Follow the River

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Well,” he said at last. “We’ve come this far. Let’s give ’er another day, at least. But with all respect, Mr. Ingles, they’s a lot of us stringin’ ourselves way out for these kin o’ your’n.”

  “By th’ Eternal, Cap’n, well I know it. But you help me get ’em safe, an’ I’ll buy every man o’ you a colonelcy. If it takes me th’ rest o’ my days.”

  Gander Jack lost the spoor the next morning in a maze of ridge trails and creeks. He simply and utterly lost it. And after leading the confused column up and down the same creek for an hour, finally beginning to locate its own hoof-prints, he announced, “I done the best follerin’ any man could do. I’m sorry but not ashamed.”

  “Then, Mr. Ingles,” said Captain Buchanan, “here we must turn back. My regrets, sir. My condolences on your families.”

  “No, wait,” Will insisted. “I’m certain they’ll stay in this valley … Down in there somewhere, I’ll vow, they’re a-ploddin’ along. We could …” He paused, realizing how desperate he sounded.

  “ ‘Down in there somewhere’?” the officer repeated. He was trying to mimic the poor man, then was ashamed of his sarcastic tone. “Down in that valley somewhere, y’ say,” he added gently. “But, man, look at that valley. Y’ could hide five armies behind any one of those mountains. And look ’ee. How many mountains? Looks t’ me like about a thousand!” He stopped talking but kept sweeping his hand over the awesome gorge with its river twisting white and green so far below.

  William Ingles really looked at the New River Valley then. He sighed and his head drooped forward. He remembered something his mother-in-law had oftimes chanted to the boys:

  Ten times ten times ten.

  “Very well, then, Cap’n. We’ve no right to ask more of you. Johnny lad, how say’ee? I fear ’e’s right.”

  “Right f’r them, mebbe. But I’m f’r you an’ me an’ John and Matt goin’ on alone, if that’s th’ way it has to be.”

  “Nay, Johnny. That’s suicide f’r us and no help for our’n. Come ride along back with me, brother. ’Tween us we’ll think of another way …”

  Far down the valley, thunder muttered. Clouds the shape and color of anvils stood on the western horizon, under the descending sun.

  “ ’Spect I could still recover their trail f’r you, gents,” the tracker mused, watching the approaching storm. “But that would wash it away ’fore we could use it.”

  They nodded and let him pretend so. It apparently made him feel better.

  Two days later the armed company was back at Draper’s Meadows. They took a rest at the spring under the willow, and ate, and watched in wordless pity as Will Ingles and Johnny Draper poked among the burned buildings. They found the awful remains of old Elenor Draper in the berry thicket, and dragged her down in a blanket and dug a grave for her next to those where they had buried Colonel Patton and Casper Barrier and the Draper baby a few days before.

  Captain Buchanan was getting impatient to get back toward the Blue Ridge. He walked about, switching his boot-tops with a peeled twig, and watched the two settlers confer solemnly over the graves. He had come to admire them immensely; they were apparently tireless and fearless. But their futile errand of rescue had cost him and his volunteers many man-days here on this wild side of the divide, and he was worried about how matters might be back at the eastern settlements. The countryside well could have been pillaged in their absence, and was but thinly defended while his force was out here on this vain pursuit. At last the captain walked down to the graves. He cleared his throat to interrupt them. “Gents, we’d best be off. We can do even less for these poor souls than we could for those out yonder.”

  Will Ingles looked thoughtfully at Buchanan’s fatigue-drawn face. Then he said:

  “Johnny and me and my brothers’ll be a-stayin’ here a while, Cap’n. You fellers go on back. And with our deep thanks for your service.”

  “What?”

  “We been a-talkin’ us up a plan,” said Will Ingles.

  “Whatever it is, y’ can’t travel alone. Better let me advise y’ to stay with us.”

  “We looked this place over,” said Johnny. “Th’ savages left a few tools; our scythes are down in th’ barley field. We’re a-gonna stay here an’ harvest as much as we can pack out. We’ll bring it to th’ Dunkard’s when we can. Reckon it’ll be welcome there.”

  Buchanan flung down his homemade switch. “Damnation! I’d figgered you t’have a little bit o’ sense! Come on, now. Riskin’ lives for your families is one thing. Riskin’ ’em f’r barley’s another! Now, how can I let all th’ fools hereabouts keep on after lost causes, when I’m supposed t’be protectin’ ’em?”

  “Well, Cap’n,” Will Ingles said slowly, “might be what you see as a lost cause, we don’t. Y’see, Johnny and me, we got us a notion we could ransom our people.”

  “Ransom?” Buchanan acted as if he’d never heard the word.

  “Ransom.”

  “How can y’ ransom somebody y’ can’t even find?”

  “Well, first, of course, we’ll find ’em.”

  “Oh, no, no, no, now. I won’t let you stray off after hostile savages into parts unknown, with y’r heads full o’ such vain idees. Not if I have t’ hog-tie y’ and carry y’ back to the fort!”

  “Just get along, Mr. Buchanan, an’ leave this to us. We’re no’ fools enough to go a visitin’ Shawnees. But the Cherokee Nation …” Will pointed to the southwest. “… They’re peaceable. With us and with the Shawnee. We reckon there’s a chance, just an off chance, we could go down to th’ Cherokee, talk to ’em, maybe get their help. Might be they’d inquire o’ th’ Shawnee. Find the whereabouts of our people. An’ make a ransom offer on our behalf.”

  Buchanan’s face had gone long and sour on this. “Now, damn, Mr. Ingles. You surely don’t believe you can …”

  “Cap’n, I believe I can do anything that I have t’ do.”

  Buchanan looked at Will for a minute, then bit the middle of his upper lip between his front teeth, hissed a sigh and gazed out over the grainfields of Draper’s Meadows. The fields rippled in a gentle breeze. At length he asked, “How long d’ye reckon y’ll need to harvest?”

  “No more’n we can carry on two horses, a day.”

  The captain pondered. “It’s fine lookin’. An’ ripe if ever I saw ripe. Tell y’what I could do, gents. I could volunteer ye ten men under a sergeant—if they’ll agree, I mean—t’ help y’ cut an’ winnow. Then mebbe in two days y’ could bring in enough to make it worthwhile. And have some protection while y’re aboot it.”

  A slow grin opened in Will Ingles’ whiskers. His eyes glimmered and danced. “Mister Buchanan,” he said in a tight voice, “I mought yet come t’ believe y’re as smart a feller as me.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  Mary rode with the baby girl at her breast, cradled in her right arm, and fought off dizziness and nausea and a relentless piercing soreness. Seeping blood had soaked her skirt and the horse’s flanks. Only by tangling the fingers of her left hand in the horse’s mane and locking them there in an unconscious grip was she able to keep from slipping off the beast as they went up steep slopes and down precipitous ravines or splashed along in streambeds. Both Tommy and Georgie were now riding on the horse with their Aunt Bettie, Georgie in front of her and Tommy behind.

  Mary believed she might well bleed to death. The morning after the baby was born in the mosquito-infested woods, the Indians had loaded up the horses. Then the chieftain had come to where she and the infant lay on the bed of dead leaves, and had looked down at her and said:

  “Mo-ther come?”

  He had given her as simple and final a choice as that: If she had not been willing to try to travel, it would have been the end of her. They would have tomahawked her and the baby or simply left them to die in the forest. And so, hiding her agony behind a feeble smile, she had struggled up into a kneeling position, stayed long enough to catch her breath, then stood up, still clutching t
he baby to her bosom. She had stood there for a moment, swaying, feeling as if all her innards were going to fall out onto the ground. She had been too weak to walk, of course, and so they had put her on her horse and she had sat straddling it, feeling all bruised and oozy and smashed and rent apart there in her crotch, and for the first few minutes it had been so awful she had felt as if she were giving birth to the great horse itself.

  And now it was their fifth day out and she had been riding that way for two days and she was still bleeding. She had been so faint that she had nearly forgotten to count the days. The river was there sometimes and sometimes it was not.

  On the morning after the birth, they had come to a fording place where a creek flowed into the river, and there they bad crossed from the east to the west side of the river, wading in swift water almost to the horses’ withers; Mary could remember the cool water on her aching and swollen and insect-tortured legs. And she could also remember, vaguely, riding in a huge thunderstorm and downpour.

  And now on this fifth day they had come by many an unexpected and confusing way. They had come down along the narrow bank of the river for miles, through bottomlands and over bluffs and ridges, at one place riding across the river in a canoe the Indians had hauled from a hiding-place, finally reaching the mouth of a tributary that flowed deep and fast from between bluestone cliffs into the New River. And as well as Mary could remember, they had turned westward off the New River to go up this tributary. She was confused by it, and knew she would have to remember this and try to sort it out if she ever again recovered the strength or the will to think about escaping.

  Beginning to distrust her memory, sometimes unsure whether she had forgotten to count a day or had counted one twice, Mary decided to improvise a calendar of sorts. Among the items of booty the Indians had brought from the settlement was Mary’s sewing basket, which had been given to her by her mother ten years before. From it Mary now took a long strand of wool yarn. Going back through her sometimes foggy, sometimes vivid memory, and comparing her recollections with Bettie’s and Henry’s, she recounted the days and marked each one with a knot in the yarn. She wore the yarn looped several times around her waist, where it served both as a calendar and as a belt to secure her deteriorating dress. Each morning, her first act upon awakening was to tie another knot in that woolen strand, thus keeping her memory clear to concentrate on backward glances at landmarks.

  There were ten knots in the yarn when the party finally came down off a path that had carried them northward for three days along the arrow-straight ridge of a flat-topped mountain. Mary had not seen a glimpse of the river for four days. They descended through a dense forest and began following the narrow bottoms of a twisting, north-flowing creek. The bottom of the creek was all of many-colored, round pebbles. There were trees along the way marked with tomahawk cuts or circles of faded war paint. When they made camp that evening, at a delightful place where a spring poured down over a ten-foot ledge, the Indians went one at a time to the spring, stripped, and washed off all the traces of their war paint, as if it were a ritual here.

  Mary’s bleeding finally had subsided. Her legs and clothing were encrusted with dried blood. After the warriors had cleaned off their paint, she and Bettie went to the spring with the children. They bathed the dirt and sweat and blood off themselves in the musical rush of the falling water. Tommy and Georgie, naked, played on mossy rocks with the cool water spilling over their heads and shoulders. She heard them laugh for the first time since the Sunday of the raid. They were happy and carefree for the moment. Their dread of the Shawnees seemed to have been diminishing over the days, though both would stiffen and grow still when a warrior would approach directly or reach to lift them on or off the horse.

  The pain in Bettie’s arm was lessening, she said. The poultices had cured the infection and the swelling was down. At several camps along the way, the Indians had allowed Mary to go off in search of comfrey for the dressings, and had taught her to make a salve by mashing the steeped leaves in deer fat. She would wander out of sight of the camp, and sometimes would stand alone in the wilderness simply noting the strange experience of being alone and unguarded. The Indians seemed to feel sure now that neither she nor Bettie would try to flee, at this distance from the white settlements. Surely, she thought, we’re more than a hundred miles from home by now.

  But they would not let her go into the woods with her baby and two sons; they seemed to know that she would never flee and leave her children. Their vigilance over Henry Lenard did not diminish. They kept his hands tied except when he was at work camp building and wood gathering, and a warrior with a gun was always within a few feet of him.

  Mary was aware that she was becoming the most favored among the hostages. When a fresh kill of game was made along the trail and a horse was needed to carry it, it was always Bettie and one or both of the boys who had to give up their mount and walk. Mary and her baby daughter were always permitted to ride, even though there were times when she would have welcomed an opportunity to dismount and walk for a change of posture. Mary suspected that her policy of cheerfulness and dignity was largely the cause of this deferential treatment, so she maintained it and encouraged the others to do likewise.

  And now on this tenth day, sitting in camp beside the spring, with her week-old dark-haired daughter at her breast, Mary felt a presence, and looked up to see the tall chieftain standing before her in the twilight. Without war paint, his face was quite handsome and pleasant. In the first glance at his eyes, Mary imagined she saw a fleeting look of tenderness in his face, as if he had just hidden it upon realizing she could see it. Now he straightened his back just perceptibly and crossed his muscular arms over his bare chest and looked at her with the kind of satisfaction a proud man shows toward a good possession.

  “Oui-sah. Mo-ther good,” he said. “Mo-ther strong.” He made a downward scooping motion in front of his loins, which she perceived to mean the coming of a baby. He paused as if working with words, then said: “Not make big voice.” She presumed he meant that she had not screamed in her labor. She presumed that this probably was one of the reasons why she was being treated so well.

  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.