sucking. Fire’s the only thing that will make it let go.”

  “Then light a fire! Please. Make it let go. I can’t stand it.”

  The creature was swelling, its grey body changing to pink as it filled with her blood.

  Nick unpacked his tinderbox. One, two, three times he struck the flint and steel before getting a spark. Usually once was enough, but not this time, while the leech sucked and sucked.

  “Hurry!”

  “I’m doing the best I can.” Squatting beside the smoldering tinder, Nick fed wisps of dry grass to the precious spark.

  “Nick! I can’t bear it. It’s big as a sausage.”

  Not only as big as a sausage, but the right colour too. A pink, pulsing sausage attached to Charlotte’s foot.

  At last Nick held up a stick with a bright, glowing tip.

  “Hold still.”

  At the touch of fire, the ruptured membranes spurted blood. The leech let go. Suddenly empty, it was just a small grey bladder lying in a pool of blood. Nick tossed it into the reeds.

  “Did it really hurt that much?” he asked.

  Charlotte inspected the tiny puncture that the leech’s mouth had left. “Not really.” As she pulled on her boots, she felt embarrassed because she had acted — yes, she must admit the truth — like a girl.

  “The real problem tonight will be mosquitoes,” said Nick. “The fire will help keep them away if I throw on some green rushes to make it smoke. And it would be a good idea to smear mud on every bit of your skin that isn’t covered by clothes.”

  But neither smoke nor mud gave much protection. When the mosquitoes arrived, they attacked in hordes, in vicious biting clouds. They were so thick that Charlotte could smack a dozen at a time. It made no difference to their numbers.

  Good grief! She thought. First the leech. Now the mosquitoes. I’ll have no blood left in me by dawn.

  If she hadn’t been exhausted, she might not have slept at all. But she did, off and on. At daybreak when she wakened, slapping and scratching, Nick had already loaded the canoe.

  “Let’s get away from here,” he said. “Mosquitoes won’t follow us over open water.”

  They paddled out to the middle of the channel, where they ate their breakfast undisturbed, soothed by the gentle rocking of the canoe.

  “I hope there’s never another night like that,” said Charlotte.

  “Not till we’re on our way back. By mid-morning we’ll be out of the wetlands.”

  Charlotte dipped her neckerchief in the river. Using it as a washcloth, she scrubbed the dried mud from her face and throat.

  “A beard has more uses than I thought,” Nick said. “Mosquitoes prefer smooth skin.”

  “Pity I can’t grow a beard,” Charlotte said ru
efully as she scratched the bites on her cheeks and chin.

  “I’m just as glad you can’t,” Nick replied. He picked up his paddle. “Let’s be on our way.”

  After they had left the wetlands behind and begun their journey up the Oswego River, they were paddling against the current. With every mile it grew stronger, pushing against Charlotte’s paddle as if it were a living force, trying to send them back the way they had come. A blister formed in the groove between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. The sun was hot. Sweat ran down her face. They fought for every inch.

  When the sun stood directly overhead, they stopped to eat and rest. Charlotte lay on her back, relaxing on the springy bracken fern that grew along the riverbank. Without turning her head, she glanced at Nick from the corner of her eye. Slumped beside her with his arms wrapped about his knees, he looked exhausted too.

  From further upriver came a roaring sound, too steady to be thunder.

  “Can you hear the rapids?” Nick asked.

  “So that’s what it is! It’s louder than I remember.”

  “When you went down the Oswego in the long canoe, it was November. There’s a lot more water in the river in May.”

  She pondered this as she stared up at a drifting white cloud. “Nick, at this rate, we’ll never get to Oneida Lake. We could travel faster on foot, even carrying the canoe and our supplies. We must portage.”

  “There’s an easier way.”

  “Tell me.” She continued to watch the cloud. In a minute it would cover the sun.

  “The canoe stays in the water, but we walk along the bank and tow it upriver. I can drag the canoe by its bow rope.”

  “Against the current? Would that be easier than paddling?”

  “Yes, because we wouldn’t have to unload the canoe, carry everything on our backs, then load the canoe again.”

  As the cloud covered the sun, the air felt suddenly cooler. With a burst of energy, Charlotte stood up. Taking a few steps to the water’s edge, she studied the river. Even close to the riverbank, the greenish-brown water was moving fast. Sharp-looking rocks jutted from the riverbed so close to the bank that she saw no room for a canoe to pass. Towing the canoe seemed impossible.