An Embarrassment of Riches (7 page)

“'Tis a mastodon,” Uncle declared.

“Why, I reckon 'twould be somebody's master, but not mine, ho ho,” the Woodsman joked. He and Bilbo shared in this drollery a minute.

“At Philadelphia,” said I, “Mr. Charles Willson Peale has erected the skeleton of just such a beast as you describe in his museum.”

“Ah, Philadelphia,” Uncle sighed, wistfully, thinking of his home, “Owl's Crossing…”

The Woodsman flinched and glanced overhead.

“Owls? Crossing?” he said, evincing much anxiety. At that very moment, deep in the night-shrouded forest, came the shriek of a great horned owl
(Bubo virginianus)
. It certainly made a fellow's skin crawl. All our party were visibly nonplussed. Bilbo, of course, affected a nervous cackle. Neddy cocked his ear to the night. The Woodsman sat erect, sniffing the chill air.

“Sometimes you can smell 'em,” he stated mysteriously.

“Smell what?” Bilbo asked. “Owls?”

“No. Injuns.”

“Do you smell any now?”

“No,” the Woodsman said. “But there is an herd of seven Virginia deer at about a quarter mile, one elk at an half, several foxes, raccoon, and 'possum aplenty, two, no, three badgers, and rodents innumerable.”

We heard a flapping of wings overhead.

“Also many bats,” the Woodsman added, “and, perforce, an owl.”

“No Indians?” Bilbo pressed.

“Not a one,” the Woodsman declared with confidence. Suddenly, another terrifying cry issued from the darkness. “There is now one less squirrel. A fox has et him.”

“Can thee tell all these things by a mere snuffling of the breeze?” Uncle inquired in wonderment.

“O, yes,” the Woodsman replied. “Why, the forest air is an open book. Were I, by some misfortune, struck blind, I would yet know my exact surrounding.”

“'Tis an amazing art,” Uncle said, and we all agreed.

“Pshaw,” the Woodsman scoffed. “Anyone can develop the faculty. Merely spend five thousand nights in the darkling woods. Avoid the towns and especially the taverns, as nothing so muddles this ability as the stench of tobacco—what ho!” he drew himself erect again, his delicate nostrils aquiver. “Gentlemen,” he said, “a bear has just lumbered across the margin of my scent range.”

“What distance?” I asked.

“A mile and a quarter—hold! Wait a minute! He has shifted direction and is retreating.”

“Do you suppose he smells us?” I asked.

“Not a chance, for he is upwind.”

“Why is he retreating then?” Bilbo inquired.

“How should I know?” the Woodsman replied. “Bears have their own reasons for going where they will. My faculty permits me to locate the beasts, not to read their minds—ho ho ho!” he rocked with mirth while the rest of us traded dumb, marveling glances. “I am most grateful for your hospitality, friends, but I am constrained by my noble mission to press on at once.” He licked both spoon and cup, replaced them in his necessaries pouch, and stood up.

“What is your mission?” I asked.

“Why, to render aid to the unfortunate.”

“Ah ha. What if I told you that we were at this very moment in the clutches of a treacherous and unregenerate villain?”

The Woodsman burst into another paroxysm of laughter.

“This has been a most diverting encounter,” he told us. “I can't tell you when I've had better company of the human sort. Bears, as you know, are humorous critters, and wolves enjoy a roguish sort o'twitting, but we are in the main a melancholy race, don't you agree?”

He bowed and doffed his skunkskin cap.

“What if I told you that the gentleman to my right were holding a pistol in my ribs this entire while?” I said.

Bilbo now erupted into a fit of counterfeit hilarity whilst Bessie honked and Neddy yipped. It struck me that the scoundrel had entered the wrong profession after all; had he taken to the stage, he would have made a fortune by now, so superb was his flair for the sham; while his talent as a pirate seemed merely ordinary.

This provoked yet another outburst of laughter in the Woodsman. He gripped his side and staggered over to lean against a tree trunk, so incapacitating was his jollity.

“Really,” he protested, “this is too much. I must be on my way … ho ho ho ho ho … ha ha ha ha ha … hee hee hee hee hee….” And with his final farewell he backed out of our firelit glade and disappeared into the lugubrious darkness, his laughter subsumed into another sudden and freakish blast of warm wind that rattled the treetops.

“Bilbo,” said I, “you are an obdurate wretch.”

“Thou art a cloaca incarnate,” Uncle added.

“What a way to speak to your partner,” Bilbo replied.

The next several days, in fine weather, we floated down the Ohio between hilly, forested banks, sometimes abreast of steep gray bluffs. There were infrequent other craft upon the river, a keelboat like ours here, a gundalow there, a skiff, a broadhorn loaded with barrels, a scow full of hides, a lone Indian in his dugout. None of these could we hail, nor stop and parley with. The pretense of “partnership” aside, Bilbo hardly let us out of his sight a moment. Our relation of captives and captor went on as before. By day, we were confined within the limits of our boat; that is, free to roam its cramped deck. After supper each evening ashore, Uncle and I were bound back to back, at the wrists, with a leash run to the vigilant dwarf, and thus suffered to find sleep as we might. And not an hour of any day or night passed that I did not dream of escaping these scum. Sooner or later, of course, the mists of gullibility would disperse in Bilbo's mind and our fountain of youth would stand unveiled for the hoax it was—which hour would bring leaden balls to both our brains.

“Uncle,” I whispered one night as the others snored symphonically across the dying fire. “Uncle, we must conceive some plan of escape!”

“Was that not the idea behind thy fountain of youth ploy?”

“'Twas a mere buying of time. I beg you, sir. Rack your imagination!”

“If only we could lay our hands upon any of an hundred noxious herbs that abound in the woods,” Uncle mused, “and somehow contrive to slip a dose upon these wretches. But Sammy, I must tell thee, being a Quaker I could not make myself a murderer, even of these scum who would be ours.”

“Let me do the job, then, Uncle, for I shall attend to it with relish.”

“Sammy!” he whispered, horrified. “To be thine accomplice would be one and the same thing. No, we must find some herb that is grossly incapacitating, yet not deadly, some—”

“Phrensyweed?” I ventured.

“Exactly!
Furor muscaetoxicus
,” Uncle agreed enthusiastically. “'Twould be ideal: incapacitating, yet not lethal. But, alack, 'tis such a rare and retiring little weed. Why, in complete freedom we would be hard-pressed to locate a patch. In our present confinement, I can't see how—”

“I think I know a way,” I said, a scheme taking shape in my mind requiring the amorous exploitation of that poor misbegotten creature, Bessie. Meanwhile, Uncle described for me in minute and vivid detail the characteristics of phrensyweed, that I might easily recognize it and snatch a handful before Bilbo took a notion to snatch our lives.

Just after noon the following day a brief thundershower had sweetened the air by disuniting the noxious vapors that lay heavy upon the Ohio. I was sitting idly atop the cabin roof whilst Uncle leaned against a biscuit cask watching Neddy scratch behind his ear for fleas, as any mongrel might. Bilbo emerged from the companionway with a specimen jar of whiskey.

“Studying my stalwart little companion?” Bilbo inquired, not impolitely. Though a villain through and through, he was a sociable villain. Our mode of travel, the scenery and teeming wildlife, failed to divert him, so he sought to enliven the hours of tedious flotation with palaver. Until now, he had found Uncle taciturn to one extreme and myself overlavish to the other extreme in scorn and effrontery. “Shall I tell you Neddy's history?” he asked.

“Can we prevent you?” I replied.

“You shall not regret it. The afternoon will take wing and fly.”

“Captain, the stage is yours.”

He bowed, sipped his whiskey, cleared his throat, and blew his nose over the gunwale.

“Are you ready?”

“Let's have it,” I said.

“Abandoned in a wood outside of Pott's Town, Pennsylvania, Neddy was raised among the wolves—”

“What bosh!”

“Strange but true. Taken into the pack by a nursing female, he was suckled through infancy at the teat of his wolf-mother. Happily did he disport himself in the wild with his brother and sister wolves. And sadly did he bid them all forever farewell when it was time for the litter to depart the den and strike out upon their own—”

“Any fool knows that a wolf pup and an human baby do not mature in the same span of time,” I said.

“I compress my narrative for dramatic effect.”

“O, well then….”

“He struck out on his own, in his own good time,” Bilbo glared at me. “By and by he endeavored to find a mate. No she-wolf would have him. The packs drove him away with snarl, fang, and claw. As the seasons chased one another, there he repined in his lonely den, an outcast. Then, one twilight in the approach of another winter, when a full moon shone coldly through the bare branches of the leafless trees, did Neddy, in a state of delirious despondency, wander into the rifle sights of a Pennsylvania marksman, who brought him down with a fifty-caliber ball to the shoulder. Imagine this huntsman's surprise to wade through the browning bracken and discover his prey to be of the human form!”

The dwarf began to snuffle. Soon his remembered miseries brought forth a draft of tears. Though entirely skeptical of this account, I found it hard to listen and watch unmoved. Even Uncle paid rapt attention.

“Ah me,” Bilbo continued, dabbing his own moist eyes with the tattered lace cuff of his yellowed linen shirtsleeve. “This huntsman brought poor Neddy back to his hovel and there nursed him back to health—not out of kindness, but upon reasons of the basest calculation, for the moment he was able to stand upon all four limbs did this churl in buckskins sell Neddy to an enterprising Yankee named Artemis Swatley for the sum of one Spanish gold dollar. This Swatley, a Connecticut peddler with his wagonload of pots and pans, fancied himself something of a showman, and hauled about from town to town a collection of oddities—a six-legged cow, jars of pickled monstrosities of nature, a trio of speechless albino acrobats, and a plaster o'Paris effigy said to be the very mummy of King Philip, the notorious Wampanoag firebrand—all as a sort of window-dressing, as 'twere, to gather the ignorant country folk in order to sell them wooden nutmegs, nostrums, short-weighted sugarplums, and sundry gewgaws of the cheapest manufacture. He featured Neddy in this exhibition of horrors as ‘Bungo the Dogboy.'”

“Dreadful,” Uncle declared, completely enthralled.

“Came the revolution,” Bilbo went on portentously. “Alarms! Chaos! Confusion! Slaughter! Swatley's miserable caravan chanced to be caught in the vicinity of Monmouth Courthouse 'twixt a company of bloodthirsting Hessians on the one hand and a mob of fractious Jersey rabble on the other. This rabble destroyed his wagonload of wooden nutmegs and shoddy tinware whilst the Hessians captured his freaks, Neddy amongst them. Need I tell you he was cruelly treated by those mercenary German brutes? They released him upon their withdrawal to New York. Amid the clangor and smoke of war did poor Neddy wander the countryside, knowing not whether he were truly man or beast, his little heart a'palpitating with sorrow, and yet the indomitable will to live still burning in his bosom.”

Neddy let loose a melancholy howl. Bilbo patted him upon his tin cap.

“There, there,” he said. “Where was I?”

“The war,” Uncle refreshed his memory.

“Ay yes. It ended. At last, peace descends upon the land. The doves return to their roosts. The chimes ring out. The States are confederated, the Articles of Peace signed. Commerce and agriculture reawaken from the nightmare slumber. Neddy is taken in by a series of masters, one crueler than the next. He is used for everything from fetching wingshot ducks out of the freezing Chesapeake Bay to treeing coons in the County of Albemarle, Virginia. Barbarous children pull his ears. Till comes the day he wanders west.”

Neddy ceased his lamentations and sat back upon his haunches, a far-away look in his eyes.

“Ah, the West, my babes! That motherland of the castoff, the unwanted, the eccentric, of society's flotsam and jetsam. Here he fled. Here he reapplied himself to those feral arts learned at his mother's teat. Here did he at last find that peace of mind, that contentment, which society had denied him. Here, in the wilderness, on that little island in the Ohio, did Bessie and I find him, and enter into the mutually advantageous relation in which you found us.”

Bilbo sighed and drained the whiskey from his jar. Uncle's jaw had fallen progressively agape as the rascal had ground out this inconceivable fustian narrative.