Follow the River (10 page)

The chieftain smiled. “Look this,” he said. “Shawnee mother.” He assumed a comical expression, an imitation of dreamy blissfulness, and stepped away in what apparently was the waddling of a pregnant woman. Then he returned in the same walk, mimed an expression of surprise, squatted before her, both feet flat on the ground, and began grimacing and making straining sounds in his throat. For a moment Mary was incredulous; this grave warrior seemed to be trying to move his bowels right before her eyes. Three or four of the warriors had come near and paused to watch, amused. Then the chieftain convulsed suddenly with a loud sigh, and, still squatting, looked down and made the scooping motion again, between his thighs, held an imaginary something to his chest, stood up with a smile and tilted head, and pretended to run forward. He recrossed his arms then and stood beaming with amusement while his warriors chuckled nearby.

Mary found herself flushing, and she understood what he had demonstrated: an Indian squaw, pushing and squatting on the trail to give birth without even lying down, then scooping up her baby and running to catch up with the tribe. “Surely not,” she exclaimed. But then she smiled with amusement at his antics, his strange, suddenly very human demeanor; it was as if something else had come off with the war paint. “Squatting!” she exclaimed, laughing. “Well, well! Mebbe I sh’ll just have t’ try it that way next time …”

Next time
, she thought, suddenly almost crushed by a sense
of sadness and longing. As if it had a memory of its own, the skin of her body felt the broad, wooly warmth of her husband’s powerful torso.
William
, she cried silently inside.
Ever again?

Bettie was sullen that night. She would not look at Mary while the new potion of salve was being applied to her arm. She would not talk.

“Bet, darlin’,” Mary said at last, “y’re distressin’ me, girl. We can’t afford to shut each other out; we’ve nowt but each other!”

Bettie turned accusing eyes on her. “Y’ laughed with ’em.” Her voice was flat with hostility. “With those murtherers.”

Mary’s mouth dropped open. First she was indignant. Then her soul flooded toward Bettie and she remembered the awful moment when they had brained Bettie’s infant against the cabin logs. “Oh, Bet!” She put her arms around her sister-in-law and hugged her head against her bosom. “I’m only tryin’ to keep us alive!”

Yet, true as that was, it suddenly sounded feeble even to her own ears.

It was so: she
had
laughed with the killers of her own family.

She had somehow forgotten—in the moment when that chieftain was being so very human—that these were the same people who had made a massacre on her own friends and family.

The north-flowing creek had returned them to the river, to Mary’s great relief, and there were twelve knots in her yarn belt when they came in the afternoon to a shoal where the river was wide and ran shallow over a bed of rounded stones and gravel, and here they recrossed to the northeast bank.

After a tedious ride along this shore, involving the fording of two creeks, they came to a stretch of river bank where a strange odor pervaded the air. It was not the stink of dead flesh, exactly, but faintly like bad eggs. The Indians were obviously coming into a familiar place; they were talking much and in good humor.

At last they drew up near a small depression, where a murky spring bubbled out of the ground. The Indians held the horses’ bridles tightly, and talked in excited tones while one of the braves knelt and struck flint and steel to make fire in a wad of punk. Blowing on it to bring up the flame, he then darted to the edge of the spring and threw it in, then darted back. What happened then was like a Biblical miracle: a huge tongue of flame leaped thirty feet into the air with a breathtaking
whoomp!
Horses lunged against their bridles and the women and children screamed and hung on to keep from being thrown to the ground, at the same time trying to shield their faces against the heat from the pillar of fire.

The Indians made big sport of it. The white people’s terror gave them a moment of supreme amusement. They watched this phenomenon cheerfully. For a few minutes they made gestures hinting that they might throw the boys into the whipping yellow-orange tower of flame. Then, when the captives finally were in a good state of terror, the chieftain uttered a few solemn words and the party resumed its progress down the river bank. The Indians relished their joke for hours afterward.

The next day there was another noticeable agitation among the Indians. They talked rapidly among themselves, in low voices. They seldom stopped to rest, and seemed intent on getting to some particular place. All this had its effect on the imaginations of the hostages. The last few days, despite the rigors of getting through the wild landscape, there had been an almost reassuring monotony. The scare at the burning spring had shown the captives how comforting that monotony had been. There was a certain feeling of security in the predictability of the hours, in not having to dread new events. Now the prisoners were affected by the intensity of their captors’ behavior, particularly their increased attention to firearms. Alarming possibilities grew in Mary’s fancy. Were they coming into the territory of hostile tribes? She imagined her family once again caught up in a storm of war cries and gunfire and scalping. Or were the Shawnees simply getting near their own homeland and preparing for a triumphal return?
That prospect was equally dreadful. While on the trail, the captives had enjoyed a sort of a state of grace, but at the journey’s end, she knew, their fates would have to be decided. They might be burned at the stake, they might be publicly tortured, they might be butchered and cannibalized, they might be torn from each other and given into slavery.

While she, and no doubt Bettie and Henry, grew grim and terrified with such imaginings, the chieftain brought the column to a halt in a narrow ravine near the river’s edge. He had the horses secured and made the captives dismount to sit and be quiet under guard. Then he supervised the checking of weapons and charging of flashpans, and led a dozen of his braves on stealthy feet out of the ravine and on up the river bank. They were obviously on their way to make an attack of some sort. Mary waited, almost breathless, in the sunflecked covert with her infant girl at her breast. Now and then she would glance around at Bettie and Henry, and their drawn faces and vulnerable eyes would only feed her apprehension. They were all waiting for screams and gunshots.

Half an hour passed in this loaded silence.

Then they heard the first gunshot, a solid
thud
, and its echoes came reverberating up the valley. There were four or five more shots, almost all at once, and their aftershocks came rolling between the wooded slopes. Mary’s heart raced; her mouth was dry.

Then one lone voice called from up there, an eerie, exuberant wail. And at once the warriors who had been left behind to tend the pack train broke into cheerful chatter and began moving. They prodded the prisoners to stand up and walk, and led the horses out of the ravine to follow the route of the others.

The firing had been brief. But there had been no more shooting than that at the massacre of Draper’s Meadows, Mary recalled, and it had been enough to devastate many lives. She was almost ill with the dread of what she might see.

About a half mile up the river they came in sight of the main body of warriors, who were milling around on a strangely white stretch of beach along the river’s edge. Some of them were kneeling, others were standing or walking about. Forms
were lying on the beach. There was no sign of buildings. As they rode closer, Mary saw that the kneeling warriors were bent not over human bodies, but over the carcasses of several large animals that lay dark against the dazzling white of the shore.

Mary had seen elk before, in the hills around Draper’s Meadows, and recognized one of the carcasses as that of a great bull elk. He lay on his side, head twisted, his enormous fork of antlers looking like some of the dead, bleached, barkless trees that stood around the edge of the white beach. The elk’s tawny flank was still heaving.

A few yards away lay a white-tail doe, slim and slight and still, its blood staining the sand crimson. Beyond it was a huge dark-brown bulk of a beast unlike anything Mary had ever seen. It had a glistening mantle of darker hair over its shoulders and its blunt, short-horned head.

The horses, growing nervous near these carcasses, were led to the far edge of the beach and unloaded. The captives were herded together, and Henry Lenard explained to them that this had been a highly successful hunting foray instead of an attack.

“It’s a salt spring,” he said. “That sand’s half salt, it is. Look at all the tracks here’bouts. Game comes here to lick. All kinds. That yonder, lookin’ like a mangy bull: I do b’lieve that’s what they call a buffalo. Colonel Patton tol’ me he saw one once that had strayed a way up the New.” He stood staring at it. One of the braves came near, noticed their curiosity and pointed to the beast.
“P-thu-thoi,”
he said.
“P-thu-thoi.”

There was movement in the brush behind them. Two warriors emerged, each pulling at one hind leg of a small buck deer. They dragged the dead animal to the center of the beach clearing, leaving a narrow track of blood, which was dribbling from its nostrils. Tommy and Georgie pressed close to Mary, but watched with wordless fascination as the skinning and butchering began. She saw Bettie watching, pale, as knives ripped along through tough hide to lay bare white tendon and red meat, and by the look of her eyes knew she was thinking back to the massacre twelve days ago at Draper’s Meadows.

As was Mary herself.

* * *

The baby girl sucked and pulled at the nipple as the sun came up. Little shocks of hurt and pleasure spread like ripples from Mary’s breast through the rest of her body; the pleasures and pains became longings and regrets, became a total bittersweet emotion.

A large brown spider with black-banded legs had built a perfect net of web between two branches a few inches above Mary’s head sometime during the night. Now the spider sat in the center of the web, its legs touching the radiating strands, waiting for vibrations that would signal the entrapment of some small insect in the far filaments.

The rising sun illuminated the web. Dew had covered everything during the night, and the spider’s web looked like a piece of lace ornamented with a thousand tiny diamonds. Mary had seen a diamond once, in Philadelphia when she was a little girl, and had never forgotten that it had looked like a shattered rainbow. Now each dewdrop in the web was like a tiny trapped rainbow.

As Mary watched in her nursing trance, a small fly blundered into the margin of the web. The brown spider left its station in the eye of the web and raced out to the struggling insect, examined it, then with swift and industrious motions of its forefeet began rolling it in a shroud of filament until it was entirely immobilized. Then the spider went back to the center of the web and resumed its vigil. Mary shuddered.

She tied the fifteenth knot in her belt this morning. They had worked hard here at the salt spring. There was always the smell of woodsmoke in her hair and clothing. Fires burned day and night. The Indians had cut the lean flesh of the game animals into strips and hung them on frameworks of green saplings to smoke them into jerky. And they had put the captives to work, over another bank of fires, boiling down the waters of the salt spring in the stolen kettles to make salt. Thus far, working from dawn until dark, they had produced almost a peck of the white treasure.

Jerky and salt were being wrapped and packed with care, apparently for an imminent resumption of the trek toward the Indians’ homeland, where it would be a part of the winter’s food hoard. The pack train, which already had been heavily
burdened with loot on the trip down the river, obviously would be loaded to its capacity from here on, and Mary could foresee that she and her fellow prisoners might have to walk the rest of the way.

However far that might be, she thought.

The long halt at the salt spring had been good for Mary and Bettie and the children, despite the fatiguing work. Being off the horse had given Mary’s tortured abdomen and loins a reprieve, and she was no longer bleeding or feeling torn inside. The flesh of Bettie’s arm was healing well, because she had been able to do her work at the salt kettles with her left hand and protect the splinted one. Bettie had said nothing more about Mary’s accord with the savages. But Mary remembered her accusations and was careful not to displease her in that way again. So now she had to conduct herself with especial care, to keep from annoying not only the Indians but Bettie as well.

Tommy and Georgie had been almost no trouble on the trail, and were even less here. They seemed to find the hunting and butchering activities of the Indians supremely interesting, and in the last two days had drifted from their mother’s side to spend more and more time helping the warriors with the game meat and hides. Tommy, whose chief entertainment at the settlement had been listening to his father’s and grandmother’s stories about distances and long-ago adventures, seemed now to be caught up in the doings of the moment. He’s havin’ adventure enough of his own now, Mary thought. As for Georgie, his activities always had been simply whatever Tommy was doing, and seemed to be so even now. Often during the evenings at the salt spring, Mary yearned to gather them close to her and tell them stories, and otherwise to keep them from drifting from her influence into that of the Indians, but it was not possible. She had no leisure. Besides, the boys found the boiling of brine much less interesting to watch than the preparation of game and the maintenance of weapons.

In a way, that was just as well, as the infant girl needed most of the energy Mary had left from the salt-making. Sometimes
she would detain the boys and make them watch over the baby while she worked, but they chafed under this.

At the day’s end, the warriors had been teaching Tommy and Georgie one of their own childhood games. From a strip of split green hickory and rawhide thongs they had made a perfectly round hoop, which could be rolled along the ground as a moving target for the throwing of small crude spears made of cane. The Indians encouraged them to play this by the hour, sometimes stopping work to watch and cheer their best throws. At home in the settlement, the boys had been assigned certain chores as early as they had been able to understand and do them. But Mary soon came to understand here at the salt camp that the Shawnees considered play a more appropriate pastime for boys than work.