Arundel

by Kenneth Roberts

  When the gray light of the false dawn appeared through the trees at our right, Natawammet and Woromquid poled the canoe behind a ledge on the west bank of the river, and above the clatter and babble of near-by rapids I heard the distant vibration of falls.

  “Ticonic,” Natawammet said. We had come two miles an hour for eight hours, and I hoped I’d never see quick water again.

  The Indians drew the canoe onto the high bank and dropped on the ground beside it. In half an hour the real dawn came, and the red men picked up the canoe and moved into the trees, hunting for the mark of the trail—saplings scored with a small triple slash inclined slightly to the left.

  We clambered through the woods for three hours, burdened by our packs and muskets, whipped by branches and briers; holding saplings from the canoe and clearing rocks and vines from under the Abenakis’ feet. At the end of the three hours we came to the Kennebec again, and found it running clear, without rapids, and no sign of other travelers on it.

  We drove upstream, peering cautiously around each bend, never knowing when we might stumble on the Frenchman. The m’téoulin, we found, had told the truth, for shortly we came to a pleasant island where the channel to the right was passable by a canoe, but the one to the left was all ledges, wholly impassable.

  The Abenakis put us ashore on the island with our muskets and bows; the canoe, with our packs, they took to the far bank, beyond the shallow channel.

  Having seen the lay of the land, we made our plans hoping our labors hadn’t been in vain: hoping we’d outdistanced Guerlac.

  Being the better shot with arrow and musket, my father guarded the high bank; while I, being quick in the water and a fair swimmer, lay by the river with a branch thickly grown with leaves. If the canoes came he was to whistle the mournful cry of the yellowleg, and I was to roll into the current with the leafy branch over my face, so that I could see without being seen. When the first canoe reached me, then, I was to upset it with a hand on the gunwale and seize Mary while my father attended to the rest.

  We waited interminably; and I knew that all the hunting I had done, for geese or turkey or moose deer, was as nothing compared to the excitement of hunting man.

  The sky was overcast and the morning still. The muted calls of chickadees and the scolding of jays were loud, and my heart was low, for I was sure Guerlac had gone on toward Quebec ahead of us.

  When my hopes were lowest I heard my father whistle mournfully, the four dropping notes of a yellowleg. I rolled into the river with the branch over my face and my heart pounding as though to tear my ribs apart.

  I worked out toward midstream and could see nothing. I was trembling and shivering under water, fit to shake myself to pieces.

  Then I saw the canoe, with four paddlers rising and dipping, rising and dipping. They were brown and naked, feathers bound upright to their scalp-locks, green and yellow paint on their faces. My throat was dry and rough, and I sank in the water until I could scarce breathe.

  The canoe came straight for me, the brown men rising and dipping, rising and dipping.

  It loomed high above me. I looked into the white eye of the bow paddler: saw the deep groove at the corner of his lips. I came up under my branch, reached for the gunwale and missed—reached and caught it and pulled hard.

  I heard Guerlac’s cold brittle laugh. There was a shout from my father and the twang of a bowstring. A blaze of white light exploded in my brain.

  VI

  THERE was a shifting before my eyes when I awoke—a billowing green sea out of which a dusky red wall advanced until it threatened to crush me; then withdrew, writhing and fluttering. My tongue lay in my mouth like the ball my mother makes from a pair of woolen stockings when she has mended them; I could have drunk the hogshead of rainwater that stands by our kitchen door in Arundel.

  I was, I thought, slipping down an endless waterfall, turning slowly in my descent; but as I strove to reach out and grasp the swollen objects past which I swirled, I ceased to slide. I lay on a bed of fir tips in a canoe. The surging green sea resolved itself into the trees along the river bank; the dusky red wall was the naked back of Woromquid, rising and dipping with each paddle stroke.

  My head felt overtight, as though a squirrel had crawled in to share it with me; and though I vaguely knew there was a matter of importance to consider, I could only squeak for water. The canoe swerved inshore. My father climbed out and held up my head to let me drink from a birch bark cone. My skull was bound like a bale of beaver skins. My father cut more fir tips and slipped them beneath me, ordering me to sleep. When I woke again, the setting sun blazed red in our eyes and the canoe was pushing through a guzzle at the tip of Swan Island.

  There was talk from folk on shore—dim, distant talk which angered me for no reason. The canoe was lifted with me in it, carried up a hill and into a cabin. Before I fell asleep again, I saw Rabomis and the m’téoulin and my father gathered around me. There was a soothing softness on my overcrowded head. I was pleased to be among friends, but unbearably oppressed by something that continued to escape me.

  It was not until morning that my senses returned sufficiently to let me remember that our pursuit of Mary and Guerlac had failed because Guerlac’s canoe had not been spilled at the first attempt.

  Guerlac, my father said, had risen from the bottom of the canoe when I had dragged at the thwart, and had driven his hatchet toward my head. My father had shouted and loosed an arrow at his face; but the arrow, flying to the left as arrows will when too light or the bow imperfect, had slashed Guerlac along the right cheekbone and split his right ear—enough of a hurt to turn his hatchet a little so that by the grace of God I was struck with the flat of the blade instead of with the edge. The canoe turned over and my father set up a shouting in different voices to make the Indians think there were more of us. Mary, he saw, was not in this canoe at all; so he knew too late our ambush was badly planned.

  He loosed two more arrows and fired a musket, striking one of the Indians in a spot that would oblige him to kneel or stand while eating.

  Then, roaring and shouting, he had dashed into the river and pulled me out, emptying the water from me while the Indians were helping Guerlac to the opposite shore. In that moment he had seen the second canoe at the bend below us. The Indians, ignorant of our numbers, drove it against the bank and took to the woods, and with them they carried Mary. He fired the second musket and two more arrows toward them, to make them cautious. Then he gathered up the muskets and bows, swung me over his shoulder with my face streaming blood, and set off in search of Natawammet and Woromquid and our own canoe.

  My father was frightened by my appearance, he said, for my face, where it was not covered with blood, was as white as a loon’s belly, and my breathing no stronger than a kitten’s, so he thought best to go down at full speed through the Five Mile Ripples.

  If our canoe should be broken on them, he figured, we would be no worse off than we then were; whereas if we passed them safely we could catch the outgoing tide below Cushnoc, and by hard effort win through by sundown to Swan Island, where Rabomis and the m’téoulin, having some knowledge of remedies, might heal my head.

  My father declared he couldn’t say how Natawammet and Woromquid guided us through the quick water without disaster, for mostly he was afraid to look, and he was busy supporting my head when we bumped over the ripples, which are not ripples at all, but curling waves with sharp rocks lying among them like sharks’ teeth. When Natawammet and Woromquid went to the council house to act out their adventures for the other Abenakis, according to custom, Woromquid insisted that he had been unable to turn the bow of the canoe from a pointed rock, until my father shouted at him with such violence that he found the strength to lift the canoe entirely out of water. If my father was frightened he was frightened to good advantage, which is a form of fright that harms nobody.

  At this time I cared for none of these things, nor for the repeated declarations of Rabomis that Guerlac’s hatchet had made a crack in my skul
l and that I had been only the thickness of a gnat’s wing from death. I was alive, so there was no occasion, it seemed to me, to speak of death.

  I wished only to hear how we might overtake and recapture Mary; I wanted to do nothing except start again in pursuit of her. Yet my head pained villainously and my father said I was too sick to travel. I would have climbed out of bed, but couldn’t move an inch. When I was fully recovered, my father said, we would travel to Norridgewock for further news of Mary and Guerlac.

  The m’téoulin brought a sheet of thin green moss that grows on dead logs, spread on it a jelly made by boiling the roots of the linden tree, and fitted it to my head, holding it in place with a cap of buckskin whose thongs tied beneath my jaws like an old wife’s nightcap.

  For six days the m’téoulin placed moss and linden jelly on my head, forbidding me to leave the cabin; and the days passed somehow. My father sat often with me, molding bullets or discussing magic with the m’téoulin; and Rabomis brought the wampum rolls of the tribe from their hiding place and read the ancient tales of the Abenakis: how they had fought wars with the Iroquois before the white men came; how the great lord Glooskap made man from an ash tree; how Glooskap created the squirrel too large, and so made him smaller; how the geese are divided into tribes and how they hold their council with Wuchowsen the Wind Bird concerning the weather, and despatch expresses to inform the tribes of their decisions; how the Weewillmekq’ or horrible horned worm grows under water to the size of a moose; and how Lox, the crafty Indian devil, rose from the dead.

  Years before, Rabomis said, there had been many more of these tales, but some of the most ancient of the wampum rolls had been lost or destroyed, and some had been carried to Canada by turbulent warriors who wished to live in St. Francis or Beçancour, where they might obtain gifts from the French in return for making war on the Engish settlements. Once the wampum rolls were lost the tales were soon forgotten, except for fragments that had no value other than to entertain children on a winter’s night.

  My father puffed at his pipe and said that in a few score years there would be many things forgotten about the Abenakis in addition to their tales; that this was only fair, since the Abenakis preferred their own manner of living to that of the white men. The white man, said my father, wrote down his thoughts and his customs, so that his children might profit by them. Since the Abenakis would not do this, and lived only as it pleased them to live, their thoughts and customs must vanish as trees vanish.

  “It may be,” said my father, “that your way of living is pleasanter than our way. If you find it so, you must be satisfied with the pleasure and not fret over the future, as does the white man.”

  Rabomis, slender and straight in her long deerskin jerkin, belted tight around the waist with a band of wampum, put her hand on my father’s shoulder. “There are some,” she said, “who live as they do because they are not allowed to live otherwise.”

  My father, seeing Jacataqua and myself staring, stooped to knock out his pipe on the hearth, so that Rabomis’s hand fell from his shoulder; and for some reason, whenever people since that time have spoken to me of the Abenakis as savages, which they have done more than a million times, the memory of Rabomis comes into my mind.

  Her face was oval, and a clear brown in color, like that of Phoebe Marvin after a summer of her deviltries in the water at the mouth of the Arundel River. Below her eyes there was a flush of red, as though a warm light shone up at her. Her black hair was bound by a narrow ribbon of wampum. Her deerskin jerkin was open at the throat; and around her neck were strands of bright blue wampum.

  Her English speech was soft and pleasing, and broken a little by queernesses of pronunciation learned from her father, a Huguenot from France, who had become the master of a vessel that was wrecked at the mouth of the Georges River, near Monhegan. Her manner of expression was pleasing, too; for the Abenaki speech is involved and flowery, and it was her custom to speak in English as she would have spoken in Abenaki.

  I cannot understand why white men believe that the Abenakis and all other Indians speak in gutturals, with perpetual ugging and gugging. I know little of the speech of the Western Indians, who are despised, probably incorrectly, by Abenakis for living in filth and indulging in obscene practices; but I know the Abenaki speech as well as my own, and there is no speech softer to the ear. I have spoken with Frenchmen of some position concerning this matter, and they have said there is no language in Europe as well adapted to express the niceties of diplomacy and the gentlenesses of society as is that of the Abenakis of the Kennebec, the Androscoggin, and the Saco rivers.

  Indeed, it is impossible for me to hear the Abenakis called savages without recalling their honesty, generosity and steadfastness: without remembering the abuse and treachery they suffered at the hands of the lustful, foul-mouthed traders and trappers who fattened on them.

  It may be I shall be damned for saying so; but unless I have misread my Bible, I have found more Christianity and human kindness in Rabomis and Hobomok, the m’téoulin, and Natawammet and Mogg Chabonoke and Natanis and other of my Indian friends than in the venerated and violent Cotton Mather of Boston, who has declared in his writings that all red men are Scythians, and that the practising of cruelties on them and the breaking of treaties with them are justified in God’s sight.

  There have been many Abenaki children stolen by white settlers during my lifetime and reared in white settlements as servants and slaves. Similarly, there have been many white children stolen by Abenakis and reared along the Androscoggin and the Kennebec and the Penobscot as sons and brothers of their captors. Now this is odd, but true: in nearly every case the Abenaki children who were stolen by the whites have sooner or later escaped and gone back to their own people, too frequently taking with them the evil traits of their captors; whereas the white children who were stolen by Abenakis have either refused to leave their captors, or have been desperately unhappy on returning to the settlements and so have rejoined their red brothers whenever the opportunity offered.

  The fearless sachem of the Androscoggins, Paul Higgins, was stolen from the white settlements in his early youth. He said to me once that if he should have to return to the settlements and toil forever at the same tasks, year after year, he would feel like a broody hen, endlessly doing the same useless thing with iron perseverance, and would soon go crazy.

  Even the food and the cooking of the Abenakis proved to be better than endurable. During my illness we lived on venison, which at first I refused to eat without salt, though my father devoured it in the Indian manner as eagerly as did Rabomis and Jacataqua, by dipping it in sugared raccoon fat.

  Seeing the pleasure my father took in this food, I tried it and found it had merit, though I shall never prefer it to three or four platters of my sister Cynthia’s baked beans, well dowsed with my mother’s sauce made from cucumbers and onions. Yet I believe that if the Abenakis had their way they would live forever on venison thus prepared.

  From them, at this time, I discovered if a person has only one variety of food to eat over a long period he will never weary of it. Likewise that venison or moose meat, eaten with salt, as we eat it, has no nourishment; and if naught else be eaten for a week or more the body will be weakened because of certain things the meat lacks. But eaten with sugared fat, in the Abenaki manner, it is nourishing.

  There is good reason for their method of cooking wild ducks, which, some people believe, they savagely eat raw. What they do is roast a duck for ten or fifteen minutes, which is long enough to roast venison, even. At the end of this time the meat on the duck’s breast is red and tender. If cooked for another fifteen minutes, as is usual among those who consider themselves more civilized, the meat is mealy and rich, and repulsive if eaten twice in succession. But cooked the shorter time it is like rare beef, and can be eaten day after day without distress.

  Each day the pains in my head grew less. After six days, Rabomis and the m’téoulin examined my wound, bathing it with warm water and ashes. T
hen the m’téoulin brought his conjuring tools, which were tobacco, a pipe made from the tooth of a moose, the wishbone of a black swan, the shoulder blade of a wildcat, and several dyed feathers. The shoulder blade he rubbed with the wishbone, after which he blew smoke on it from his pipe. He heated it before the fire, brushed it with the feathers, and studied its surface. What he saw appeared to satisfy him, for he declared that to remain longer in the cabin might bring sickness to other parts of my body. He meant I might go out on the morrow and sit in the sun, but he would take no blame if the experiment proved unsatisfactory.

  The Abenakis set great store by their wise men who are gifted, or pretend to be gifted, with m’téoulin; but I have observed that those who predict by means of the wildcat’s shoulder blade are careful to obtain as much knowledge as possible before predicting. If they predict the outcome of the next day’s hunting they take care beforehand to examine the countryside for signs of game. If they foretell the results of a battle they first ascertain the strength of the enemy. Furthermore, they use language understandable in more ways than one; then if their predictions go wrong they say the fault lies in the understanding of those who sought their help.

  On the following morning I went out to find a light wind from the southwest, and a fog off the sea, and a honking and quacking and squattering of wild fowl. From high up came the trumpeting of swans, far out of sight and too powerful to need rest. From lower down sounded the melancholy clamor of geese, weary from their flight against the head wind, and conversing dolefully concerning the possibility of alighting for breakfast. Lowest of all, on every side of the headland, sounded the garrulous gossip of the ducks, thousands upon thousands of them.

  Seeing Jacataqua and other Abenakis drifting toward the lookout ridge, I followed along behind them, and found the women sitting along the ridge sewing moccasins and beading buckskin shirts, and looking down at my father, who was preparing to kill ducks for the whole encampment. On an earlier visit to Swan Island, the women said, he had made a narrow flat-bottomed craft out of elm bark, by means of which he was able to outwit the geese and ducks, even when they were at their wariest, and most determined not to be approached by hunters.