Follow the River

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Da’st we slepp ’neath a roof?” Mary ventured. She was growing drowsy over her full stomach. “I think there be frost a-comin’ on my head.”

  “O for a roof, yah. Why not, eh?”

  They went in the hut and spread their blankets on the Indians’ old bed-square, and rolled up in them, each with her spear lying at hand, after Mary had worked a bark shingle of the back wall loose to provide an escape-hole should anyone enter by the front door. It was fearsome to be sleeping in the home of savages who might or might not return, and the possibilities bothered her for an hour even as she grew cozy and less and less inclined to move. She decided to leave that chance in God’s hands, and prayed so. Ghetel was not snoring yet, either, and late in the night Mary heard her chuckle.

  “What?”

  A sigh from the old woman. Then: “Vas I mad w’en you missed the fish! But vaz I happy this night you don’t spear good!”

  They laughed softly, and then they were able to sleep.

  Mary woke with a gasp, the tense grip of a strong hand on her arm. Ghetel was clutching her, sitting up in her blanket and staring toward the grainy silver predawn light in the doorway. Somewhere out there, dry leaves were rustling loudly, as if many people were walking without concern for stealth.

  The two women freed themselves from their warm blankets and snatched up their spears. In her waking panic, Mary recollected details of their situation; she remembered the escape door she had made in the back wall. On hands and knees she turned and lifted down the slab of bark and looked out into the nearby cornfield.

  The noise was coming from there. She could see cornstalks jerking and moving. They dared not try to escape from this side. She watched, frozen, for Indians to emerge from the corn.

  The first face poked out among the leathery stalks. But it was at knee-height. Then there was another. Mary suddenly went almost silly with mirth. She reached back and grabbed Ghetel’s arm and pulled her down to the opening to show her the intruders.

  The faces were looking toward the hut. They had comical black masks over their eyes, and busy little black noses. Then one of the raccoons rose on its hind legs, reached up with little hands and grasped an ear of corn. It shucked it skillfully and then started eating the tender kernels from the middle of the ear.

  “Eh!” Ghetel cried. “It’s our corn! GET!” She scrambled to her feet and ran toward the front door with her hickory lance, abandoning all caution. By the time she had plunged into the corn patch, flailing with her stick, the furry little bandits had vanished and Mary was almost helpless with laughter. It seemed the misery of ages dissolved and sloughed off with this release. She was wiping her eyes when Ghetel returned stooping, grumbling, through the door.

  “Ah, Ghetel! You and your raccoons!”

  In the pink light of dawn they picked as much corn as they could tie up in the blankets, breakfasting on plump ears as they worked. They watched over their shoulders toward the woods and thickets, and kept an eye on the river for canoes. Their laughter might have been heard across the river in this morning stillness. Sounds from the Shawnee town were drifting over clearly enough: snatches of voice; the faraway thump of some tool; the very distant gunshot of some hunter on the other side of the O-y-o. Mary was anxious to be well out of the vicinity of the town and this camp before broad daylight. They harvested rapidly the ears that the raccoons had not sampled. The little animals had done an amazing amount of sampling …

  “Hush!” Mary whispered, listening.

  It was the clunking of the horse’s bell. Mary moved to the corral and saw the roan standing inside, looking at her. The animal appeared quite tame, evidently over its fright of the previous evening. Mary, her heart high with hope, quietly replaced the fallen rails of the corral and then went into the hut and returned with the hide strap. “How’d y’ like us t’ have a horse?” she said to Ghetel, who was knotting the corners of a blanket full of corn.

  “Yah! For dinner, you say?”

  “Nay, for ridin’!”

  “Ah, ’at vould be acceptable also. My feets say so. Ha!”

  Having won the horse’s allegiance with a handful of corn and few syllables of sweet talk, Mary easily got the leather strap tied to the thong that supported its bell. The horse was a mare, docile, long in the tooth, and so complacent and easily led that Mary presumed she was accustomed to white people. Probably stolen from whites, she thought. With quick and surprising ingenuity and some strips of leatherwood bark, Ghetel retied the blankets in such a way that they could be slung over the horse’s back with a bulging load of corn hanging at either flank, and by sunup they were ready to continue upriver. They were more cheerful than they had ever seen each other. They were strengthened by a supper and a breakfast of corn. They had enough food to last for several days, and a horse to carry it and themselves. They had already proven themselves by their first hundred and fifty miles, and with this food and this wonderful heaven-sent mare, the next three or four hundred miles loomed comparatively easy.

  “You ride first, Mary,” the old woman offered magnanimously. “I lead.”

  Mary suspected Ghetel was afraid to go first on an untried horse, but of course did not venture that appraisal. “No,” she said. “Till we’re out o’ this vicinity, let’s us stay low. We’ll both walk.”

  “Ah, yah.”

  They tried to keep themselves far enough inland that they could not be seen from across the river, but soon found that the cane and undergrowth were impenetrable everywhere but on the Indian trail along the river bank. So all they could do was stay along the trail most of the time and hope they would not meet any parties of Indians coming down.

  It was a pleasant morning. Though they were in rags now, the walking and the food in them kept them warm, and the sun was pleasant on their faces when they were out of the shadows. The horse’s hooves thudded softly, a reminder of this gift of Providence, and the little bell on its neck clanked, a sound musical and civilized to their ears after the rushings and roars and deep silences of the wilderness they had heard for so long, after the gunfire and tortured screams and sobbings of grief that had begun their wanderings in this savage purgatory. The bell was a dull bronze, old, and Mary wondered where it had come from. Civilized hands had made it, she was sure; bells were civilized things. Maybe it was part of the booty brought here by raiding Indians. The kind of thing LaPlante and Goulart traded for skins. Aye, it very well might have been through that very trading post sometime, she thought. The blue and white checked pattern of shirt cloth moved in her mind behind her eyes. It seemed ages since she had been engaged in that business. Even that, in a way, seemed like civilization compared with the elemental subsistence of these last weeks. But she smiled to herself. It was good not to be the bounden partner of those Frenchmen any more. She was free. With corn to eat and a companion who, though erratic and difficult, was a companion nonetheless, and with a good horse with a civilized bell.

  But that bell, she thought suddenly. P’raps for safety it ought to be thrown away. She stopped the horse and reached to untie it.

  “Vat you do here, eh?”

  “Get rid o’ this. Kind o’ noisy f’r sneakin’ by Indians …”

  The old women grabbed her hands and jerked them down. Mary looked at her in astonishment.

  “No,” Ghetel said, shaking her head severely. “This bell is good luck. Haf to keep. I had dream, the bell is good luck for us.”

  “Nonsense. It could be the death of us …” She reached again; again Ghetel shoved her hands away, with real roughness. Then the old woman’s face softened and brightened. She held a finger to her temple, indicating the source of an idea. She stooped and gathered a handful of leaves and stuffed them inside the bell, around the clapper. Then she tore off one of the rag tatters that had once been her dress, and bound up the bell to keep the leaves from falling out. “There,” she said. “So ve keep the bell. Is luck.”

  Mary shrugged. The little conflict of the moment was gone.

  And, in trut
h, she would have hated to throw the civilized little bell away into the wilderness anyway. Ghetel had done well, with her fond little superstition.

  The horse was proving a great comfort to them. Late in the morning, Mary climbed onto a ledge of limestone and slipped a leg over the animal’s broad back, tentatively, in case the mare was not accustomed to a rider. Gone are the days, she thought, when I could just spring on. The horse turned her ears and quivered her mane and tried to look back, but Ghetel held her firmly by the lead. Mary slid the rest of her weight onto the horse’s back in the space in front of the bundles of corn. The mare blew softly but stood steady.

  “Eh, now. Lead on, Ghetel, I think she’s no objection whatever.”

  Mary was lulled by the motion of the horse’s progress, and realized how weary she was. Her legs tingled and throbbed in waves. Having no underclothing, and scarcely any outer garments, she was directly against the horse’s hide, could feel the friction against the insides of her thighs like a massage soothing away the stress, could feel the animal’s flesh giving slightly over its ribs, could smell the wonderful remembered musk of horse. She went into fits of dozing, or rather trances of oblivion, as she did not close her eyes; and faces and scenes from Draper’s Meadows—the faces of her mother and the boys, Will sitting before the hearth luxuriating while she washed and kneaded his feet after a strenuous day; the ticking of the old grandfather clock as she lay awake looking at his sleeping profile after love while the pleasure of it in her loins ebbed into the deepest sort of ease—such dreams of their old hard but heavenly life drifted like smoke behind her eyes. Will had often said that the kindest thing people could do for each other was tend to each other’s feet at day’s end, and he had “done” her feet almost as often as she had done his; she could feel now Will’s strong, warm hands kneading her arches almost to the limit of bearability, sometimes making her legs twitch, and his loving fingers flexing her toes, pulling them until their joints popped softly but surprisingly, and then rotating her tense, resisting feet on their ankles until her calves would relax—oh what a sweet good man was her Will! Capable of the biggest and boldest efforts but kindly and attentive to the smallest need, always having time to give to anyone who needed him, however tired he was or how full of tomorrow his mind might be …

  I’m a-comin’ back t’y, William Ingles; oh I vow I’ll reach ’ee …

  Suddenly a bolt of dread snapped her out of this reverie. In her mind she had seen a looming of dark faces. She opened her eyes onto the bright innocent yellow and crimson of autumn foliage, seeing nothing ahead but the horse’s neck and ears and Ghetel’s wild iron-gray hair and the gauntlet-stripe scars on the sagging skin of her back. But the feeling would not leave; it was the feeling which on that July Sunday morning had made her glance repeatedly at the cabin door. She could not ignore it. “Ghetel! I’m a-gettin’ off,” she hissed. The old woman’s face turned to her, reflecting the alarm she had detected in Mary’s voice. She halted the mare and Mary slid off to the ground. The pain of the sudden weight on her half-rested feet and legs almost made her fall. “Listen,” she whispered, “something’s a-tellin’ me we ought to get off this trail …”

  At that moment the mare’s ears pricked up and she gave a low nicker, her head turned toward the shadows under a lofty wood.

  From somewhere in those shadows came the muffled sound of a man’s voice. They listened. A moment later it came again, louder.

  Mary jabbed with a finger toward a thicket of sycamores and locusts lying down the slope at their left, close to the river bank, and both the women hauled at the neck-halter to bring the animal along. They made a din of rustling and crackling on the leaf-and-twig carpeted floor of the thicket, and had just halted the mare behind a head-high clump of scrub when Mary saw the Indians, a mere fifty feet away.

  They were afoot, all warriors or hunters, going westward along the trail, toward the Shawnee town. They wore no war paint but carried their muskets at their sides. Several of the braves, in pairs, carried poles across their shoulders and there were dead animals and fowl hanging from these poles by their feet or necks. Mary counted thirteen men passing, then a brindled pack horse with the whole carcasses of two small deer over its back, then another horse, a large bay, carrying a black bear strapped across it, the bear’s hanging head swaying and bobbing with the horse’s movements. Ghetel watched them and kept crouching lower and lower, as if wishing the earth would swallow and hide her big pink and gray body. Mary watched under the mare’s neck, stroking to keep her from starting or neighing.

  The hunters took a long time in passing. They were casual and jovial, talking and sometimes grunting out short, coughlike bursts of laughter.

  The two women remained still for a long time after the sounds of the hunters’ passage had faded. They stood letting their heartbeats and breathing return to normal, watching the trail for any sign that the group might have been only part of a larger body. At last a horsy smile spread over Ghetel’s face and she looked at Mary with some wonder. “I don’t know how you know,” she said, beginning to shake her head, “but I listen to you after now.”

  “Tell y’ what I fear,” Mary said. “That afore this day’s done, them hunters will look down an’ see our tracks a-comin’ thisaway, an’ send somebody back here t’ see who we be. That’s what I fear as much as meetin’ more savages headlong.”

  Ghetel considered this, nodding and running her tongue thoughtfully over her back gums with elaborate ruminating movements of her lower jaw. Finally she announced: “Ven I vatch to th’ back, you vatch to th’ front. My turn to ride now, eh?”

  “Aye.”

  “Get me a place to climb up, den.”

  And when Mary led the mare alongside a fallen log Ghetel could use as a mounting block, the old woman hoisted her broad bony rump onto the horse’s back as if she were getting onto a sidesaddle. Then, to Mary’s astonishment and amusement, she raised her left leg, instead of her right, and lowered it over the other side so that she was astraddle but backward, looking over the horse’s rump. She turned and looked down at Mary. “Now ve go,” she said, “and I see ’em if they follow.”

  Mary stared at her for a moment, mouth hanging open, then shook her head. “So be it!” She laughed. “Hang on!”

  And so they continued, up an Indian trail through the blazing fall foliage in the valley of the beautiful river, keeping a vigil fore and aft.

  CHAPTER

  14

  Their great fortune in obtaining the horse seemed also to have extended to the weather. For three days they were blessed with mild, dry, southerly winds, sun-gilded, fleecy clouds cruising across a pearly blue sky. The wind soughed high in the trees above them, sent shivers across the surface of the river and stripped off the first loose leaves of autumn. A gust would boom in the crowns of the towering hardwoods; leaves would spill off and whirl away like yellow snowstorms. Deep drifts of ochre and orange and crimson leaves deepened on the forest floor, fragrant and crisp and easy underfoot. Docile wasps and weary flies stitched leisurely through slanting sunbeams. Mary and Ghetel went on through this dry, balmy weather, taking turns riding and leading the mare, wading and limping through the rustling leaves, carrying their homemade lances upraised, like a pair of tatterdemalion remnants of some Amazonian cavalry. Mary sang her little homing ballad often as they went along. Ghetel had abandoned her retrospective mode of riding the first time the mare lunged roughly up a bluff and there was no mane to hang onto. The nights were dry and cool but not cold. Their supply of corn dwindled slowly, more slowly certainly than if they had dared to kindle a fire to cook it in any manner. Drying on the cob day by day, it made a gritty and starchy meal, almost like eating chalk, so they did not eat as much as they would have if it were more palatable. The few handfuls of berries, walnuts, wild grapes and persimmons they found each day were a wondeful relief. Because of her lack of molars, Ghetel had to find some way to crack and pulverize her corn, and usually smashed it with the blunt side of the tomahawk on
a rock until she had a small dirty pile of yellow-white grit that she could wash down with water. She ingested a fair amount of dirt and stone dust to this primitive milling process. Mary’s own teeth were beginning to ache and loosen because of their wretched diet, and she would have strange twinges and itches in her gums, and could suck a taste of rot from between her grinding-teeth. But at least the corn had bound up their flux, and both privately took satisfaction in the little hard stools they left behind every morning.

  Mary estimated that they were covering twice as much distance each day as they had before acquiring the wonderful animal, partly because the horse could carry them both across creek mouths and shallow rivers they would have been afraid to wade on foot. The mare was a good forder, not skittish at entering water, and would with good footing make her way across a strong current as high as her withers, with the two women astride her, the water reaching their hips, Mary clutching the mane, Ghetel embracing Mary’s scrawny waist. And when the mare would clamber out on the far bank, both the women would fuss over her, hug her neck, kiss her muzzle, stroke her throatlatch, hand-feed her a little corn and perhaps let her rest and graze if they were in grassy country. Mary had always loved horses, but never had she loved one with the same choking, tear-starting love she felt for this benevolent lovely beast that had appeared in her life when she had so desperately needed it. Sometimes she would look into the deep brown, soft-lashed eyes and would feel a rush of appreciation that felt almost like a prayer. “Ah, God,” she exclaimed once, “would that people could be so good!”

  But sometimes that kind of communion could devastate her soul, because into that same rich upwelling of emotion the images of her three lost children would rush, as if through a gate suddenly left unguarded.

  On their third day with the horse, they came to a sandy-bottomed tributary that Mary distinctly remembered from the trip down in the captivity of Captain Wildcat. The Indians had crossed it in a canoe and had secreted the vessel in a canebrake on this shore. “Wait,” she said, and leaving Ghetel with the horse, pushed her way into the tall, waving yellow-green stalks, holding her hickory lance in front of her, both to part the reeds and to be ready in case she should come upon a water moccasin—or an Indian. She waded through the muck searching for the outline of a canoe.