An Embarrassment of Riches (9 page)

The din went on all night long, the forest creaking and crackling as though it were aflame, while the cooing gradually desisted. Then, dawn shining through the rough planks of our cabin roof, the cooing recommenced, built to a fantastic hullaballoo, and transmodulated into the creatures' flight song. With a turbulence that compared to one of the nor'easters that rake my coastal home, the incalculable flock rose out of the trees as a united body, once again blotting out the sun, and began a new day's journey. Again the white rain fell, nattering upon the deck most of the day. It was not until late afternoon, when sunlight shone down the companionway, that we dared venture outside. And when we did, O, what a noisome, desolate sight greeted our squinting eyes.

I had no sooner climbed up top when I lost my footing and fell into the viscid white slime that coated our deck an half-inch deep all over like some diabolical frosting on a cake. So disgusted was I, that with not a moment's hesitation I leaped overboard into the river, itself polluted with the guano to a cream and coffee color. Dead pigeons by the hundredfold floated feet up in the sluggish current like so many sops in a gigantic consommé.

“Are you all right, old fellow?” Bilbo cried to me from the deck, ever more solicitous of my weal.

“Only disgusted,” I called back, trying to wash the muck off my clothes.

The others looked glumly about the boat and surrounding forest. Even Neddy wore a look of revulsion. The treetops as far as one could see on either bank of the river were broken and befouled. Many limbs hung askew as after a bad storm and pigeons hung entangled in the twigs where they had died, while the forest floor was littered with countless more bodies of the profligate birds. One could only wonder at the extravagance of a nature that might deprive so many individual members of a species their lives, yet still suffer to exist in such vast flocks.

“We'd better clean her up, my hearties,” Bilbo muttered. “We can't be running deeper into Indian country painted white like a floating Methodist church.”

Uncle merely stood at the prow shaking his head in astonishment. Though he had seen many curious marvels in his life, from Niagara's booming cataracts to the great seal rookeries of Labrador, I don't believe he had ever witnessed an extravaganza like the mass flight of these pigeons.

We were all hard at work scouring the droppings off the boat for the remainder of the day. By nightfall, our craft was free from most of its guano veneer, though a powdery white residue remained. This too needed a remedy, so the following morning we lapped over the deck and cabin with a crude paint improvised out of the snuff-colored clay that comprised the banks. By the time we finished this job in the heat of the afternoon, the dead birds in the nearby woods began to send up a fierce odor of decay. Without further ado, we weighed anchor and poled upstream, away from that place of rot and filth.

Two more numbing days at the poles ensued, no further evidence of the disgusting pigeons to be seen. The swathe of their flight had run, evidently, to the eastward, whilst we plied due north. The river inexorably narrowed. Soon, geography dictated events, for the morning that [O5]that third day post-pigeons, not long after we set out on a breakfast of corncakes and roasted buffalo fish, our ears were alerted by another roaring in the distance.

“What on earth now!” I mumbled, imagining some new pestilence.

“'Tis falling water, Sammy,” Uncle said, keening to the sound as he lifted his pole. “It is just like the Niagara sounded at ten miles.”

“What's going on down there, you two?” Bilbo asked irritably from his supervisory post on the cabin roof. Then he too heard the far-off tumult.

“By Christ's holy spunk, not more birds!” he moaned in despair. Neddy growled. Bessie whimpered.

“Must we have these blasphemies?” Uncle rebuked him.

“Must there be rain? Indians? Porcupines? Agonies? Mosquitoes? Shitting multitudes of birds! By Beelzebub's brass balls, do not upbraid with me, sir!” Bilbo fulminated, clearly unhinged at the prospect of another visit from those vile avians.

“It is crashing water, Bilbo,” I intervened. “Up ahead lie the falls of the Dismal.” Our captor was visibly relieved. He shut his eyes for a moment and slouched back upon his crate. The exertions and frights of our voyage were taking a heavy toll on his wits.

“Thank God,” he muttered simply, without maledictory garnish.

“This shall be our jumping-off place,” I improvised the next steps of our quest. “We shall have to put by the boat, hide it somehow, and continue on foot.”

“All right,” Bilbo agreed wearily. He removed his battered tricorn hat and fanned himself with it. “These weeks have took a year off my life. I can taste the waters of that spring already. Ah, youth!”

“There is nothing like it, sir,” I attested.

“'Tis a refreshment like none other,” Uncle added.

“Others may have their cardinal virtues: wisdom, freedom, justice, honor,” Bilbo mused on. “But give me youth. Youth and gold.”

“Nobly put,” I flattered the knave.

“Pole on, then. Let's take her as far as we can go.”

This proved to be only another mile. And the falls of the Dismal, while impassable, proved to be no Niagara, but a series of stepped cascades rather than a single roaring cataract. It looked like a rock-studded hill of frothing water, about two hundred yards in length but only seventy-five feet in elevation along that length. Here, for the time being, ended our voyage up the Dismal River. We hid
Megatherium
in a quiet eddy a quarter mile below the falls, cloaking her in a mantle of branches from the black willow
(Salix nigra)
, that ubiquitous shrub of the bottomlands. What with these trappings and her recent paint job the boat became virtually invisible in her riparian berth.

Thus we set off upon land, a very queer sensation indeed after so many weeks on board our keelboat. Uncle and I were burdened with the load of specimen jars, which we contrived to transport using a device made of two poles beneath which we slung by cords the pinewood crate designed to hold the jars. It was quite heavy. Fortunately, Bilbo's comparative indolence aboard had left him less fit for a long ramble, and he was constrained to stop and rest as often as every ten minutes, making our slavery less stringent.

“When we reach the fountain,” he said, sweating and panting, “we must take care not to drink too much of the elixir, lest we end up like your horse, Old Tom, eh? Bawling babes. 'Twould be a dangerous upshot indeed. At the mercy of this howling woodland and the brutes that live here. Why, we'd be too small and weak to carry back our precious cargo. Ain't that right, Neddy?”

“Yap yap!”

“Tell me something, old fellow.”

“What?” Uncle replied crabbily.

“Not you, grumpy-guts. Your brother.”

“Yes?” I said.

“Did you notice, by chance, at the time of your … er, transformation, any lessening of, er … intellectual attainments?”

“Sir…?”

“Of knowledge gained over three score and twelve years of life?”

“No,” I answered. “But how can you miss what you no longer remember ever possessing?”

“I see,” said Bilbo irresolutely. “Well, that's a worry banished. Still, we must be very careful to regulate our dosages upon arrival there. You, for example, may not wish to indulge in a drop, since—no offense—you have, perforce, regressed somewhat short of manhood's prime—”

“You may kiss my fundament.”

“—and may therefore desire a few years to accrete before undergoing another treatment. The same with my Bessie here, who is, I think we may all admit, at the very peak of maidenly ripeness. Not a month off one way or t'other,” Bilbo concluded with that purblind admiration of a father, whilst the poor oddity in question blushed girlishly. “Neddy, on the other hand, might be dosed liberally so as to return him to the natal state, whence he might be brought up so as to erase those feral habits he acquired in the wolf den. I tell you, I would do the job right and bring him up a gentleman.”

“A gentleman!” Uncle chortled. “Ho ho!”

“By the Nazarene's holy horn, I would, sir,” Bilbo asserted. “Up with the chest, fellows. Up, I say, and forward to the sunshine of nonage!”

He plied northward, following roughly the course of the Dismal, no longer a sluggish, turbid, reeking miasmal flowage worthy of the name, but now a clear, sprightly brook, over whose gravelly bed finned beautiful fat-bellied trout
(Salmo trutta)
. The terrain was a well-drained upland forest of chestnuts
(Castanea dentata)
, both black and white walnut
(Juglans nigra
and
cinerea)
, the latter sometimes called butternut; hickory of several species including pignut
(Carya glabra)
, bitternut
(Carya cordiformis)
, a few pecan
(Carya illinoinensis)
, and the aptly named shagbark
(Carya laciniosa)
. By late afternoon, my head ached. Bilbo himself had had enough traipsing for the day and called a halt to our party. At the mouth of a feeder creek, or branch, lay a lick where blocks of ensalinated coal stood upon the surface of the ground. Here we surprised and killed a bear and encamped for the night.

In the morning, Bilbo awoke stiff and cranky, no longer the jolly, garrulous rover he had been the day before. Our breakfast was bear and bear alone. I find such an exclusive diet to be annoying on the guts, and bear, being particularly strong in flavor, put me into a state of nausea. We marched until high noon, passing across a highland of terrible laurel slicks
(Kalmia latifolia)
, whose stunning, saucer-shaped white blossoms did not mitigate some of the worst traveling I ever saw.

“Where in hell's hundredth acre is that damnable Zane's Trace?” grumbled Bilbo as we made our noon halt.

“Ahead,” I told him. “Still ahead.”

“Ahead?” he mocked me. “Balls….”

The dwarf procured a turkey and in short order had the gobbler a'roasting for our luncheon. After the meal, Bilbo elected to take a nap, whilst the ever-avid Bessie enveigled me into a nearby hawthorn thicket
(Crataegus intricata)
. I tell you, she was like unto a rabbit in more ways than one. We were thusly entwined when the forest erupted in shouts and shrill hell cries. My blood turned to ice. A gunshot rang out, followed by a terrible shriek. I rolled off of Bessie. Her legs fell to the ground with a thud. The hawthorn branches parted around us and in thrust the wild, leering, painted coppery faces of a dozen Indians. With triumphant yells, they sprang in and seized us.

Eight of the brutes conducted us roughly back to our luncheon bivouac. We arrived there to find several more Indians in vicious assault upon Bilbo, whilst three were required merely to hold back the snarling, snapping, slavering Neddy, and two clutched Uncle.

Bilbo's assailants belabored him with the ferocity of famished wildcats, tearing his clothing away in shreds and gnawing the tips of his fingers amid shrieks and squirts of blood and clouds of dust as they thrashed upon the forest floor. The reason for their fury was immediately apparent: one of their number lay on the ground, a neat round hole in his throat and bright blood pooling warmly over the leaf litter beneath his lifeless body. I surmised at once that Bilbo had shot him—a singularly stupid thing to do, given their superiority of forces. The villain might as well have pointed the pistol at his own head and pulled the trigger.

Though he had oppressed us for weeks, I cannot say that I was glad to see him so harshly treated, for it did not portend anything but misery and abuse to come for Uncle and myself, who were, after all, members of his party. Bessie, of course, was beside herself, honking and flailing uselessly at our new captors. Then one of the savages stood forward and shouted at Bilbo's tormenters. When they did not heed him, he fetched one of his own fellows a kick to the shins and shouted again. They desisted at last and climbed off Bilbo, who yet writhed upon the blood-smeared leaves.

The savage who had shouted appeared to be the band's captain—though still a young warrior and not necessarily a tribal chieftain. He was dressed more gaudily than his compatriots. They wore only the simple breechcloth and moccasins that is their summer costume, plus various armbands, beaded necklaces, and similar adornments. Their hair was worn to shoulder length, unbraided, each with an eagle's feather hanging downward. This captain, however, wore what had been a white gentleman's puce silken waistcoat, embellished since his acquisition of it with porcupine quillwork. From the waistcoat's hem had been stitched a tufted fringe of what looked like human hair—most of the tufts black, but some brown, yellow, and red. Over the waistcoat this wight wore a very fine necklace of bear claws that must have been an accessory of much envy among them. Atop his head was a gaudy bonnet based upon the felt crown of a stolen hat, with ermine skins dangling from the side and a single spray of parti-colored plumes stitched to the front. All of his party bore painted faces and bodies, but this fellow's was at once the simplest and most fearsome. His face was daubed sheer white, with the eye sockets colored blue, so that he looked like a bedizened ghoul.

All of the foregoing action had happened very quickly upon our delivery from the thicket, and when this war-captain was done freeing Bilbo from his assailants, he turned his attention to Bessie and me. The warriors began laughing at us with much mischievous delight, while their leader—who was not laughing at all—strode up to us imperiously.

“Pull up thy pants, Sammy,” Uncle advised me and I did so. The leader wheeled and angrily remonstrated his troops, who ceased their jollity that instant. He reached tremulously out and lightly ran his fingers over Bessie's face, in particular the harelike aperture that was her mouth. His whole manner seemed steeped in the deepest reverence. Though terrified, Bessie was held by a stout brave and could not escape this officer's fondling. He muttered a litany of incomprehensible words.

“He says that the she-rabbit spirit came to him in a vision last night and told him she would be his people's deliverer,” Uncle translated, to my complete surprise.

“You understand them?”

“Yes,” Uncle replied. “They are Shannoah. 'Tis a tongue not unlike Tuscarora.” He then proceeded to say a few words in their language, and the headman turned abruptly to Uncle, apparently surprised at his facility. “I asked him from whom or what the she-rabbit had promised to deliver his people,” Uncle said. The leader spoke again, rapidly and with greater vehemence.

“What does he say now?”

“He says the she-rabbit had promised to deliver them from us, the white pig-people,” Uncle reported. “He says he did not expect the she-rabbit to present herself in the guise of a white woman.”

The officer spouted several more sentences.

“He says that this turn of events perplexes him. He is additionally troubled that she has crossed his path in company with the man-wolf—meaning the dwarf, I suppose—who is his personal medicine spirit.”

With this, the officer sat down on the ground and removed from a leathern pouch at his hip a gray fur bundle that contained his collection of enchanted objects: an eagle's skull and talons bound in sort of a red cloth strait waistcoat and very evil-looking; various odd-shaped stones; a few burnished bits of bone (whether animal or human I had no idea); and a crudely carved wooden effigy of a wolf. These he spread out in the dust before him and fingered while he sang a grim little song. Shortly, he closed his eyes and appeared to be entering a trance.

His troops observed a brief decorum, but soon were about other business—seeing to the dead man and breaking open the crate of specimen jars. It was with unqualified joy that they discovered the jars to contain whiskey, which they began to guzzle at once. Bilbo, meanwhile, had ceased his writhings and now knelt in the dust sucking his fingertips. His face and pale, bared torso were a mass of bruises. The headman awoke from his meditation. One of the braves presented him with a jar, which he sniffed suspiciously and then addressed with delight. Sipping it with the daintiness of a Broadway fop enjoying a rum punch, he began to speak. Uncle translated:

“He says he has consulted his advisors in the nether world and they have instructed him to bring the white she-rabbit back to their town where she will make many baby warriors until the Shannoah have such numbers that they can push all the white pig-people into the Big Sweet Water. He states furthermore”—Uncle paused portentously—“that the rest of us shall have the honor of the laughing death at Shannoah-town.”

“What is that: the laughing death?” I asked.

“Sammy, believe me, it is no laughing matter.”

Bilbo drew his bloody, gnawed upon fingers from his mouth and said, desperately, “Tell this son o'Satan that I am the rabbit's father!”

Uncle did so.

The officer rejoined hotly.

“It were perhaps better thee hadn't mentioned that,” Uncle reported. The leader then went on in Shannoah at some length, Bilbo growing obviously more discomposed by the minute. When the Indian was finished, Uncle made a sour face, cleared his throat, and commenced the long translation: “It seems that in their mythology, the she-rabbit was the daughter of an hare who had been ravished by a very bad windigo, or evil forest spirit, whom thee has just claimed to be—”

Bilbo groaned.

“He says furthermore that in light of this development, they have a special death in store for thee. First, they are going to beat thee to a bloody pulp with clubs. Then they are going to festoon thee all about thy flesh with splinters of the fatwood tree”—

“Enough!”

—“and set them aflame, after which they will stake thee to an ant heap, following which, if thee yet breathes, they will carefully remove thy large bowel, tack it to a tree, and wrap thee around like a maypole dancer”—

“Stop!” Bilbo shrieked.

—“in case of which thee survives, they will chop thee to fragments from the toes upward. I must say,” Uncle paused to catch his breath, “'tis a most un-Christian bill of particulars.”

The Indian captain stood up. Bilbo commenced crawling across the ground toward him, tears streaking his bloody, dust-coated face, and imploring the stern-visaged savage to spare him in the most abject, groveling manner. He kissed the Indian's very moccasin tips. This, of course, impressed the headman as nothing short of the basest cowardice. He spat on Bilbo's head and tried to step away from his groveling entreaties; and this being impossible finally stamped Bilbo's face into the dust and hurled objurgations down upon him in the Shannoah tongue. Uncle dutifully translated:

“ … thou detestable clown … thou woman-hearted pig-man … thou reeking, pusillanimous craven … thou earthworm….”

Finally, Bilbo yet clutching at the headman's ankles, as a drowning man might grasp at a shark's fin, mistaking it for a flotsam on the dark and raging sea, the Indian drew back his foot and fetched Bilbo a staunch kick to the head, which persuasive blow sent the whimpering blackguard a'reeling head over heels 'til he landed with a sickening thump against the ground, unconscious. The leader then ordered us all bound to separate trees—save Bessie, who was already being amorously abused by more than a few of the braves—while they proceeded to drink themselves into a stupor. This they accomplished with astounding rapidity. There was a brief interlude of dancing, singing, crowing, and chesty tarryhooting, but before the sun went down all the Indians lay scattered about the bivouac in alcoholic slumber, whilst we passed the night lashed in the embrace of tree trunks, with naught to dote on but the manifold ingenious ways that the Indians might devise to afflict, revile, and mutilate our persons.

It is a very sorry Indian that awakens to the nether side of firewater the day after a drunken spree, and it is a sorrier white man who is in their captivity when they so awaken. Reeling and vomicking, groaning, wincing at the sun shining down through the forest's leafy vaults, flinching at the
peet peet peet
of the warblers, cursing one another, it was more than an hour before the sickened brutes could gather their collective wits about them; and when they did, their wits were darkened by a very black temper indeed. At first, they ignored us, tied to trees as we were, whilst plunging their heads in the brook's cold water to clear the cobwebs from their skulls. Bessie, I noticed, awoke amid a heap of them.

This Bilbo witnessed too, of course, and his loud, opprobrious anathemas drew the savages' attention back upon us, to Bilbo's grief above all; for they trussed him up like a Christmas turkey and slung him between the poles we had lately utilized to carry our jars, whilst Uncle and I were merely hobbled and led on two leathern leashes as the party finally made to depart.

We were all day trekking under a burning sun, and at what was, at times, nearly a trot. We left the course of the river, crossed a kind of beargrass prairie that showed signs of having been burnt over some years previous, and finally arrived late that afternoon, in a state of exhaustion, at Shannoah-town. I'd say we marched ten leagues in all.

This savage metropolis was built upon a bluff some thirty feet above a good-sized, clear-watered, north-flowing river (the Sandusky, I would guess, which empties into Lake Erie, their “Big Sweet Water”) and was no rude collection of hovels, but a very well-laid-out village of bark-covered wigwams atop an even more impressive series of mounds and earthwork embankments. A sort of Main Street led to a conical tumulus some fifty feet high and very impressive. We were conducted down this boulevard amid a mob of the homefolk, who spilled out of every dwelling to greet the returning band and see their spoils—namely, us.

Foremost among our greeters were the Indian dogs, fierce, half-starved mongrels as mean as their masters. These were followed by the children, better fed than the dogs yet crueler. They were upon us in a trice, kicking, spitting, scratching, biting, and pulling at our hair and parts while the dogs snapped at our ankles. I tell you, I was in as much fear for my life at the hands of those little monsters as I had been at the hands of their fathers and uncles. Fortunately, the warriors formed a cordon around us so as to keep the little demons and their dogs at bay.

Beyond this cordon we could hear a rising hubbub. At a signal, the braves parted and we beheld an hundred feet distant what must have been the entire female population of the village, formed into two parallel lines and armed with paddles, some of these fearsomely studded with teeth of the garfish. Bilbo was untrussed, but refused to get up off the ground. A few well-placed kicks prompted him to his feet.

“By Satan's horns,” Bilbo croaked, spying the formation of women, “The gauntlet!”

Our captors formed themselves into a sort of human funnel, directing us toward the ranks of women.

“Cover thy head and privy parts with thy arms thusly,” Uncle said, and I imitated him. The next thing I knew, we were amidst a chaos of shrieks and blows, and emerged many long seconds after dripping gore from countless lacerations and aching in every bone. The women laughed uproariously at our sufferings. I despaired that they would run us back and forth through this gauntlet again and again like so much meat in a sausage grinder, but this was not to be. Apparently, the gauntlet was a mere welcoming committee. Uncle, Neddy, and I were dragged away to a kind of pen built of stout poles and girdled by an interwoven wattle of tough vines as thick as a rifle barrel. It was about ten feet in diameter, and we were free to move about inside.

Bessie—who alone among us had not been driven through the gauntlet—now vanished, upon what service I dreaded to imagine. Bilbo was lashed spreadeagle within a framework of poles, where he was subject to the rude goadings of the Indian children. Two braves were posted at either side of the grim apparatus upon which he was stretched. Their job was to make sure the children did not go too far in their persecutions and spoil the grown-ups' pleasure. Thus, the boys and girls were permitted to twit him, thrash him about the legs with thorny sticks, pull the hairs thereon (for his breeches were torn to shreds), and worry him with smoldering brands. This Bilbo endured, at first, with characteristic oaths and curses before lapsing into a kind of stoical resignation. For all the trouble he had caused us, I felt very sorry for the poor mountebank.