Follow the River

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  The Indians made big sport of it. The white people’s terror gave them a moment of supreme amusement. They watched this phenomenon cheerfully. For a few minutes they made gestures hinting that they might throw the boys into the whipping yellow-orange tower of flame. Then, when the captives finally were in a good state of terror, the chieftain uttered a few solemn words and the party resumed its progress down the river bank. The Indians relished their joke for hours afterward.

  The next day there was another noticeable agitation among the Indians. They talked rapidly among themselves, in low voices. They seldom stopped to rest, and seemed intent on getting to some particular place. All this had its effect on the imaginations of the hostages. The last few days, despite the rigors of getting through the wild landscape, there had been an almost reassuring monotony. The scare at the burning spring had shown the captives how comforting that monotony had been. There was a certain feeling of security in the predictability of the hours, in not having to dread new events. Now the prisoners were affected by the intensity of their captors’ behavior, particularly their increased attention to firearms. Alarming possibilities grew in Mary’s fancy. Were they coming into the territory of hostile tribes? She imagined her family once again caught up in a storm of war cries and gunfire and scalping. Or were the Shawnees simply getting near their own homeland and preparing for a triumphal return? That prospect was equally dreadful. While on the trail, the captives had enjoyed a sort of a state of grace, but at the journey’s end, she knew, their fates would have to be decided. They might be burned at the stake, they might be publicly tortured, they might be butchered and cannibalized, they might be torn from each other and given into slavery.

  While she, and no doubt Bettie and Henry, grew grim and terrified with such imaginings, the chieftain brought the column to a halt in a narrow ravine near the river’s edge. He had the horses secured and made the captives dismount to sit and be quiet under guard. Then he supervised the checking of weapons and charging of flashpans, and led a dozen of his braves on stealthy feet out of the ravine and on up the river bank. They were obviously on their way to make an attack of some sort. Mary waited, almost breathless, in the sunflecked covert with her infant girl at her breast. Now and then she would glance around at Bettie and Henry, and their drawn faces and vulnerable eyes would only feed her apprehension. They were all waiting for screams and gunshots.

  Half an hour passed in this loaded silence.

  Then they heard the first gunshot, a solid thud, and its echoes came reverberating up the valley. There were four or five more shots, almost all at once, and their aftershocks came rolling between the wooded slopes. Mary’s heart raced; her mouth was dry.

  Then one lone voice called from up there, an eerie, exuberant wail. And at once the warriors who had been left behind to tend the pack train broke into cheerful chatter and began moving. They prodded the prisoners to stand up and walk, and led the horses out of the ravine to follow the route of the others.

  The firing had been brief. But there had been no more shooting than that at the massacre of Draper’s Meadows, Mary recalled, and it had been enough to devastate many lives. She was almost ill with the dread of what she might see.

  About a half mile up the river they came in sight of the main body of warriors, who were milling around on a strangely white stretch of beach along the river’s edge. Some of them were kneeling, others were standing or walking about. Forms were lying on the beach. There was no sign of buildings. As they rode closer, Mary saw that the kneeling warriors were bent not over human bodies, but over the carcasses of several large animals that lay dark against the dazzling white of the shore.

  Mary had seen elk before, in the hills around Draper’s Meadows, and recognized one of the carcasses as that of a great bull elk. He lay on his side, head twisted, his enormous fork of antlers looking like some of the dead, bleached, barkless trees that stood around the edge of the white beach. The elk’s tawny flank was still heaving.

  A few yards away lay a white-tail doe, slim and slight and still, its blood staining the sand crimson. Beyond it was a huge dark-brown bulk of a beast unlike anything Mary had ever seen. It had a glistening mantle of darker hair over its shoulders and its blunt, short-horned head.

  The horses, growing nervous near these carcasses, were led to the far edge of the beach and unloaded. The captives were herded together, and Henry Lenard explained to them that this had been a highly successful hunting foray instead of an attack.

  “It’s a salt spring,” he said. “That sand’s half salt, it is. Look at all the tracks here’bouts. Game comes here to lick. All kinds. That yonder, lookin’ like a mangy bull: I do b’lieve that’s what they call a buffalo. Colonel Patton tol’ me he saw one once that had strayed a way up the New.” He stood staring at it. One of the braves came near, noticed their curiosity and pointed to the beast. “P-thu-thoi,” he said. “P-thu-thoi.”

  There was movement in the brush behind them. Two warriors emerged, each pulling at one hind leg of a small buck deer. They dragged the dead animal to the center of the beach clearing, leaving a narrow track of blood, which was dribbling from its nostrils. Tommy and Georgie pressed close to Mary, but watched with wordless fascination as the skinning and butchering began. She saw Bettie watching, pale, as knives ripped along through tough hide to lay bare white tendon and red meat, and by the look of her eyes knew she was thinking back to the massacre twelve days ago at Draper’s Meadows.

  As was Mary herself.

  * * *

  The baby girl sucked and pulled at the nipple as the sun came up. Little shocks of hurt and pleasure spread like ripples from Mary’s breast through the rest of her body; the pleasures and pains became longings and regrets, became a total bittersweet emotion.

  A large brown spider with black-banded legs had built a perfect net of web between two branches a few inches above Mary’s head sometime during the night. Now the spider sat in the center of the web, its legs touching the radiating strands, waiting for vibrations that would signal the entrapment of some small insect in the far filaments.

  The rising sun illuminated the web. Dew had covered everything during the night, and the spider’s web looked like a piece of lace ornamented with a thousand tiny diamonds. Mary had seen a diamond once, in Philadelphia when she was a little girl, and had never forgotten that it had looked like a shattered rainbow. Now each dewdrop in the web was like a tiny trapped rainbow.

  As Mary watched in her nursing trance, a small fly blundered into the margin of the web. The brown spider left its station in the eye of the web and raced out to the struggling insect, examined it, then with swift and industrious motions of its forefeet began rolling it in a shroud of filament until it was entirely immobilized. Then the spider went back to the center of the web and resumed its vigil. Mary shuddered.

  She tied the fifteenth knot in her belt this morning. They had worked hard here at the salt spring. There was always the smell of woodsmoke in her hair and clothing. Fires burned day and night. The Indians had cut the lean flesh of the game animals into strips and hung them on frameworks of green saplings to smoke them into jerky. And they had put the captives to work, over another bank of fires, boiling down the waters of the salt spring in the stolen kettles to make salt. Thus far, working from dawn until dark, they had produced almost a peck of the white treasure.

  Jerky and salt were being wrapped and packed with care, apparently for an imminent resumption of the trek toward the Indians’ homeland, where it would be a part of the winter’s food hoard. The pack train, which already had been heavily burdened with loot on the trip down the river, obviously would be loaded to its capacity from here on, and Mary could foresee that she and her fellow prisoners might have to walk the rest of the way.

  However far that might be, she thought.

  The long halt at the salt spring had been good for Mary and Bettie and the children, despite the fatiguing work. Being off the horse had given Mary’s tortured abdomen and loins a reprieve, and s
he was no longer bleeding or feeling torn inside. The flesh of Bettie’s arm was healing well, because she had been able to do her work at the salt kettles with her left hand and protect the splinted one. Bettie had said nothing more about Mary’s accord with the savages. But Mary remembered her accusations and was careful not to displease her in that way again. So now she had to conduct herself with especial care, to keep from annoying not only the Indians but Bettie as well.

  Tommy and Georgie had been almost no trouble on the trail, and were even less here. They seemed to find the hunting and butchering activities of the Indians supremely interesting, and in the last two days had drifted from their mother’s side to spend more and more time helping the warriors with the game meat and hides. Tommy, whose chief entertainment at the settlement had been listening to his father’s and grandmother’s stories about distances and long-ago adventures, seemed now to be caught up in the doings of the moment. He’s havin’ adventure enough of his own now, Mary thought. As for Georgie, his activities always had been simply whatever Tommy was doing, and seemed to be so even now. Often during the evenings at the salt spring, Mary yearned to gather them close to her and tell them stories, and otherwise to keep them from drifting from her influence into that of the Indians, but it was not possible. She had no leisure. Besides, the boys found the boiling of brine much less interesting to watch than the preparation of game and the maintenance of weapons.

  In a way, that was just as well, as the infant girl needed most of the energy Mary had left from the salt-making. Sometimes she would detain the boys and make them watch over the baby while she worked, but they chafed under this.

  At the day’s end, the warriors had been teaching Tommy and Georgie one of their own childhood games. From a strip of split green hickory and rawhide thongs they had made a perfectly round hoop, which could be rolled along the ground as a moving target for the throwing of small crude spears made of cane. The Indians encouraged them to play this by the hour, sometimes stopping work to watch and cheer their best throws. At home in the settlement, the boys had been assigned certain chores as early as they had been able to understand and do them. But Mary soon came to understand here at the salt camp that the Shawnees considered play a more appropriate pastime for boys than work.

  They will make proper little savages out of them all too soon, I fear, Mary thought. And I doubt there’s much I can do to prevent it.

  Every day the Indians brought in more game, which they killed easily in the vicinity of the salt lick, and every meal was a feast of roasted meat, made more savory with salt. Mary ate it and loved it, and felt her strength returning. But eventually so much of even this succulent flesh grew monotonous, and she began to have yearnings for bread. One evening she obtained a bag of flour and some cornmeal from the booty the Indians had taken at Draper’s Meadows, and made a dough with salt and water. She shaped thin wafers from the unleavened mass and baked them on stones. The Indians welcomed this food, whose preparation obviously was the province of their women and thus rare on the trail. Bettie nearly foundered herself on it, muttering around mouthfuls something about “the staff of life,” and apparently did not mind this time that Mary had done something that pleased the savages.

  They left the salt spring on the seventeenth day and continued northward on the right bank. The river ran broad and smooth now, curving less tortuously around the steep mountainsides. There were wooded islands in the river, and sometimes the party could travel an hour at a time along narrow bottomlands without having to climb into the hills.

  Bettie’s horse had been employed to carry some of the meat and salt produced at the salt lick, and so she and Tommy were afoot. Georgie was put on Mary’s horse, to ride behind her as she carried the baby girl in her arms.

  Mary wished she herself had been permitted to walk—not because she really wanted to, but because of the resentment this new arrangement was aggravating in Bettie. She plodded and stumbled through the brush and cane a few feet in front of Mary’s horse, leading Tommy with her good hand, her dark hair and her slim figure in its torn dress and her splinted right arm right in Mary’s view as a reminder of the inequality of their treatment. Bettie would look back over her shoulder now and then, her face unhappy and her stare full of accusation. Then she would face forward again, and for a while would seem to stumble more often and more heavily, lurch more violently, crash more clumsily into bushes, moan and mince more pathetically at the pain of gravel underfoot, as if to increase Mary’s guilt at being the Indians’ favorite. At least, so it seemed to Mary, and she was bothered by it.

  “Bet,” she began calling every so often, “Bet, I can walk, Would y’ like to ride a spell?” Bettie would respond by not looking back. And Mary hurt inside, and was confused. But she suspected that the Indians would not have let them change places anyway. They had made a point of assigning the horse to her.

  By evening Bettie would be sulking and silent, giving in only reluctantly to let Mary dress her arm. “Bet, darlin’, don’t y’ see it?” Mary hissed to her one evening, believing she understood it now. “They want to divide us up. They want us to resent each other. Why … why … see how they’ve kept poor Henry off by himself. See how they’ve mollycoddled my boys, and lured ’em off from me with games …” It seemed so obvious now, now that she had seen it. It made sense to her. “Now, Bettie,” she said in a confidential tone, “we must all stay one in heart, like the family we truly are. No suspicion, please, hon? We’re us, and they’re our enemy, I know that as sure as you. I’m sure Henry would agree with me, that’s what they’re a-doin’.”

  They were given no opportunity to discuss it with Henry Lenard, though. He was kept always at a far side of the camp or at the other end of the column. But from a distance, he watched Mary’s special treatment and Bettie’s discontent, and in his eyes, too, Mary thought she saw accusation.

  It was distressing. Through no conscious fault of her own, she felt herself being isolated from her dear ones.

  On the morning of the nineteenth day. Mary refused to mount her horse. She held the baby in her right arm and took Georgie’s hand, turned away from the brave who was prepared to help her up with the children and started walking forward along the column. She walked up to Bettie and said, “That horse is free. I want you to ride it. I sh’d rather walk a hundred leagues than have y’ look at me the way y’ do. Come, Tommylad. Will y’ walk wi’ me?” Tommy glanced at his aunt, then fell in behind his mother.

  The Shawnee chieftain watched Mary Ingles coming forward with her lips compressed and her head held high. He shrugged. Then he rode back and told the brave to help Bettie onto the horse.

  All day they went that way. For Mary it was a great effort to walk and carry the baby and lead her two sons. She had to shift the infant from one arm to the other at increasingly frequent intervals. She panted and was drenched with sweat. Her shoes were falling apart. The soles flapped loose and threatened to trip her, and her toes and feet were bruised over and over by rocks and roots. But she walked, and would not look back at Bettie on the horse.

  For the greater part of that day Mary was too preoccupied with what she was doing, and its possible effects on Bettie, to notice that the Indians once again were acting eager and excited.

  In the late afternoon they were moving over the gentlest terrain they had yet encountered. The mountains were less steep and less high, and the bottomland was more than a mile wide. There were vast areas of cane and meadow.

  The sun was almost on the western bluff, and Mary was automatically dragging one sore foot up before the other, her eyes on the spongy ground, when the Indians began calling:

  “Spay-lay-wi-theepi!”

  “O-he-oh! O-he-oh!”

  Mary looked up and saw before her the widest stretch of water she had ever viewed. Far to her left, the river they had been following widened through the broad lowland and curved away between its bluffs to empty into a great blue-green, slow-flowing stream that appeared to be a mile wide.

 
She thrilled. This surely was the great Ho-he-o, or O-y-o, into which her husband believed the New River flowed. Dear Heaven, she thought, we’re likely the first white folk ever to have come this way! Somehow, for a moment, that grand notion rose above everything else in her soul: the discomfort, the jeopardy, the remorse.

  And it meant that, if ever there should be a chance of escape, she really could, as she had speculated over and over and over on the trail, find her way back to Draper’s Meadows by staying on the river. Her happiness rose like a song in her breast.

  Never had she seen such a beautiful or mighty river. It was so wide its far bluffs looked blue in the distance. They were flat-topped and covered with dense, dark forest and brilliant blue-green meadow grass.

  They made camp that evening in a parklike stand of timber free of undergrowth, on the point where the two rivers converged. From the center of the camp they could see the surfaces of both streams glittering under the sinking sun. A gentle and soothing river breeze hushed over the point. The sense of spaciousness was heartening after the two weeks of struggle and confinement between the steep walls of the river gorge. Mary felt the same expansiveness of spirit she had always enjoyed on the rolling heights of Draper’s Meadows.

  The day on horseback, perhaps, and the pleasing site of their present camp, seemed also to have dispelled Bettie’s resentments. She was her old self now. As they knelt by their cooking fire in the twilight, Mary told her what she had been thinking about the way back. Bettie listened, her eyes glittering now with excitement, now with fear. The prospect of such a trek to freedom through the wilderness they had already traversed seemed joyous but impossible. They whispered back and forth about it late into the night.

  “But that river, Mary,” Bettie exclaimed, nodding toward the O-y-o. “If they take us across it, how could we ever return?”