Arundel (58 page)

When there was no more movement in the depression between the ridges Paul Higgins and I went down into it and picked up the two men who lay there. We built a fire and left them beside it, then went back along the army’s trail to see how it happened that Hobomok and the other Abenakis had not come up with us.

On high ground near the river a fire was burning, and by it sat Jacataqua, roasting the last of our bear and raccoon meat. Beside her crouched her yellow-faced black dog, gnawing voluptuously at a bone; and lying by the fire were seven men, soldiers, seemingly without life.

“Don’t eat too much of that,” I said to her as we came up.

“Do you think I’m a pig?” she asked, without bothering to look at me.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Steven,” she said, waving a greeting to Paul Higgins, who stared at her gloomily, “everything happened: every damned bad thing in the world.”

At this Paul and I touched wood. I’m not superstitious, nor do I put any faith whatever in that foolish custom. If there were more bad things on the road for us, it was not reasonable to suppose that the touching of a piece of wood could save us from them; yet it seemed to me that nothing capable of averting evil fortune should be overlooked.

“Where are the others?” I asked.

“Gone after other sick men. Two fell in a bog about a mile back. One man sat down at the edge of the lake and couldn’t get up. I think the two in the bog are dead.”

“What about these men?” I asked, looking at the seven by the fire.

“Crossing the river,” Jacataqua said. “That was bad! Some, to keep their clothes from being made wetter, took them off when they crossed. When they fell down, they found the water so cold they couldn’t get up.”

She added that four dead men had been left in the stream. “We can’t waste strength on dead men,” she said.

There was something lonely and bitter about her. It put me in mind to ask why Burr had left her and gone with Morgan’s men.

She shrugged her shoulders. “He may be a great gentleman among white men, Steven, but he’s strange about food.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what we do to an Abenaki who has food and won’t share it with a man who has none.”

Paul and I nodded.

“Yes,” said Jacataqua, “that’s the first thing we’re taught, so I’m troubled about Aaron. He never shares his food unless he must.”

Paul grunted. “Many good white men are like that. White men have strange savage customs.” He spoke, as he so often did, as though his father and mother had been Abenakis instead of white colonists from Devonshire in England.

“I think,” Jacataqua said, “that if Aaron had to choose between me and five pints of flour, he might take the flour.”

“I know nothing about it,” I said, “save that men are peculiar. I cannot understand how a woman can endure to take up with one of them for more than a week at a time. Neither do I see how such talk as this will feed these men when they wake. Let’s go along the ridge and see if there’s anything to kill.”

“I’ll go,” Jacataqua said. “Tarso can help us hunt.”

“Tarso?”

“Anatarso,” she explained. “Humming-bird.”

“Anatarso!” Paul groaned, as if to say he preferred to starve, rather than hunt with a dog named Humming-bird.

None the less, Humming-bird nosed a rabbit out of a thicket, showed us a covey of spruce partridges in a tree, and gave tongue among the rocks until we climbed up and found two porcupines. I know of things that I had liefer eat than porcupines; but their livers are delicious, and the rest of them might be worse. After we had shoved a stick through them lengthwise and burned off their quills in a fierce flame, they were juicier than beaver, and certainly better than seal.

When Hobomok and the others returned they brought three men with them, all three unconscious from exhaustion.

On the following morning, the last day of October, we left behind us at Dead Man’s Camp ten live men, with two of Paul’s braves to send them, when rested, on their way to Lake Megantic.

It was Paul who named it Dead Man’s Camp, since those for whom it was made would have been dead except for the grace of God and Paul’s Abenakis.

XXVI

W
E CAME
out of the forest into a clear space on the high easterly shore of Lake Megantic. Natanis was there, with one of Paul’s messengers from the lower Chaudière. They were warming themselves in the sun and looking back across the head of the lake at the great barrier of the Height of Land, shining and sparkling in the early sunlight.

We could see the marshes at the mouth of Seven Mile Stream protruding into the blue lake, seemingly as fair and dry as fertile meadowland; and up above the mouth of the stream, on the lower slopes of the Height, like lace on a woman’s breast, shone the white patch of the Beautiful Meadow. Above this, in turn, rose the spurs of those terrible mountains. They were harmless-looking now, against the pale blue of the autumn sky; but I could not forget the bloody footprints in the snow and the rigid body of James Dunn on the mound in the swamp. To me the mountains seemed hideous and menacing, like the bared teeth of some jealous monster, snarling at those who dared invade this Northern country.

“That’s over,” Natanis said, as if in answer to my thoughts. “I think the Great Spirit must have watched over your brothers. They escaped from the swamps and went down the Chaudière.”

“All of them?”

“All except the stragglers and the sick. Arnold went first, with a few men; then Morgan with his bateaux. Your friends were led out of the swamps by Goodrich and Dearborn yesterday. Behind them, this morning, went those we brought out last night. There will be no further losing of the way. The Chaudière will carry them straight to the St. Lawrence. There can be more trouble, though, and some is already here!”

One of Paul Higgins’s messengers ran to us, drew a ball of knotted twine from his wallet and began to read it to us, unrolling it from his left hand into his right, fingering the knots and seeming to get a meaning from each one.

“The white chief,” the messenger said, “was wrecked at Talons du Diable, three leagues down the river. His boats were broken in pieces. At Great Falls our people carried what was left of his boats for him.

“Later the tall loud-voiced captain whose men carry rifles came down with seven bateaux. All seven were smashed in pieces. One man was drowned. Many would have been drowned if our people had not saved them. These men have no food. We are hunting game for them, but game is scarce.

“A captain with a black dog is sick. We think he will die if he cannot have food.

“One company had all its food in one bateau. The bateau was wrecked before the company could come up with it. All the food was destroyed. The company is hungry.”

The messenger rolled up his string and replaced it in his wallet.

“Is there enough food in Sartigan for all these men?” Paul Higgins asked.

“Plenty.”

“How far is Sartigan?” I asked.

“From here, seventy miles. Five miles beyond where the Rivière du Loup flows into the Chaudière, and then across the Rivière la Famine. From the beginning of the Chaudière sixty-five miles.”

“Is there no food nearer?”

“Sartigan is the first house,” Natanis said.

If I understood the messenger rightly, it was Goodrich’s company whose food had been destroyed. They must have gone foodless for two days. I thought to myself that if Phoebe must march without food for another sixty-five miles she’d be no more in my hand than the carcass of a night heron, all feathers and boniness.

I could feel, in the flesh of my palms, the ridges of her ribs as I had felt them in the dark swamp, and her thin little body fitting loosely into her brass-studded belt; and there was something terrible in the thought that she might become so wasted she could never be smooth and golden again, to slip over the stern of a sloop like a golden otter sliding up a river bank.

“Someone,” I said, “must go for Cap Huff and Natawammet, and not stop to catch fish or hunt wildflowers.”

“I’ll go for them,” Natanis said. “You can follow your friends down the Chaudière.”

I hitched my pack and musket into place and hurried north along the Megantic shore with Hobomok, Jacataqua, and the dog Anatarso.

Of all the rivers I know, it
seems
to me the Chaudière is best named. Dead River is painfully alive for most of its length; the Sandy River hasn’t enough sand, in some parts, to polish a shilling; and although Cobosseecontee means “where the sturgeon is found,” there are no sturgeons in the Cobosseecontee River except at its mouth in the spring of the year. But the word “chaudière” means “caldron” in the French tongue; and the river Chaudière is a boiling, hissing caldron of water for its entire length, its bed made up of jagged rocks and ledges, with here and there a sudden roaring cataract set among rock-walled turns so sharp that the water, whirling in them, seems to smoke.

In other rapid rivers there may be white patches of quick water, followed by stretches of smooth; so that a canoe, driven by skillful paddlers, reaches for one goal of dark water after another, giving the paddlers time to think, and so come through safely. In the Chaudière the water runs white for miles, all curling waves and foam from bank to bank, with spines of rock rising above the smother like the backs of salmon in the quick water of a tide river in early spring, as they go up to lay their eggs and die.

Thus paddlers shoot for miles through this furious water, and in the end become numb to the whiteness and the danger. Their alertness relaxes, their canoe is slashed to the vitals by the sawlike teeth of a ledge or toppled headlong down an avalanche of foam, and it’s a miracle if they, as well as all their belongings, aren’t boiled to a pulp by the Chaudière.

Nor does the foul nature of this stream cease with its rocky bed and its swiftness. There are high bluffs on each side of the river channel. Sometimes the river runs far from the bluffs; but again it turns abruptly against them, raging and snarling, so there is scarce an inch of shore on which to find a foothold. Thus there are times when one who follows the banks of the Chaudière on foot is pushing and twisting his way through the cedar and hemlock swamps of the lowlands, wading through streams and over piles of dead trees, spewed out by floods in years gone by; and there are other times when he is clambering up a precipitous bank, catching at roots or briars to keep himself from slipping, or plunging down the face of a precipice into a tangle of underbrush at the base.

I have traveled this trail with a full belly and warm clothes, and found it a tax on my patience. When a hungry man, weak and ill clad, has passed over it, no threats of hell’s tribulations can frighten him thereafter.