by Scott O'Dell
He looked from me to the musket. It was standing near at hand. I picked it up and pointed to the ax he held on his shoulder. He made no move to put it down, but grunted in an insolent way. He then glanced about, apparently for something else to take.
I half-cocked the trigger. It caused a small noise in the quiet morning. I pointed to the ax and said the word he had used and knew. "Mine."
He moved his feet at the click of the trigger. His eyes shifted in my direction and in them was a hard light. I expected him to lunge forward at any moment and use the ax upon me. I cocked the trigger. It made a loud sound. I raised the musket and pointed it at him again. I told him once more that the ax belonged to me.
He hesitated with his mouth open. Then he said something in his own language, dropped the ax on the ground, and made his way down the slope, along the stream to the edge of the pond. His canoe was pulled up on shore. He lifted it into the water and sped away, using his paddle on one side, then the other.
I watched until he was out of sight. The rest of the day I looked for him, thinking that he might return. That night I lay awake, the musket at my side.
25
SIGNS WERE EVERYWHERE of a long winter to come—the same deep ice and snow we'd had two years before at home.
Tree squirrels gathered nuts at a frantic rate, scarcely pausing in their labors. The flying squirrels, which are usually nocturnal, were out at dusk gathering the last of the hickory nuts, blown down by two days of wind. Their undersides were a sparkling white and heavily furred, a certain sign, my father had said, of early snow. The wild geese began their journey south, even leaving the lake at night, until one cold morning it was deserted. I missed the cries and the shining wedges.
After three wild misses and a waste of powder and ball, I shot another deer and smoked the meat. I dipped a dozen candles from the tallow and two dozen rush lights from rushes I gathered along the two ponds. Then I began on a door for the cave. The rush lights and candles were easy tasks, because I had made them at home many times before. But the door caused me trouble.
First, the opening to the cave was jagged on both sides and at the top. With my ax I cut out a frame to fit, and then chinked the holes between the rock and the wood with mud mixed with straw. This was the easy part. The hard part came when I tried to make the door itself.
I had no tools except the ax and the jackknife. The knife had belonged to my father, and I had it saved from the burning. Although I had never made anything out of wood before, if Fd had proper tools I could have managed something.
I cut out rough boards to fit the door frame, but without an auger I had no way of boring holes for the cross pieces. Instead, I bound them together with leather thongs. Then I had to push the rough door into place. It still was not a door, because it lacked hinges. Finally, I gave up and just leaned it against the opening. It covered half of it, that was all. I could squeeze inside, but so could the cold. Then two days after I set it up, a hard wind came and blew it down.
Except for the door I was fairly snug against the winter, even a deep winter, but I would have little to do after supper. I had neither flax nor wool nor the means to weave them. At the farm I had always stayed up, working long after the men were in bed.
I thought about making a journey into Ridgeford village to buy needle and thread and cloth for a dress. I had less than ten shillings to my name, but possibly I could earn money at the inn.
I thought about this for several days. The trees were bare, as well as most of the bushes, which would make traveling easier. But I was afraid to go. Captain Cunningham's men most likely would not be there looking, but they might be. The truth was, I didn't want to see anyone.
I had been so busy gathering wood and food, I had neglected the cave. It looked like a bear's nest, things stuck here and there underfoot. I spent a day cleaning up. I made a broom out of marsh rushes and swept up the stone floor and covered it with tallow, which made it shine in the firelight.
While I was sweeping a strange thing happened. The broom had a long handle, and I was flailing away at the dirt when the white bat started to fly. Night was falling, the time it always went out on its night journeys. Suddenly it began to swoop back and forth around me, darting in and out, squeaking as it went.
I marveled that it didn't touch the swinging broom. Suddenly, the thought struck me that it was playing a game, seeing how close it could come without colliding. I swept faster. I swung the broom around my head. The bat flew in and out; I swung faster and faster. The bat still whizzed in and out.
Exhausted by the game, I finally let the little creature fly away. I had the feeling that if bats could laugh, this one was laughing now as it disappeared in the dusk.
That night I gave it a name. The creature was white, which made me think of angels. I thought of all the angels I could remember—the blessed angels, Raphael, Chamuel, Michael, Uriel, Jophiel, Zadkiel, and Gabriel. I thought of the Throne Angels and the Angel Rulers of the Seven Heavens and the Angels of the Twelve Months of the Year, the Angels of the Hours of the Day and Night, all I could think of.
Remembering the creature's wide mouth and long, pointed teeth, I thought of Isaiah 14 and Lucifer, the fallen angel. But at last I named it after the Archangel Gabriel. Gabriel of Waccabuc.
26
ON THE MORNING of the nineteenth of November—at least this was the date I scratched on my calendar—a north wind brought a dusting of snow. It stayed on the ground only until nightfall, but the wind kept up and was piercing cold.
The last day of the wind visitors came—a young man and his wife, with a baby strapped to her back, and a child holding her hand. At first sight I took her to be an Indian, with her high cheekbones and coppery skin. But then I saw that she had blue eyes and was only part Indian. She spoke with an accent, but I understood her.
"My name is Helen," she said. "And this is my husband, John Longknife. My little girl is named Bertha. The baby has no name yet. We are waiting for a better moon. Then we will give her a name."
The young man seemed ill at ease. I took it that stopping by for a visit was his wife's idea. I had things to do, but I opened the door and invited them in.
We sat around the fire. Mrs. Longknife took off her shoes and warmed her feet. Her husband kept his shoes on.
"We come in the summertime and fish in the lake," the woman said. "We fished here last summer. We caught more than a hundred trout. That was before you came."
I asked her where she lived.
She pointed north. "Over the ridge, a day's journey in the summer, longer in the winter," she said. "My grandfather lived here at nearby Waccabuc, which is the Indian name for Long Pond. He lived here before the time the white men burned a hundred tents in the village beyond Ridgeford and killed almost two hundred Indians. All of them. He owned the land around the lake. But he sold it to a white man for a barrel of something to drink. The man's name was Tibbets. Is that your name, Tibbets?"
"No, it's Sarah Bishop."
She glanced at her husband, but nothing passed between them that I could see. I wondered if she was going to lay claim to the land, as the Indian Wantiticut had done.
"You are a granddaughter, maybe," the girl said.
"Maybe," I answered and asked her if she would like to drink some tea.
Her husband said, "Good."
He was a handsome young man with strong features and a soft voice.
I put water on the fire to heat. I still wondered why they had come. If they had come to claim the land, what could I do? I would run them off with the musket, as I had Wantiticut, I decided.
They spoke together in their own tongue while I was making the tea. They drank the tea with wry faces, but tried not to let me see that they didn't like it. The girl wanted to know what it was.
"Wintergreen," I said.
"There is another tea," she told me. "You have the berries growing here. I have seen them by the lake. I will help you gather them sometime."
My heart, which had been th
umping, settled down.
The young man said, "You have canoe?"
"No."
"You want?"
"Yes." I lived on a big lake and could use a canoe. "Someday I'll need one."
"Good. We fix him someday."
He spoke to his wife, using Indian words, which she translated.
"My husband says that it will take a long time to gather bark for a canoe and, besides, the season is not good for gathering. He will help you in the spring. Now he will show you how to make a dugout. It will be of use when you go out to fish in the lake where the fish are big."
"I'll not need one this winter," I said.
"Winter is long," she answered. "I know from the winters I have lived. It will keep your hands busy, making a dugout."
"We go," said her husband. "For dugout."
Above the cave was a small stand of pine. He selected the largest of the trees, and, spelling each other, we felled it. He sharpened the ax on a stone and we cut a piece twelve feet long from the trunk. It was much too heavy to carry, even for the three of us, so we rolled it down the hill and inched it into the cave. It took all that day.
John Longknife hollowed out a shallow place on top of the log and into it poured hot coals that took hold at once.
"There is much more for him to tell you," his wife said. "He will show you in the morning how the log is hollowed out."
They had smoked trout with them and I made a pot of gruel and more tea. We sat around the fire and ate, while the log slowly burned. From time to time John Longknife got up and chopped a path for the fire to take.
I wanted them to sleep in the cave, but they put up a shelter outside. In the morning, after we had eaten, the young Indian showed me how the fire must burn. He drew a line along the top of the log with my jackknife and curves front and back to mark the bow and stern.
He spoke to his wife and she said, "The fire must not burn too far. The burning must stop when the shell is twice as thick as your hand. Then you use the ax to cut it down some more. Until the sides are no thicker than your hand, except for the bottom. The bottom must be left deeper. You must use wet clay to guide the fire."
Her husband held his hands apart to show how deep the bottom must be.
Then the Longknifes left their children with me and went down to the lake and fished the rest of the morning. They came back with dozens of fat trout, much bigger than those I caught in the stream. They built a hickory fire against the face of the cave and smoked them, taking the rest of the afternoon and that night.
In the morning the ground was covered with frost. John Longknife looked up at the gray sky and said that winter would come soon. "Two days maybe."
Helen Longknife nodded. "My husband knows the signs. Do you have snowshoes for the winter?"
"No."
"You will need them when you travel."
"I don't plan to travel."
"You can get sick. You are a long way from the village. You are alone. You will need shoes."
She glanced at the string of smoked trout. I had the feeling that the Longknifes were planning to stay on with me through the winter.
Helen got up and went over to her pack, unfastened her snowshoes, and handed them to me.
"Put them on," she said. "See if they are right. If they are not right, my husband will fix them."
But the biggest gift of all followed the gift of the snowshoes.
"You need a door," Helen Longknife said. "Many animals in the forest will look for food when snow comes. They will walk right in on you when you are sleeping. The small animals, foxes and bobcats, they are not important. But we have wolves and bears. The bears are big. You need a door."
John Longknife took the planks I had bound together, which now stood aslant the opening, and laid them out on the ground. He cut hinges of a double thickness, using deerhide I had stored. With my jackknife and his hunting knife and a tool he had made and carried in his belt, on a key ring he had found somewhere that had two big rusty keys hanging from it, he bored holes and made wooden pegs. He wedged the frame I had made hard against the rock and set flat stones at the top and bottom and sides. He made an oak bar that moved on a heavy oak peg and locked itself into an oak slat.
I helped him as best I could. In four days the door was up. It fitted the frame, swung freely on its hinges, and could be barred tight from the inside.
When the door was finished, the Longknifes took their fish down, packed their things, and left.
"We would like to come next summer and fish," Helen Longknife said.
"You are welcome," I said.
"Then we will help you set the dugout in the water."
"Thank you."
The little girl came over and put her hand in mine for a moment.
I watched the family go down the slope. They had a birch canoe beached on the lake. As they moved away, they waved and I waved back. I liked them. They were friendly people. But for some reason I was not sorry to see them go.
It was mostly that I had grown comfortable in my new life. I had a warm cave for a home. A stream full of small fish and a lake teeming with large trout and wild fowl lay at my doorstep. The forest yielded an endless store of acorns and roots, nuts and berries.
And not only had I become comfortable, now I found myself looking forward to each day. I felt that I had a part in what it would bring. That each new day was not something that would just happen, but was something that I would make with my own hands and thoughts. I still feared Captain Cunningham. I often saw his round face with his little onion eyes staring at me. But the war and the terrors had begun to fade in my memory.
27
SNOW FELL EARLY in December, as John Longknife had predicted, and lasted for three days. When it ended, there were drifts around the mouth of the cave higher than my waist. The stream still ran, but Long Pond was covered with a sheet of ice that grew deeper every night, until by the middle of December it was a foot thick.
By then I could walk out on the lake without falling through, wearing my new snowshoes. I chopped three holes in the ice and, with the hooks my friends had left me, short lengths of deer sinew, and venison bait, I set lines at each of them. The first day I caught six large trout, two bass, and a pickerel, all of which I buried in a snowbank.
I set the lines every morning, weighing them down with rocks, and went out toward evening to see what I had caught. After a week I had enough fish to keep me for a month.
The next-to-the-last day I fished the ice, I noticed tracks along the shore where the stream ran out of the lake between two low hills. When I first saw them I thought they were bear tracks, but they turned out to have been left by a man who took large steps and seemed to be in a hurry.
I did not follow the tracks that day, seeing no reason to, but the next morning I discovered fresh ones in the same place. I thought that whoever it was might be fishing at the south end of the lake, which lay out of sight around a bend.
It was a bright day, with the sun glinting on the trees. As I started back home, carrying my lines, a string of fish, and my musket, I saw a flash of light at the edge of the lake a few steps off to my right. I went over to see what it was, thinking that it might be something, a piece of metal, I might use.
To my surprise it was a trap that was shining new, and in it was a muskrat. It had been caught by its two front paws. One of them it had gnawed off, and it was trying to gnaw off the other. There was much blood on the snow.
The animal stopped chewing at itself and bared its teeth at me. I worked my way around until I was behind it. Quickly, with a foot and a hand, I opened the trap. The muskrat took a feeble step and fell on its side.
It had a thick coat of glossy brown fur, but it was an ugly thing, with a pudgy face and whiskers and a funny smell. I had a notion to kill the animal with a blow on the head. Anyway, it was going to bleed to death. I decided not to kill it and walked on. Then I turned back. Somehow, lying there in the snow, alone and bedeviled, it reminded me of myself. Of how I had felt whe
n I first came to Long Pond.
I took off my shawl to protect my hands and picked it up. The animal made a noise, a thin groan, opened its mouth, but didn't try to bite me. I carried it home and put it beside the fire, though I was sure it would die before nightfall.
The muskrat was still alive in the morning. I gave it water, which it didn't drink. Then some of the fish left over from my supper, which it didn't eat. I went back to the lake where the trap was. I hadn't noticed before that it had letters on it, scratched there by a chisel. The letters spelled the name Goshen. It gave me a start. Sam Goshen! Again I saw his long, purplish nose as he grasped me and shoved my body against the wagon wheel.
Farther along was another trap; this one was unsprung. I sprung it. I found a second trap with a dead raccoon in it. I took the animal out. I found two more traps with dead beaver caught in them and ten more traps unsprung. I sprung them all and went home with the two beaver. I did not see Sam Goshen anywhere, but I was breathing hard when I got to the cave.
The muskrat was still alive. It would not eat or drink, but spent the evening licking the stump of its chewed-off paw. Once it got up as if it wanted to flee somewhere, then lay down and went to sleep.
It was uglier than I had thought at first. Its back legs were partly webbed, and it had a flat, thick tail shaped like a flour scoop. But if I could tame it somehow, it would be company. Gabriel, the bat, had gone to sleep when the big snow fell. He hung upside down now in a far corner of the cave, unconcerned about the new boarder or about me.
I barred myself in that night and cocked the musket and set it up handy. I half-expected Sam Goshen to come to the door. If he was around, he would surely see my tracks and follow them to the cave. If he did, I'd be ready.
I stayed up late, but he didn't come. Just before I went to bed I heard sounds outside. I crept over to the door, opened it a crack, and peered out. It was a bear snuffling around in the snowbank where I had put the fish. He came and sniffed at the door for a while. Then I heard him trotting down the hill, breaking the dry crust along the trail.