Arundel (11 page)

Natawammet and Woromquid gazed impassively at my father. He motioned me into the canoe and went around the circle of red men, holding each one for a moment by the upper arms. “You are my brothers,” he said. “When I return we will feast together.” He climbed over me and sat down, and Woromquid stepped into the bow. Natawammet pushed the canoe into the guzzle and guided it through the marsh. Behind us Rabomis called: “We shall be happy when you return.”

The sun was halfway down the sky as we put it at our backs and swung into the broad Kennebec. The tide ran strongly upward, carrying with it the clean smell of salt water. My father looked around at Natawammet kneeling in the stern. “The Frenchman,” my father said, “is bad. If we pass over the trail above Ticonic Falls before the sun is an hour high, I will make new muskets for you and Woromquid.” Natawammet rose to a half-standing position, and at each stroke of his paddle the canoe lifted in the water, and ripples hissed along its side.

As twilight approached, flocks of wild fowl passed over, moving south, and heavy-headed moose deer watched from the shallows. We came across black bears fishing at the water’s edge. When we slapped water at them with paddles, they galloped into the forest, snorting and whistling in terror.

To hold the beat of our paddles in time, Woromquid sang the ancient Abenaki song of Wuchowsen the Wind Blower, who sits on a lofty rock at the edge of the sky and causes the winds by flapping his wings.

When the great lord Glooskap came among men, sang Woromquid, he often went in his canoe to shoot sea fowl. At one time the winds blew violently each day, so that he shot with difficulty. Then it grew worse. Then it blew a tempest, and he could not go out at all. So Glooskap said: “Wuchowsen, the Great Bird, has done this!”

He went, therefore, to find him; and after many days he found him, a large white bird, sitting on a pinnacle of rock.

Then Glooskap spoke to him, saying, “Grandfather, you are too hard upon your children; be easier with your wings, for the wind is too strong.”

But the giant bird replied: “I have been here since ancient times, and I moved my wings ere aught else moved or spoke. I shall beat my wings as I please.”

Then Glooskap, angered, rose until he touched the clouds, seized the bird-giant Wuchowsen as though he were a pigeon, tied both his wings, and hurled him to the bottom of a rocky cleft.

Now the Indians could go out in the canoes all day, for there was no wind. But the waters became stagnant; they became thick with scum, so that Glooskap could not paddle his canoe.

So, bethinking himself of Wuchowsen, he went again to the cleft in the rock and drew out the great bird, who had suffered no hurt, being immortal.

Untying one of his wings, he put him on his rock again; and since that time the winds have never been as terrible as in the old days.

Darkness had fallen when our ears caught the roar of the falls at Cushnoc, at the foot of which lies Fort Western, the best of all the Kennebec forts, not only in the way it is placed, but in the way it is manned. A sentry hailed us at the landing place. Across the river burned a fire, so that the sentry could see, against the path of light in the river, any person who sought to pass the fort. My father gave our names and went up the path with the sentry to see Captain Howard. When the captain heard we wished to reach Fort Halifax before dawn, he shook his head doubtfully but had food brought so we could eat as we scrambled around the falls.

The traveling above Cushnoc was bad. The water was swift and shallow, and hour after hour was a nightmare of low falls and high falls and broken, tumbling water: of high banks, roaring rapids, jagged rocks; of pushing and fending and poling and straining with paddles; of leaping into icy water and scrambling back again; of fighting yard by yard, rod by rod, mile by mile up the river, with smooth stretches so few and far between that after we had passed them we forgot they existed.

The darkness weighed upon us; there were troublesome noises of wild animals among the thickets at the water’s edge; our shoulders, stomachs, backs and legs ached from chill and exertion.

How we got through the night I cannot say. For my part I think I could never have done so but for the hope of finding Mary on the morrow. I said to myself God knows how many times that nothing on earth could tempt me to such labors again: that the effort was useless. Then I thought how my father was doing this because a wrong had been done, not to him but to his community, and how Natawammet and Woromquid were doing it for friendship and a new gun; and I knew there was no way of telling what a man will endure, or why.

When the gray light of the false dawn appeared through the trees at our right, Natawammet and Woromquid poled the canoe behind a ledge on the west bank of the river, and above the clatter and babble of near-by rapids I heard the distant vibration of falls.

“Ticonic,” Natawammet said. We had come two miles an hour for eight hours, and I hoped I’d never see quick water again.

The Indians drew the canoe onto the high bank and dropped on the ground beside it. In half an hour the real dawn came, and the red men picked up the canoe and moved into the trees, hunting for the mark of the trail—saplings scored with a small triple slash inclined slightly to the left.

We clambered through the woods for three hours, burdened by our packs and muskets, whipped by branches and briers; holding saplings from the canoe and clearing rocks and vines from under the Abenakis’ feet. At the end of the three hours we came to the Kennebec again, and found it running clear, without rapids, and no sign of other travelers on it.

We drove upstream, peering cautiously around each bend, never knowing when we might stumble on the Frenchman. The
m’téoulin,
we found, had told the truth, for shortly we came to a pleasant island where the channel to the right was passable by a canoe, but the one to the left was all ledges, wholly impassable.

The Abenakis put us ashore on the island with our muskets and bows; the canoe, with our packs, they took to the far bank, beyond the shallow channel.

Having seen the lay of the land, we made our plans hoping our labors hadn’t been in vain: hoping we’d outdistanced Guerlac.

Being the better shot with arrow and musket, my father guarded the high bank; while I, being quick in the water and a fair swimmer, lay by the river with a branch thickly grown with leaves. If the canoes came he was to whistle the mournful cry of the yellowleg, and I was to roll into the current with the leafy branch over my face, so that I could see without being seen. When the first canoe reached me, then, I was to upset it with a hand on the gunwale and seize Mary while my father attended to the rest.

We waited interminably; and I knew that all the hunting I had done, for geese or turkey or moose deer, was as nothing compared to the excitement of hunting man.

The sky was overcast and the morning still. The muted calls of chickadees and the scolding of jays were loud, and my heart was low, for I was sure Guerlac had gone on toward Quebec ahead of us.

When my hopes were lowest I heard my father whistle mournfully, the four dropping notes of a yellowleg. I rolled into the river with the branch over my face and my heart pounding as though to tear my ribs apart.

I worked out toward midstream and could see nothing. I was trembling and shivering under water, fit to shake myself to pieces.

Then I saw the canoe, with four paddlers rising and dipping, rising and dipping. They were brown and naked, feathers bound upright to their scalp-locks, green and yellow paint on their faces. My throat was dry and rough, and I sank in the water until I could scarce breathe.

The canoe came straight for me, the brown men rising and dipping, rising and dipping.

It loomed high above me. I looked into the white eye of the bow paddler: saw the deep groove at the corner of his lips. I came up under my branch, reached for the gunwale and missed—reached and caught it and pulled hard.

I heard Guerlac’s cold brittle laugh. There was a shout from my father and the twang of a bowstring. A blaze of white light exploded in my brain.

VI

T
HERE
was a shifting before my eyes when I awoke—a billowing green sea out of which a dusky red wall advanced until it threatened to crush me; then withdrew, writhing and fluttering. My tongue lay in my mouth like the ball my mother makes from a pair of woolen stockings when she has mended them; I could have drunk the hogshead of rainwater that stands by our kitchen door in Arundel.

I was, I thought, slipping down an endless waterfall, turning slowly in my descent; but as I strove to reach out and grasp the swollen objects past which I swirled, I ceased to slide. I lay on a bed of fir tips in a canoe. The surging green sea resolved itself into the trees along the river bank; the dusky red wall was the naked back of Woromquid, rising and dipping with each paddle stroke.

My head felt overtight, as though a squirrel had crawled in to share it with me; and though I vaguely knew there was a matter of importance to consider, I could only squeak for water. The canoe swerved inshore. My father climbed out and held up my head to let me drink from a birch bark cone. My skull was bound like a bale of beaver skins. My father cut more fir tips and slipped them beneath me, ordering me to sleep. When I woke again, the setting sun blazed red in our eyes and the canoe was pushing through a guzzle at the tip of Swan Island.

There was talk from folk on shore—dim, distant talk which angered me for no reason. The canoe was lifted with me in it, carried up a hill and into a cabin. Before I fell asleep again, I saw Rabomis and the
m’téoulin
and my father gathered around me. There was a soothing softness on my overcrowded head. I was pleased to be among friends, but unbearably oppressed by something that continued to escape me.

It was not until morning that my senses returned sufficiently to let me remember that our pursuit of Mary and Guerlac had failed because Guerlac’s canoe had not been spilled at the first attempt.

Guerlac, my father said, had risen from the bottom of the canoe when I had dragged at the thwart, and had driven his hatchet toward my head. My father had shouted and loosed an arrow at his face; but the arrow, flying to the left as arrows will when too light or the bow imperfect, had slashed Guerlac along the right cheekbone and split his right ear—enough of a hurt to turn his hatchet a little so that by the grace of God I was struck with the flat of the blade instead of with the edge. The canoe turned over and my father set up a shouting in different voices to make the Indians think there were more of us. Mary, he saw, was not in this canoe at all; so he knew too late our ambush was badly planned.

He loosed two more arrows and fired a musket, striking one of the Indians in a spot that would oblige him to kneel or stand while eating.

Then, roaring and shouting, he had dashed into the river and pulled me out, emptying the water from me while the Indians were helping Guerlac to the opposite shore. In that moment he had seen the second canoe at the bend below us. The Indians, ignorant of our numbers, drove it against the bank and took to the woods, and with them they carried Mary. He fired the second musket and two more arrows toward them, to make them cautious. Then he gathered up the muskets and bows, swung me over his shoulder with my face streaming blood, and set off in search of Natawammet and Woromquid and our own canoe.

My father was frightened by my appearance, he said, for my face, where it was not covered with blood, was as white as a loon’s belly, and my breathing no stronger than a kitten’s, so he thought best to go down at full speed through the Five Mile Ripples.