The Blooding of Jack Absolute (34 page)

Até nodded. ‘A kettle will keep us alive, white boy. More than any gun. And he has no use for your book.’ At Até’s nod, Jote
picked up the volume and swiftly ripped the paper from its cover, throwing the pages, still bound in one piece, back onto
the ground. ‘But his wife can sew the skin into a tobacco pouch.’

Jote led them slowly on, waiting patiently at various points for the two who struggled to keep up. Unlike him, they did not
have what looked to Jack like elongated tennis rackets strapped to their feet. He and Até either plunged into drifts up to
their knees or slipped on icy, bare rock amongst scrub brush. At least the deepening cold was banished by the exercise and
Jote had relented about the jerky; once out of sight of his camp and his women’s sharp tongues, he let the two boys chew a
couple of fibrous strands apiece. Yet it was little enough to fuel their struggles and Jack was very grateful when, with a
pale sun peeping through rents in the snow clouds indicating midday, Jote halted in a grove of beech. Jack dropped onto a
pile of their leaves, leaned his back against the base of a trunk and watched apprehensively as Jote and Até conferred. Then,
what he most feared, happened. He’d still hoped that Jote would suddenly declare it the sort of cruel joke the Mohawks were
given to, would clap them on their backs, lead them back to the warmth of the tent and a meal. That hope ended when Jote raised
his arm in a parody of an army salute and loped off
down the trail. The snow swallowed the sound of his footgear slapping its surface and soon all that was in their ears was
the wind soughing through the trees, beginning to bite now they were stationary, and their own deep-hauled breaths.

Jack looked up at Até. ‘Where are we?’

The other shrugged. ‘Here.’

Jack bit back a response. He’d learnt, in their brief acquaintance, that the other’s taciturnity would only be deepened by
anger. And he needed some reassurance now, anything to counter the rumbling in his stomach that was fashioned only partly
of hunger.

‘I mean, are we close to any settlement, any farms? Montréal?’ The thought of surrendering to the French was suddenly very
appealing.

‘I do not know. This is not my country. But I do not think so. If anything was near, Jote would have left us by it.’

‘Instead he’s just abandoned us – in the middle of nowhere?’

‘In the middle of somewhere. In the middle of …’

Até gestured around and the anger surged again within Jack. The young Mohawk had an air of glacial superiority that would
have put a belted earl of England to shame.

‘He’s left us “somewhere” with nothing. Nothing!’

‘No. He’s left us with two more things.’

‘Really? And what is this bounty, pray?’

Até moved to a tree beside the one Jack still squatted against, its far side out of his vision. Até pointed and, grumbling,
Jack rose.

From the lower branches of the beech, skulls dangled. They were deer, small antlers still attached and they were hanging by
what looked like thin string. He reached out to one and, at his touch, it dropped to the ground to join a couple of others
already there. Até pointed to one still hanging. He ran his forefinger down the string and touched the tendon of his neck.
‘They hang by this. It rots, skull falls, shows this animal has not been hunted here for a while, so will be plentiful. Many
on ground here so … we can hunt it.’ Jack was about to ask
pointedly, ‘With what? The kettle?’ but Até now lifted a wooden ladle that rested, open-faced against the trunk. ‘And this
is for water, shows water here is good. If like this,’ he closed the face, ‘water bad. Must boil.’ He pointed into the forest
and, now he listened, Jack could hear the faintest tinkling there of an ice-choked stream.

Até pulled the ladle off and bent to the base of the tree. Gesturing to a piece of bone that looked like a shoulder blade,
he said, ‘Dig here,’ attacking the ground as he spoke. Jack did as he was bid, the two of them scraping the snow away, the
ground beneath not quite frozen solid, allowing them some purchase. They dug until a hole went the depth of Jack’s lower leg
before the note changed and his bone struck wood.

‘Me,’ Até said, and began to scrape around a shape that Jack soon saw to be some sort of container. It was quite large, a
foot across and two deep, made of birch bark and woven with some reed.

‘Buried treasure?’ he whispered.

‘Abenaki hunting post, left for their tribe if they are away from camp and in need. So, are we not their slaves? And are we
not in need?’ Jack saw the ghost of a grin cross the Indian’s features before he set to prising off the lid.

The contents were meagre. No weapons, no snares, no real food save for a smaller container of bitter dried berries that they
devoured swiftly between them. There were two small furs, threadbare but a little warming when shoved inside a deer-skin jacket
that was doing little against the ever-deepening cold; and a long coil of rope, which Até seemed to consider the best discovery
of all.

Jack sat back, shivering. The little exercise, the little hope, both passed now. He looked across at Até, whose face betrayed
a similar disappointment.

‘You said two things.’

‘Yes.’ Até’s face had brightened again. ‘Come.’ He led Jack over to the trail up which Jote had disappeared. ‘Look.’

Jack did. There were the marks of Jote’s unusual footwear
there, beside the smaller imprints of Até’s moccasins. He scanned back and forth. ‘I can’t see anything.’

Até pointed, his voice impatient. ‘There!’

Jack followed the finger. There
was
something else, now he looked hard, another series of marks beside the footprints. They led away, into the trees. He looked
up. ‘Deer?’

Até snorted. ‘You went to school, white boy? They never teach you difference of animals?’

‘Only in Latin,’ Jack muttered, bent again. Now he looked he could see that the prints were not cloven, as he had known deer
tracks to be in Cornwall. These were not made by hoof then but by some big, five-toed paw. A claw’s mark headed each one.
But the cold was numbing brain as well as body, the name danced just out of reach. What other creatures lived in this strange
forest?

‘I give up,’ he said, straightening. ‘Why don’t you tell me, brown boy.’

Another snort. ‘This is made by
Ne-e-ar-gu-ye.
In your tongue it is … is …’

As Até searched his mind, Jack remembered the words. ‘
Ursus ursidae!
’
he said, but for the life of him, he still could not think of the name in English. He knew no Iroquois and he was sure Até’s
Latin was just as poor. Then both of them suddenly remembered the word in English.

They said it together, ‘Bear!’

If one should allow a sleeping dog to lie, Jack thought, how much more so a bear?

His shivering, which was ceaseless due to the cold anyway, only increased at this thought. But Até’s logic had been incontrovertible.

‘I track bear to hole, yes? I fix way to kill him, yes? What you do? Nothing!’ he’d said, then added, a rare smile coming,
‘And since you say I
cheat
in our race, now you show how fast you are.’

He didn’t feel fast this late afternoon. A night freezing on
pine boughs under a tree had yielded little rest and the morning spent trying to dig deadfalls (and then having to abandon
all of them three foot down due to the granite seams), had left him with a headache worse than most sustained after a long
night’s carouse at Covent Garden and legs as wobbly as if he’d spent the whole afternoon notching a score on Tothill Fields.
All fuelled by foul
pemmican,
fingerfuls of it scraped from the ball and deposited on the tongue, swallowing the rank grease, struggling to prevent it
coming straight back up. Despite its loathsomeness, they had somehow managed to finish the whole ball between them. It was
the last of their food. Thus Até’s rejection of Jack’s demand that they build themselves some sort of shelter for the night
and tackle the beast on the morrow.

‘We may be too weak then. You may not be able to run fast enough. And if the bear catches you, then eats you, he will leave
no scraps for me.’

Jack thought he was probably not joking. Hadn’t Bomoseen told him that Mohawk actually meant ‘flesh-eaters’. And he wasn’t
referring to mutton!

Jack’s shivering had become almost an ague. What was the blasted savage doing? He peered again over the lip of rock that was
the entrance of the cave. He still could see and hear nothing down there but the smell was as rancid as the grease he’d lately
consumed. The bear was there.

A whistle came and he turned to see Até beckoning him. Slipping off the rock, he ran down to him and the Native took his arm
and pulled him into the canopy.

‘You must take him only this way, pft! Straight! You understand? Grandfather
Ne-e-ar-gu-ye
will be very angry he has woken up so soon after he lie down for the winter. But because he is sleepy he will not think so
good and perhaps he will not run so fast and so perhaps will not catch you.’

‘Perhaps?’

Até ignored him, still dragging him down the faint trail till he jerked him to a halt about sixty paces from the bear’s cave.
Pulling Jack with him to the ground, he pointed forward. ‘You see?’

At first, Jack could detect nothing unusual, just another piece of foliage across the path. But looking closer he realized
that the leaf-covered thing he took for a creeper or tendril was, in fact, part of the rope Até had pulled from the Abenaki
container. It ran about knee-height off the ground, was wrapped around a birch trunk and tied to a stake embedded about four
foot further on. Beside the stake a small birch sapling was pulled back to the forest floor, its end still rooted near the
path, its tip straining under the rope. Something stood proud from that end and, stepping closer, Jack could see that another
sharpened stake had been thrust through the sapling near its head, and bound tight in with further rope.

‘But where—’

Até raised a finger to his lips, then parted the bush into which the rope disappeared, and pointed to a small hooped stake
driven into the ground like a question mark. The end of the rope was held by another stick wedged against both curves of the
hook.

‘See?’ Até grinned. ‘Grandfather chases you. You jump rope, fall. He stops, hits rope, knocks the small stick, and …
wang
!’ He made a flowing gesture of the sharpened stake flying up, showing it embedding in his own head. ‘Dead bear!’

‘This …’ Jack was almost too astounded to speak,‘…
this
is your plan?’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘What’s … ?’ Jack could think of a thousand things, not least the idea of him ‘falling’ down and the bear obligingly stopping
before advancing slowly onto the rope. But he decided to show Até an even more obvious flaw. So he just leapt up in the air
and landed hard on the ground. The stick fell from the hook, the rope slackened and the released sapling surged up and juddered
to a halt a foot from Até’s face.

‘Not now! With bear!’ Até yelled, immediately going to the sapling to reset it, tugging the rope across it, keeping it taut
as
he dragged it around the birch and back to the hook. Jack stopped him before he replaced it.

‘I’ve just shown you! It won’t work.’

‘It will. My people use this snare all the time.’

‘Oh, I’m quite sure. And have you? How many times?’

‘Plenty.’

‘You …’ Jack pushed down his rising temper. ‘My running will set it off. You have to make this,’ he pointed to the hook, the
trigger of the mechanism, ‘harder.’

‘It work well.’

‘If you think it works so well, then you run it.’

Até shrugged. ‘I fix. You run.’

Suddenly, all those other reasons, not least the bear’s close pursuit of him, came flooding into Jack’s mind. He shook his
head. ‘I can’t,’ he said softly.

Até didn’t even look up from the rope as he whispered, ‘Then we die here, white boy. Die pretty damn quick. You feel,’ he
jerked his head toward the sky, ‘much more snow coming, tomorrow. Maybe next day. This is last chance for food before it comes.’

Jack shivered violently. Not just from the returning cold. From the knowledge that Até was right. If they didn’t kill the
bear, the winter would indeed kill them pretty damn quick.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said, through his rattling teeth. ‘Damn you for a brown-faced lunatic, but I’ll do it.’ He stood, stamped
his feet and stared back to the cave entrance. ‘How exactly does one wake up a bear?’

With fire. The musket flint they’d been given was for that purpose. Até struck sparks off it with a tomahawk onto some cattail
down wrapped in a cone of birch bark. Once this torch flared it was thrust onto more bark, some twigs; soon a fair fire crackled
away. Jack was reluctant to leave the first warmth he’d felt in an age, but Até was insistent.

‘Here,’ he said, handing Jack the kettle, and several branches of wood. Then he used the ladle to scoop embers into the
metal bowl. ‘You go now. These …’ he gestured to the sticks, ‘will burn. You drop into hole then run. But make sure bear is
awake first.’

Jack looked at Até, looked at the kettle in his one hand, the branches in the other. Then, shaking his head, he moved up the
trail to the cave.

It was one of several on that rocky hillside. Indeed the whole area was pitted with them, as if some giant had jabbed his
fingers into the earth then dragged them away in lines. Some of these trenches had already half-filled with snow, making walking
treacherous. Others were deeper, led to cliff faces like the one just beyond the cave, that tumbled into an ice-clogged rivulet
below. Jack peered over the precipice, conscious of the slickness of stone beneath him, then looked in a circle all around.
There was only one way for the bear to follow him – down the path on which Até stood now, waving him on. Beyond the beckoning
Native, the land rose again in folds and troughs, more caves and cliffs and snags for fleeing feet.

Cursing, he turned to his task. Dipping the branch end into the embers he blew hard, watching it catch, leaves crisping into
brief, yellow flame. Lobbing it over the edge of the hole, he set the kettle down and ran back a half dozen paces.