An Embarrassment of Riches (33 page)

It was as though some key had unlocked a door in my brain; that behind this door lay not only the patterned beauty of the world itself, but my capacity to see it and to understand my place in relation to it—to feel my heart palpitate at the sight of a wild rose, the scarlet spikes of
Canna indica
, the solemn grandeur of moss-hung oaks, the jewel-like appearance of a ruby-throated hummingbird
(Archilochus colubris)
as he hovers 'neath the pink and scarlet blossoms of the trumpet vine
(Campsis radicans)
. My concentration focused as never before. I could squat for hours on end in the midday heat before a bough of drooping wisteria
(W. frutescens)
, tracing the delicate lilac-hued clusters of blossom with eyes and pencil, then coloring these forms with paintbox and brush, and arise from this lengthy task not wearily but as though refreshed from a beautiful dream. Our botanical partnership thus became the why and wherefore of our days. Frankly, I was beginning to have my doubts that megatherium might be found anywhere in this part of the world at all. There were no bones, no scats, no evidence to suggest the existence of so monumental a creature, and, most significantly, no sightings—though we saw vast herds of other quadrupeds. Nor did we catch so much as a glimpse of the sloth's putative companion, the mastodon, an animal not adept, one would think, at concealing its massive self. And so, one sultry evening, as Uncle and I supped happily on a fricassee of squirrel, I put the issue to him direct:

“Uncle, have you any doubts that the giant sloth lives in this part of the world?”

“O, I doubt it absolutely, nephew,” he replied candidly, and to my astonishment added, “I doubted it from the very start.”

“From the start…?” I echoed him. “Then why did you agree to come?”

“I wanted to botanize the deep interior of this fabulous continent, to discover, classify, and record the vegetable life of these unknown territories. 'Twas vanity, I suppose, and no small sin, for sooner or later another man of science would have achieved the same deed, but I wanted to be that man. Can thee forgive me, Sammy?”

“Yes,” I assured him, and honestly so, though my heart sank amongst the fricasseed squirrels in my belly.

“'Twas quite an adventure, does thee not agree, Sammy?”

“You wanted to have an adventure?”

“O, heavens, yes. One more before I become stardust again.”

I saw now, in his expression, how much of the marveling boy remained in the stout body of the sixty-two-year-old man.

“I wanted to have an adventure too,” I confessed.

“Thee has. And found thy vocation.”

“Do you think so, Uncle? Might I hope to become a painter?”

“Dost wish to fritter away thy years at commerce? Balancing accounts, uncrating teacups, pinching pennies?”

I thought of home, Father's store. Dear, dogged, kind Papa.

“I could not bear the prospect,” I admitted.

“There 'tis.”

“But I tried to be a painter once and failed,” said I, recalling my miserable career as a miniaturist.

“Pish, twaddle, and bosh.”

“I was a complete fizzle, I assure you, sir.”

“'Twould make a capital epitaph 'pon some fellow's headstone: ‘He Tried Once and Failed.'”

“I sat in a cold garret and starved.”

“'Twas Providence's way of saving thee from a career as a painter of snuffboxes.”

“I had hoped to earn a living. And go on to larger subjects.”

“Thee shall. When we return to Philadelphia, I will commend thee to Dr. Peale. There is always work to be done around Peale's museum—stuffing specimens, cataloguing. It shall be thy college, and there thee shall learn, from the master, the science of the painter's art. Thy innate talents are already visible.”

“I think I should like that more than anything in the world, Uncle.”

“Thee can board at Owl's Crossing and ride our old mare Jenny across the Schuylkill to the city.”

“I cannot conceive of a happier situation.”

“Then it shall be done,” he concluded.

With that, we unrolled our bearskins, bid each other pleasant dreams, and closed our eyes to the peenting darkness. Never did I enter the portals of slumber with sweeter expectations for my future.

But no sooner had my career been neatly mapped out than we became lost. The Three-Chopped Way—so-called because of the triple blaze cut into the trees as signposts along its route—was never a very good trail. Not much traveled, the footpath was overgrown from disuse. Its telltale blazes were cut at long and irregular intervals. Sometimes as it crossed swamps and daunting cypress sloughs we would lose track of it for a day or more. In fact, we had thought ourselves lost on several occasions, only to blunder back upon a tree with the familiar triple axe marks. But now we hadn't seen such a signpost in three days. Our way through the woods became a baffling blind progress, a groping through the darkness of the unknown, and then misfortune deprived us of our uncomplaining donkey, Tom—as genial a creature as an old dog—who was attacked by a monstrous rattlesnake and killed. Several hours did he lie a'dying against our hopes, and we were helpless to meliorate his agony, though I lodged the contents of a pistol in his murderer's head. When his breathing stopped we were not only lost but reduced to carrying our necessaries upon our own backs. Two more days we stumbled forward until we struck a good-sized river and upon its bank a scene that augured our arrival in a lost and forsaken country, for there, pinned through his skull by an Indian spear to the trunk of a wahoo tree
(Ulmus alata)
, reposed the remains of our erstwhile savior the Woodsman.

“Oh infamy!” I cried at the awful sight.

We wouldn't have known it was he but for the skunkskin cap and white buckskins, for his flesh had been consumed by ravening worms and all that was left inside his emblematic raiment were the glistening bones.

“Poor noble nimrod,” Uncle said.

“What do you suppose happened to him?”

“Why, obviously he hath been murdered by savages.”

“Yes, but how?”

“Art blind, nephew? His brain is pierced straight through.”

“But the Indians quailed before him. He was invincible.”

“His powers must have deserted him,” Uncle concluded sadly.

“Look how he appears to point with his arm,” I remarked. Indeed, the Woodsman's limb did seem to gesticulate toward the river. “Damn me, a boat!”

There on the clay bank, baking in the harsh afternoon sun, lay a sturdy dugout of the Indian kind. We rushed to it. Inside were two stout paddles. Uncle and I glanced at each other over it.

“He has saved us again,” I declared. “Even in death.”

Uncle had no stomach to dispute this, for we had yet to bury the poor knight of the wilderness, and without shovels it was an awful labor. At last we heaped a cairn of stones upon his grave, and Uncle spoke a eulogy recalling his heroic deeds in life. Then we sadly filled the boat with our shooting irons and belongings and put out into the unknown river for we knew not where.

We soon determined that the river, despite its twists and turns, flowed generally southward and that we should follow it, hoping that it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, where we might meet a friendly ship bound for New Orleans or some other civilized port. For we had further determined that it was time to begin the long journey home.

For more than a week we rode the slow current south. The terrain changed from mixed forest to a country of expansive savannahs promiscuously dotted with palmetto
(Sabal p.)
. Where tributaries or freshets watered this plain sprouted stands of pine woods, occasionally supplanted by groves of oak (the sand jack
[Quercus incana]
or the stately diamond-leaf variety
[Q. lauifolia]
). Now and then we spied upon the shore what looked like abandoned cultivated fields, often containing earthen mounds and tumuli of the ancient Indian kind, though we saw no wild people or any signs of their present habitations.

The weather remained very sultry, though it was now September. Late each afternoon thunderclouds gathered and burst, as though the sky were indignant with the heat. You could set your watch by these cloudbursts. The country teemed with birdlife, and very large birds too, making our northern forests indeed compare as “a land of stunted feelings,” for here on the sand bars flocked cranes and herons by the thousands, whilst fat brown pelicans expertly skimmed the river's surface with bills like dipper nets. The curious water turkeys
(Anhinga anhinga)
would swim with their whole body submerged and only the long neck protruding above the surface, like a sea serpent's. Here we encountered for the first time the strange roseate spoonbills
(Ajaia ajaja)
, an huge clown of a bird with bright pink wings and rump and a swan's neck surmounted by a silly green head like a Persian lime, made sillier by a mottled bill the shape and color of a buffalo-horn spoon. Here the carrion crows
(Coragyps atratus)
wheeled in impressive squadrons, for wherever life teems, so too lurks its shadow, death, and by cleaning up the refuse, these ugly, black, bald-head rats of the sky performed as invaluable a service as a crew of pretty maids in a busy mansion. And amidst this abounding life, this embarrassment of riches, slouched that fearsome true dragon of the New World, the alligator, his beady yellow eyes and steaming snout protruding above the waterline. It was the first I had ever seen of these monsters and they commanded my immediate respect.

Often we encountered them sunning on a mudbank, a dozen or more of prodigious size—up to twenty feet long—their plated bodies swaying under powerful, stumpy legs as they evacuated their plots of repose at our approach, and with surprising swiftness.

One evening we fixed our camp on a patch of high ground at the utmost projection of a promontory that overlooked a lagoonlike bulge of the river. From our prospect I could view scores of the reptile monsters lurking darkly amid the wraithlike cypress with their beards of Spanish moss, and dreading an attack from a gang of them, we heaped up a great quantity of firewood to keep the brutes at bay. All night long we could hear the scraping of their claws against the steep clay bank below, not to mention the horrid music of their exhalations. Our sleep was therefore a fitful one at best, and you may be sure that I reposed with two charged pistols in my lap.

The following dawn, we awakened not to the deceptive songs of the mockingbird but to a furious thunderation of crocodilian brawling. At first, I thought that a combat of bulls had erupted among the competing males of the gang. Several seemed to be fighting. The lagoon boiled with their violence, great toothed jaws clapping, water streaming out tinted faintly pink from drawn blood, creamy bellies flashing in the sun as they writhed, and the most stentorious roars I have ever heard issue from any wild beast—reptile, mammal, or fish. The snarling of as many panthers would have compared to this hullabaloo as the mewing of so many tabby cats.

On further observation, however, it became apparent that the fracas was not one of rutting reptilian swains, but a frenzy of eating. A sizable school of trouts had blundered into the dragons' lair, and this roiling cacophony was nothing more than another day's breakfast. All in all, their manners were on a par with, say, a table full of boarders in an Ohio River lodging house. This orgy of feeding went on about a quarter of an hour, the gluttonous alligators slashing the school of trout to ribbons, some even flipping the fish up in the air, head over tail, and catching them in their jaws, as if for sheer sport. Water stained red from their turbulence and butchery spread across the lagoon like a sickening curtain. At last the giants subsided, withdrawing back into the murk of the clay banks and falling into repose like so many half-submerged logs. Floating shreds of fish flesh were now devoured by scavenging bream and perches, themselves snatched from the river by swooping pelicans. Here was nature at her most awe-inspiring: at once profligate and thrifty.

The same day that began with such an extravaganza of blood and thunder we stopped at the head of an island to procure a little game for our noonday meal—both of us having “a hankering,” as the Kentuckians say, for meat. It was a good-sized island, perhaps as much as a mile long. The river had widened considerably in the days since we put onto her. We hid our pirogue among some water oaks
(Q. nigra)
, charged our rifles, and—alert for ever-lurking reptiles—crept into the island's interior.

What a sylvan landscape we found there. The terrain gently rose some twenty feet above the high water mark to a sort of elevated plateau, along the top of which grew a stately forest of the beautiful, stout-limbed, evergreen live oaks
(Q. virginiana)
, draped with the ghostly moss that characterizes the southern climes; also the basket or cow oak
(Q. michauxii)
, a few sweet gums
(Liquidambar styraciflua)
, and loblolly pine
(Pinus taeda)
. Altogether it presented a very pleasing aspect, the mockingbirds crooning their mimetic melodies in the treetops. Amidst this inviting loveliness, I saw three tails go up like white flags. Uncle and I shouldered our arms and fired. One of the deer wobbled on its feet, but recovered. All three sprang deeper into the shadows. We raced to the spot where they had disappeared. On the sandy ground was a spattering of blood. We recharged our pieces and hastened off in pursuit.

We did not have far to go. Ahead in a glade of moss-draped oak lay our deer, mercifully expired. It was a small though fully mature buck about the size of a mastiff—a pygmy subspecies of
Odocoileus
peculiar to this region, perhaps—but plenty to answer our purposes for a luncheon. I held up the still-warm forelegs as Uncle commenced dressing out its musk glands and innards.

“What ho, ye hell-spawn'd Spaniels—stand!” a rich baritone voice called out from above somewhere. I looked all about, but saw no one.

“Craven rascals, blackheart Spaniels, stand!” another voice bellowed from above, its author also invisible.

“What…?” I said, and dropped the deer's fetlocks.

“Aye, and slain a roebuck of the King's.”

“O, black o'heart and red the whoreson's hand!”

All at once, four men stepped out on the stout overhanging limbs of the live oak trees. In a trice, they adroitly sprang to the ground and drew their bows. Our weapons lay upon the forest floor, and we had not a hope of snatching them to defend ourselves, with four arrows pointed at our hearts. Several more of the band now dropped from the trees, likewise armed, and crowded 'round us. They were the strangest-looking Indians I had ever seen.

For one thing, they had fair skin, blue eyes, and hair in every shade of brown, red, and blond, including very full beards. Their tongue was obviously some kind of English. But in manner, especially in the way they carried themselves, one saw all the hallmarks of the Indian. Finally, they were gotten up in the queerest costumes that I had ever seen on anyone, white or red.

The regalia consisted, from the top down, of a slouch hat made, apparently, of beaten deerskin, worn at a rakish angle and decorated with the gaudy feathers of herons, spoonbills, ibis, and flamingos, secured to the crown by a pearly brooch of shell. It appeared to be the fashion amongst them to wear a single earring, many of the same polished pearly shell, some of red, green, or blue glass beads, a few of hammered gold and silver. About their necks they wore the most peculiar sort of necklace, or perhaps collar would be more accurate: a stiff, uncomfortable-looking accessory made of woven bark, bleached to buff color, and meticulously folded or ruffed. It made them carry their chins very high and look down their noses at us.

Their arms were adorned with bark garters and bracelets, some very elaborately figured with beads, shell, and fragments of precious metal. Their torsos were naked, as would be expected among Indians, especially of these southern parts and tropical climes. About their loins they wore not the breechcloth that is the common apparel of every tribe, but rather a queer kind of short pantaloon of sewn deerskin, puffed out and pleated, with a lot of room in the seat. Some wore fur tails behind these pantaloons. Their footwear was more like a slipper than an Indian moccasin, made as though by a cobbler and tied with bark ribbons. All wore daggers of the old Spanish type, while a few carried actual swords and cutlasses.

“What wouldst you here, ye monstrous Spaniel curs?” a husky redbeard of their number stepped between two of the bowmen and inquired. He wore a jeweled Spanish rapier and matching poniard in his fur and snakeskin belt. His hat sported the most luxuriant array of feathers and ornaments, and I guessed that he was the band's leader. “Ye damned Spaniels, ought I crop your ears?” he said and drew the greater blade, which he dandled before my face.

“Ar … Ar … Art Quakers?” Uncle inquired in fearful bewilderment.

“Quakers?” Redbeard winced. “Dost see me quaking, Spaniel whoreson rogue?” His companions laughed.

“Whatever you think we are, we are not spaniels,” said I, and their laughter became an uneasy murmuring. Redbeard fingered my linen blouse and breeches.

“Ye come like murdering Spaniels, in Spaniel stealth and clothen clothes, yet speakest like the Wejuns that are we? Wherefore? And what withal?”

“I am Samuel Walker, and this is my uncle, William Walker, and we are the Corps of Wonders and Marvels on commission of President Jefferson.”

“Of the United States of America,” Uncle added, detecting a certain lack of comprehension on their part.”

“What a brazen-faced varlet art thou,” another of the company sneered, his fingers obviously itching to release the bowstring and drive an arrow through my heart. “'Tis a finical Spaniel ruse, like the mockery-bird who sings the throstle's song, come these action-taking knaves to plunder paradise, and crown we Wejuns with the cap of bells.”

“How learned you the King's English, ye dogs?” Redbeard demanded.

“We are Americans,” I answered, with waning confidence that it meant anything to these strange tribesmen. “Everybody speaks English in our land.”

“President Jefferson also speaks French and reads Italian,” Uncle added. The tribesmen looked quizzically at one another and scratched their heads. “By the by,” Uncle asked. “Whom art thou?”

“Wouldst
thou
me, thou tricksy Spaniel wretch!” Redbeard fumed and thwacked Uncle upon the hindquarters with his rapier. “Wouldst pluck the she-bear's suckling cubs or mock the lion when he roars for prey? By God's sonties, bind up these fork-tongued vipers at the wrists, and all away!”

Once again we were bound and hobbled in the custody of hostiles and marched away to an ill-boding destination. The village of these odd tribesmen lay close at hand, hardly a mile from the spot where we were captured, and it proved to be a place fully as strange and mysterious as its inhabitants.

In a clearing of perhaps ten acres stood two dozen dwellings unlike any Indian lodgings I'd ever seen. They looked more like the little shanties of the clam diggers that stand above the tidal inlets on my dear Long Island. Each was about twenty feet long by ten wide. They were built of sturdy timber frames with wattled mud between the posts. The roofs were peaked and covered with great silvery-white sheaves of grass thatching. Each cottage had a door of crude planking and paneless windows framed by crude carved shutters. Under some of the windows, to our astonishment, were flower boxes of hollowed log. Many of the cottages stood within fenced yards—the fence of splitted wood—the which comprised garden plots of vegetables and herbs. I espied thyme and tobacco, wormwood, bishopwort, rue, sage, lovage, lavender, and vervain, not a few of the aforesaid botanicals of Old World provenance. Among the fruits were pumpkin, bush broadbean, and tomato.

In contrast to the greeting accorded us by the Shannoah, these habitants did not rush out to thrash us with sticks, bite our shanks, or otherwise molest us. Rather, in a manner rather eerie, the women and clinging children watched silently from their doorways, yards, and windows as we were led into the village. The women's costume was as remarkable in its own way as their husbands'. They wore skirts of doeskin and nothing above. That is to say, they went bare-breasted, and though I was a captive, 'twas a captivating sight to me to see half-naked maidens who looked otherwise no different from the females of New York or Pennsylvania. They were exceedingly handsome and well-proportioned, and prettily adorned, like their men, with ornaments of shell and bead and feather. Amidst their cool, level stares, we were conducted to the tribe's jail house.

It too was a stout-timbered structure, with a floor of half-hewn logs and ceiling of woven brambles. A single window barred with oaken rods as thick around as my wrist let in a few stark rays of sunlight. The jail room was bare of furnishings, save a crude bucket for our slops. Even so, for creature comfort it far surpassed the filthy Shannoah pen. They shoved us inside, shut the door, and barred it from without. I immediately set about the task of finding some way out, while Uncle watched at our window.

“Sammy,” Uncle said with sudden excitement, “does thee suppose these strange tribesmen might be the Welsh-speaking Indians of legend?”

“The Welsh tongue is a species of gobbledygook. You would not understand a word of it,” I explained, for while an expert in matters botanical, Uncle had as many gaps in his education as a Switzer cheese has holes. “Whoever these rascals are, they speak English—and about as well as a troupe of Park Theatre players.”

At the head of the village, several other tribesmen entered bearing our supplies, for they had evidently found our boat. One man hoisted several of our muskets and pistols in the air, crying, “Fuzees! fuzees!” A crowd gathered round him and marveled over the weapons. One sensed that they had seen such things before but were mystified as to exactly how they worked.

“Damn me!” I swore in disgust, “these walls must be a foot thick—”

“Shhh! Someone approaches….”

Footfalls outside. A clunk as they unbarred the door. In strode two of the gallants, Redbeard and Yellow, who had ambushed us, followed by a stooped, elderly, white-haired fellow of their tribe with flowing white beard. To the regular items of their raiment, i.e., pantaloons and ruffed bark collar, he added a fine cape of iridescent black crow's feathers and a matching cap, upon which a pair of crow's wings were affixed outstretched, like the helmet we see Hermes depicted wearing in an allegorical painting. The two others laid bearskins on the floor and helped him down. He was infirm. They joined him at either side on the skins.

“If you be Spaniels, spill your deathsong's truth,” the old crow-bedizened fossil spoke in a voice that evoked all the unoiled door hinges of antiquity.

“Surely thine eyes inform thee that we are men, not dogs,” Uncle replied in a forceful tone, as though speaking to children, which was his manner when parleying with savages.

“Spaniel cozenage!”

“Filthy Spaniel lie!” the other two retorted in turn.

“What, by your lights, is a Spaniel?” I finally interposed, hoping, at least, to define the term by which we might be murdered.

“A Spaniel dost the very world offend,” the old man began. “He it is that skulks about the swamp, abode of rat and rattling snake, and doth the slime itself fair imitate.”

“You mean—”

“Silence, puppy, before I trim thy tail!” the redbeard warned me.

“From Hell's loose bowel the Spaniel here uncoils, to wage infernal war on Wejuns we; a fouler spawn the world did never know, nor baser-visaged monster ever see. The kraken of the briny depths seems fair, a charitable saint compared to he that in a Spaniel's armor creeps the plain, and slaughters those who in his path do be. All monsters of the living world do pale, in contrast to this execrable dog, who'd snatch a baby from its mother's teat, and eat it in a drear miasmal bog. The griffin, hippocampus, cockatrice, all phantoms of the woods or winds or deeps, are like unto a flock of gaggling geese, to a Spaniel whose atroc'ties know no cease.”

“That is a Spaniel—”

“An you two Spaniels please,” the others chimed in.

“But we are not monsters,” I pleaded. “Surely you must see that we are men like you.”

“Like we! Nay, faith, in Spaniel's clothes come thee,” Yellowbeard sneered.

“Art Stinkards?” Redbeard asked in a sarcastical tone.

“Stinkards?”

“I think not,” Yellowbeard said, “for'bserve their skins: not ruddy, but the pale of we Wejuns.”

“What is a Stinkard?” I inquired, bewildered by their queer lexicon.

“What is a Stinkard?” the three replied in unison, trading glances of disbelief.

“Liv'st in the world?” Yellowbeard asked.

“The Stinkard is that other spawn of hell,” the old man recommenced in his creaky, yet lulling, singsong voice, “who 'bout the bosky forest makes his home; and like we Wejuns off the land doth dwell, but in a manner rude and oft loathsome. Its hair is jet black like the raven's wing, its skin a darkling russet copp'ry hue, its customs vile abominable things, and fiendish ways a curse we Wejuns rue. If Spaniel like unto a monster be, then to devils odious Stinkards we compare; they cry like demons, laugh at agonies, their women-folk like tarts go wholly bare. Of Stinkards there be half an hundred tribes, all waging ceaseless internecine wars; their victims dead are luckier than alive, for torture is their chiefest art, of course.”