Arundel (44 page)

“It may help you to realize that Conkey was serious,” I said, “when I tell you the scout Steele and his seven men had orders to kill you for a spy.”

Natanis nodded. “I saw them when they came into the river. I prepared a map, as you asked; and when I was sure they’d pass my cabin, I ran ahead and left the map in a cleft stick. I watched them creep up on the cabin with cocked rifles. Natawammet and I followed them to the top of the Height of Land. When they were without food, I drove rabbits and raccoons into their path. Being hurried, they never saw those small creatures; so at length, fearing they might starve, I drove two moose into the river ahead of their canoes.”

“I wish,” I said, “I could learn the truth of this spy talk. Arnold is paddled by Eneas and Sabatis. Do you think either of them has reason to wish you dead?”

Natanis shook his head. “Eneas was in Beçancour visiting his brothers during the two hot moons of summer. He returned here in September, departing to hunt with Sabatis at once, so he could have said nothing to the white chief in August. Sabatis has fished and hunted on the lower Kennebec for years, and has been welcome in my lodge. He has no reason to lie about me, and would not do it.”

“Well, God knows what the answer is,” I said, “but there’s one more thing: the winter we returned after building your cabin, my father died because of his kindness to a Boston preacher, Hook, who fished for souls among the Abenakis.”

Natawammet laughed. “I remember! He was angry because we dared to have a religion of our own!”

“With this army there is a man who calls himself Treeworgy,” I said. “To me he looks like Hook; but he denies it. Do my brothers know anything of this Treeworgy?”

“I will look at him,” Natawammet said. Natanis shook his head.

“What about Paul Higgins and his Assagunticooks?” I asked.

“On the Height of Land,” Natanis said, “keeping out of the way until the white men begin to starve.”

“Do you think they’ll starve?”

Natanis touched the blue welt along his side. “There’s an aching in my scar. There will be storms, I think; bad storms. Food is hard to find. You might think the rabbits had been wiped out, there are so few; and the animals that feed on rabbits are fewer. Also the moose are moving to the west. I’ve seen nothing like it in all the years I have been here.”

“Well,” I said, “here’s the heart of the matter. I say to Natanis that he is my brother. These men with whom I am marching are also my brothers. I’m in need of a brother’s help. I expect now that my brother will help me in every way he can, and all my other brothers with me, if we come to bad times.”

Natanis seemed to consider my words unnecessary. “I had my life at my brother’s hands,” he said. “I am ready to help him while that life is left in me.”

He lit the pipe again and the four of us smoked in turn. “Now,” I said, “our supplies are low, and the army cannot stop to hunt for food. When it stops, it ceases to be an army, and loses the strength given to it by the fear of others’ laughter and the desire to equal others’ efforts. Therefore the day may come when it’s entirely without food. The bateaux are wrecks, and I doubt they can be carried across the Height of Land; so there may be no means for the army to reach Quebec if ever it gets to the Chaudière.

“This army must be watched carefully. If what I suspect is true, there must be fast men sent to the French settlements to spread the word to bring in food. There must be men set to building canoes on the lower Chaudière for the crossing of the St. Lawrence. There must be men set to watch the leaders, to see they neither stray from the trail nor die from lack of food. You must talk this over with Paul Higgins, deciding how it can best be done. Whatever happens, no word of this army should be spoken to any person who might carry the information to the English. When a decision has been reached, Natanis should return to me, looking for me by night in the camp of the white chief Arnold. No guard is kept, and it’s safe for red brothers to move anywhere among the army at night. There are already more than twenty Abenakis among us, mostly Swan Islanders and braves from Arrowsic and Georgetown.”

“This shall be done,” Natanis agreed.

“It’s in my mind,” I said, “that the day will come when those who said Natanis was a spy will burn in hell. If we take Quebec, it will be further said we couldn’t have done it without Natanis and his brothers.”

We feasted on strips of moose meat dipped in sweetened bear’s fat, a toothsome change from the salt pork and trout that had so long sustained us.

The ways of a man’s stomach are beyond me. There are seasons when I turn up my nose at partridges and ducks, cooked juicily over coals, and long for salt pork and trout; and there are other times when I am like to gag at the mention of trout and pork. Yet I have seen the day when the sweetest food in all the world was a strip of pork rind, raw, that had lain for a week in the bottom of an Abenaki woodchuck-skin wallet.

XXI

F
OR
four more days the army wallowed back and forth across the stinking, moss-topped swamp at Bog Brook, all of it except Enos’s Fourth Division, which fiddled along behind, dragging itself into sight when everyone else was sick of waiting. One by one Greene’s rear guard washed themselves clean of mud and stench and poled off down the brook. Morgan’s riflemen, their canvas jerkins torn and frayed from road-making labors, had fallen back to second place for the first time, so that Greene’s men jeered at them. Yet Morgan’s men, ordinarily proud of their ability and speed, had no retorts to make except perfunctory ones. I knew there must be a reason for their silence, and I wondered what it was.

Meigs’s division pulled itself out of the mud and went out slowly.

For the first time every bateau carried a sick man or two, and in some cases three or four—men poisoned by the yellow water we had drunk at Middle Carry Pond, or limp from the flux, or with feet torn on the snags and barbs of the bog, or crippled with rheumatism so they could not stand.

When the men of Goodrich’s company, finished with their carrying, threw themselves down on the bank, waiting for the bateaux to start, I saw Phoebe among them. As ever, she was beside James Dunn, moving around him like a sparrow moving around a log. He was stretched out at full length, his clothes in a wretched state and a gray cast to his face. Nor was Phoebe much better. Her moccasins had completely worn off, so that the upper parts had been pulled up on her legs to afford added protection from brush, and the bottoms had been replaced with bags of moose hide, lashed around her ankles and insteps with a snake skin and sacking. Her buckskin jerkin was ripped and stained, and her eye discolored. Yet there was an alert and unbeaten look about her.

“Steven,” she said, “James must go in a bateau. He’s not fit to march.”

“I’m as good as any man,” James whispered. To prove it he sat up.

His shoes were nearly gone, but there was still flesh on his ribs; so I told Phoebe it might be better for him to keep going rather than give in to weakness. He might grow stronger instead of weaker, and so leave room in the bateaux for those more in need of help.

“Are there many in the bateaux?” James asked.

“There’s a sick man or two in every one,” I said, “but we can always find room for you if you need it.”

“I’m better than any of those sick ones,” James said. He sank back against the grass Phoebe had thrown behind him.

Phoebe gave me a dumb, baffled look. Then she leaned over and patted James on the shoulder. “You’re better than a lot of the well ones.”

Noah Cluff, patching the knee of his breeches with a square of wet buckskin, grinned fearsomely behind his whiskers. “You ain’t so bad yourself, Phoebe.”

The scar on my forehead ached and smarted, on the fourth day of our waiting, as though newly branded with a hot iron. There was a spit of snow in the air, and a veil of it over the top and sides of Dead River Mountain. Early that afternoon we saw the colonel and Captain Oswald struggling across the meadow. Two other Indians, Swan Islanders, had replaced Eneas and Sabatis in the colonel’s canoe; and from them we learned Arnold had sent Eneas and Sabatis with dispatches to friends in Quebec, sympathizers with our cause. I knew Eneas and Sabatis were best equipped of all of us to act as messengers, but I mistrusted them because they had been with Guerlac many years before.

I would be, I saw, a fool indeed to run with suspicions to the man on whose shoulders rested all the burden of our venture; nor could anyone remain in an ill temper with Colonel Arnold when he was happy at being on the move.

Seeing us on the far side of the brook, he picked up a setting-pole from a bateau and ran with it to the edge, thrusting one end against the ground and vaulting over by holding to the other end, as easy as stepping over a log.

“The worst of it’s past,” he said, pleased as a boy when we gave him the tails of the two beavers we had shot for him. “We’ll be halfway up Dead River to-night, and at the gates of Quebec before you can say Boh to a goose!”

Yet his face lost its cheerfulness when we had been at our paddling for a few hours; for the river twines and twists around the foot of Dead River Mountain, dark and glistening and silent, as though waiting to gather a victim in its coils. When a person sets out upon it, he sees the frowning bulk of the mountain at his left shoulder. Then he bears off to the right, and then he turns to the left and then he turns to the right, and then to the left and right again; and at the end of hours of twining, the gloomy mountain is still at his left shoulder, no farther away and no nearer than when he started.

Half an hour before sundown we came to the beautiful point on which we had built the cabin for Natanis, my father and I; and my mind turned back to the day when the two of us had taken a drink to red-headed James Wolfe for capturing Quebec. I wished to God my father could have been sitting in the canoe with us. I think Hobomok read my thoughts; for he said there was a belief among the Abenakis that when they went to war, the spirits of their fathers went with them to give them strength and protection. Such things, it seems to me, are vain and childish. Yet they did me no harm, since I thought that if what he said was true no Britisher that ever lived could stop me from going over the walls of Quebec and taking away what I most wanted.

By nightfall we had passed well beyond Natanis’s cabin and come among the bateaux of Colonel Greene’s division; so when we found a likely meadow on the top of a high bank we camped there all together, pleased because the snow was over and the river full of salmon trouts, with no shallows to wet us. Only the scar on my head stung and throbbed to a degree that led me repeatedly to lay my fingers against it, fearful lest it might have burst open.

Before the night was over there were complaints; for companies that supposed themselves to have three and four barrels of flour had found no flour when they searched their bateaux. At first it was thought the flour belonging to one company had been picked up by bateaumen of another company; but when all the flour in all the companies of Greene’s division was scraped together there was only enough for each man to have one-half pint—scarce enough to feed my dog Ranger for half a day.

Hobomok and I were making cakes out of the meal we carried in bladders for emergencies when Captain Oswald came past us in a pother. “Did you take the flour?” he asked, eyeing our cakes suspiciously.

“Nay,” I said, “not I; and I’ve known enough to guard what I’ve got.”

“Well,” said Oswald, “this division’s in a pretty mess, with next to nothing to eat. We’ve got to draw on Enos for reserve supplies.”

He started off, but came back again. “What did you mean,” he asked, “by saying you knew enough to guard your supplies?”

“What do you suppose I meant?” I was in bad humor because of the throbbing of my scar, which seemed to tap on the front of my brain like a hammer.

“I suppose you meant that if you hadn’t watched your supplies they’d have been stolen.”

“That’s what I meant,” I said. “I learned long ago that food, or anything else for that matter, can’t safely be left near any body of men, unless they’re Indians. It’s becoming dangerous to trust Indians overmuch, now they’ve benefited by the society of their white neighbors.”

“What are you trying to say?” Oswald demanded.

“I’m trying to say nothing! You’re nosing about in search of a mystery, and I’m trying to help
you
say something. My opinions have no value in this army. You’ve seen that. All I want to do is march to Quebec with the rest of you, and help you fight in whatever way I can. Other persons can advance the opinions.”