Arundel (43 page)

When we dumped our loads on the shores of the first pond we saw two Virginians poling toward us in what looked like an empty bateau. When it reached us three men got up off the bottom and climbed out, emaciated men with thick beards, their hunting shirts stained and torn; their actions slow and weak.

Among them I recognized Lieutenant Steele, who had left us two weeks before to scout across the Height of Land and to the headwaters of the Chaudière.

When he left us he was tall and slender, walking with a jaunty swing to his shoulders, smiling constantly, his cap cocked a little on the side of his head. He had been well-groomed, always; but now I hardly knew him. His cap was still over one ear; his smile was lopsided; but he stooped in his walk; and on irregular ground he tripped easily. His eyes looked rubbed with soot.

He would have started back over the long trail between the Kennebec and the first pond; but when I told him Arnold was coming in during the afternoon he threw himself down with a groan of relief. We had a greater distance to go, he told me, than any of us had anticipated—eighty miles on Dead River before we could cross the Height of Land and reach the Chaudière.

I asked him whether it was bad crossing the Height of Land. It would be a matter of food, he said. If we had enough food we could get across. Otherwise it might be bad. His own food, he said, had run out, and game was scarce: scarcer than he had ever seen it. His party had shot two moose, but the meat was without fat, like all moose meat: it filled their bellies but gave no nourishment. They had near starved, all of them, as well as breaking both their canoes.

Striving to speak carelessly, I asked him the question that seemed to me most important: Had he seen Natanis?

Steele said they had surrounded his cabin to kill him, but he was gone, though the cabin had recently been occupied.

“He left a birch-bark map for some of his Indian friends,” Steele said. “We took it and used it.”

A load lifted itself from my heart. That meant Natanis had received my messages and done what I asked.

“Good!” I said. “Good!”

“Do you know this Natanis?” Steele asked.

“I haven’t seen him in years.”

“What sort of Indian is he?”

“The best there is. An Abenaki and a good friend.”

“We’d have been a week getting through the Chain of Ponds without his map,” Steele said. “Just as well we didn’t find him. What made Arnold so hot against him?”

“I wish I knew! He’d get us plenty of food if Arnold would use him.”

“It was funny about those moose,” Steele said reflectively. “They trotted right out onto us, as if they’d been driven.”

“Did you see any other Indians?”

“Nary hide nor hair. That country is empty as a Tory’s heart, and damned near as cold.”

He fell asleep. I started back across the carry at a trot, so our canoe might be brought up with no loss of time. I wished to be free to seek Natanis—to ask his help before anything went wrong. I passed Phoebe. On her shoulder were three muskets. Looped over them was not only her blanket, but strings of salt pork that dangled to her heels. Asa Hutchins, walking behind her, bent almost double under his load, peered up at me and croaked: “What’s the matter? Forget your shoe buckles?”

We met the colonel going in, making good time with no luggage on his back, and having something to say to every bateau crew and loaded man he passed. “That’s the way!” he’d say. “Stick to it, boys! We’ll kick up a dust they won’t forget! Come on, boys! They can’t beat us, boys!”

You could see the bateau crews strike out springier after they’d heard him. He was a fighter if ever there was one, and the men knew it.

We got our canoe and the rest of the baggage as far as the first pond by dusk, saying to each other we had done our share of work and must take it easy for a while; but we were new at it, or we’d never have invited misfortune by such talk. In time we came to know there was no weariness so extreme and no labor so great but what we could endure worse when it came.

When, in the morning, we crossed the first pond and carried over half a mile of ledges, we came to an evil pond; a miserable, low-lying water of a vile yellow color, surrounded by bogs and dead trees. There were no fish in it, and it smelled of decay and corruption. Most of us, dry from the heat of carrying, drank the yellow water, which affected some of us in one way and some in another, but making all of us sick.

We might have camped here to boil water and recover from our weakness; but no man, so long as he could move, seemed willing to stop—mindful, no doubt, of what had befallen poor Ervin from the first division. He was swollen with rheumatism and couldn’t move, even to roll himself over in bed; so he was left in a brush hut at the second pond, with four men to tend him and turn him over when the pain became too great to bear, and he was being eaten alive by vermin to boot. After seeing him none of us was wishful of letting himself be sick.

We crossed this dirty yellow pond and pushed on toward the third pond, the largest one, over a swamp a mile and a half long. Its surface was a tangle of roots that snared and tripped us whenever we moved faster than a crawl. While the rear bearers of a bateau fumbled with their feet for a safe footing, the front bearers would find one and lurch forward, so the two rear bearers would have to set their feet wherever chance dictated. Thus, either the front or the rear bearers were constantly tripping and falling, and the bateau sinking down and rising up. As we looked back at the line of bateaux crawling along this trail on the shoulders of their bearers it had the look of an ugly brown dragon painfully undulating between the high forest walls through which the axemen had hewn our path.

There was clean water in the third pond, and fish, too—dark, deep-bodied, square-tailed trouts. From it we could see the snow-capped top of Dead River Mountain to the westward, and knew that with one more effort we would reach Dead River. On it, we told ourselves, we could travel easily to the Height of Land; so it seemed to all of us that we were almost at an end of our march to Quebec.

I have often marveled at our youthful ignorance on this journey; and I have snorted, as men will when they grow older, staring up at the ceiling in the gray of dawn, to think I could have been so callow as to think the things I thought. As we paddled over this third pond I felt it was high time to consider how I should comport myself with Mary when I popped into her house in Quebec: whether I should say nothing, but take her in my arms and kiss her; or whether I should write out a long speech, elegant beyond belief, such as my mother had read to me out of a book, and recite it to her.

It turned out there was no immediate need of preparing for this ordeal. The length of the carry from the third pond to the little brook that fell into Dead River was three miles. Three miles, we thought, with the memories of our other carries behind us, was nothing but three miles. We double-loaded our canoe, piling our stores at the ends so it might not break in the middle, and set off among the bateaumen of Greene’s division. For a mile we clambered upward on the ragged withers of a mountain, so the skin on our shoulders was rubbed backward cruelly. Then for another mile we traveled easily down the opposite slope, hailing each other jocosely at the ease with which we progressed, even though our legs ached as if they might snap under us, and the skin of our faces burned from our exertions until they felt fit to fry fish. We disregarded, even, the forward chafing of our burdens, which almost flayed our backs; for ahead of us we saw a long green meadow, level and beautiful, dotted here and there with thickets and edged with spruces and cedars.

When we jubilantly set out across the meadow, it softened beneath us. The surface became a green moss, spread smoothly over a thick black soup into which our legs sank to the knee at every step.

Under the mud were jagged stumps of trees, and barbs of decayed branches—the graveyard of a forest dead from floods and fallen before mountain storms, as all ancient forests fall in these Northern woods.

The stumps and barbs tore at our water-soaked shoes and at the skin beneath. There was no way to avoid them; so we adopted the plan of letting ourselves slip down at each step, nearly to a sitting position, until our feet reached a foundation; then lifting the canoe forward eight inches or even a foot, dragging our feet from the ooze and taking another step.

Why the bateaumen were diverted by their flounderings, I cannot say; but they howled profanely at their plight, swearing loudly that somebody had hold of their feet, or that they had stepped on a dead cat, or that the mud was full of broken chairs and old bottles. They wrenched themselves along, cackling and guffawing; and from the churned muck in which they wallowed there arose a stench that might have been the parent of every noisome odor in the world.

In the course of time we came to narrow Bog Brook, its waters brown and smelling of deadness; but regardless of its odor we soused ourselves in it, clothes, head, hair and all, until the sweat and the slime and the stench were partly gone. Those whose luggage was entirely carried set off down Bog Brook; and we could hear them, across the meadow that separates the brook from Dead River, bawling at each other as they went poling up against the river’s sluggish current. As for those others who had brought only a part of their belongings, they stumbled off across the dreadful meadow again, sinking through the level green moss into the foul mud, pitching forward or sideways as their feet struck the snags and barbs beneath.

When we had washed ourselves, we stored our baggage and set off down Bog Brook.

I knew, when we turned into Dead River, that there was little use in following the bateaux upstream. Natanis, I was sure, would do one of two things: either send a messenger to me at night when he had located me; or watch for me himself at the point where I must enter Dead River.

We floated silently on the slow brown current, looking about for signs.

There were three crows on a tall tree, a little downstream from us, and as we drifted the three of them sprang into the air, cawing, and flew toward a twisted bull pine on the far side of the river. They circled around it, raising an outcry that came faintly to us.

Hobomok grinned and drove the canoe downstream. “Natanis is talking to the crows,” he said.

We went ashore abreast of the old bull pine; and in the thicket beneath it we found Natanis and Natawammet, glad to see us, as were we to see them. It had been years since I had laid eyes on Natanis, yet he had changed little from the boy we had rescued from the deer, save that his face was thinner and harder, and the muscles under his skin more corded. He seemed to find more of a change in me, which was nothing surprising; for my beard was ragged and my eyes hot and sunken from the sickness at Middle Carry Pond; also my hunting shirt and breeches were ripped, and the soles had parted from my shoes, so my feet stuck through in places.

“We have waited here for my brother,” Natanis said, hunting in his quiver for his pipe, “since the men with rifles first came into the river. I would never have known him if my brother Hobomok, who I hear is a great
m’téoulin,
had not come with him.”

“What is all this talk,” I asked, going straight to the point, “that you’re a spy?”

Natanis lighted the pipe and gave it to me. How welcome I found the familiar sumach leaves and powdered willow bark with which the tobacco was mixed! “We must think about this,” he said, hunkering down over his fire which, like most Indian fires, was small enough to be held in the palm of the hand. “This tale comes from some man who wishes to keep your war party from having my help.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Because when the stupid guide Conkey came into this country he asked immediately whether I was a spy, showing he had been told I was a spy. Since I’m not a spy, and have never been one, this tale must have been spread abroad by someone who wished your army to be suspicious of me.”

“I think so,” I said. “The great chief Washington and the chief of this army, Arnold, had been told in August that you were an enemy.”

“I don’t understand it,” Natanis said. “There’s no sense to it. I could not believe that Conkey spoke seriously when he asked whether I was a spy. That was why I answered him lightly, saying, ‘Of course I’m a spy, because I deliver myself into your hands and sit by your fire, instead of hiding in the forest and watching your movements without danger to myself. Next I shall write on a piece of bark “I am a spy” and hang it around my neck, so there may be no mistake about it.’ I thought by saying this I could show Conkey the foolishness of his question. I was mistaken; for he feared me, and went away without exploring the river or the Height of Land—without asking, even, for a drawing of them, which I’d have given him for the asking.”