In one of the bateaux I saw Burr; and the thought came to me that he had a knack for discovering which side his bread was buttered on; that he had doubtless smelled out Morgan’s extra provisions and abandoned Jacataqua for them, since food can be more important than a woman to some hungry men.
There was no trace of the army when we reached the meadow, save at the lower end, where Morgan’s men had lain during the snowfall. The remainder of the meadow was smooth beneath its white blanket; and from the upper end rose a thin column of smoke. While we watched it Hobomok came out from under the trees and signaled to us; so we laid up our canoe in the thickets and went to him. He had two partridges for us, and a piece of bear’s fat that Paul Higgins had left, and this food we ate at once, fearful of suffering James Dunn’s fate.
Many times, since those days, I have listened to windy talk from folk who have never gone hungry; and it seems to me there is more ignorance concerning hunger than any other subject. It may be that I am wrong in this, and that there is general ignorance concerning all things. At all events, I have some small knowledge of hunger, and am able to recognize ignorance concerning it.
Unlike thirst, which causes agony in the mouth and belly of him who suffers from it, hunger is little more than a dull disturbance in the interior, readily banished by the eating of fish or roots. Its greatest evil is the weakness that goes with it—a deceptive weakness that trips the legs unexpectedly and robs a man of the power to endure cold or heat, or to make the sudden violent effort that often saves him from death. I had as lief go without food for days on end, if I could sit in a chair and do nothing while going without; but if I must labor or fight or march, then I must have real food, pork and flour: fat meat aplenty. If I cannot have fat meat, then I twist into knots with hunger cramps, even though I fill myself with trouts or moose meat, in which there is no fat.
While we ate, Hobomok gave us what news he had. Two hours after we had left the meadow on the day before, he said, a messenger had come up from the lake: the guide Hull, one of those who had sat before the cabin with the rum-drinking Conkey, on that faroff day when I had gone to Conkey to learn about Natanis.
Hull, Hobomok said, had come with good news, seemingly, from Arnold; for after his message had been learned the men capered in the meadow, some discharging their muskets in the air. All of them had thereupon cooked their flour into cakes, each man having as much flour as could be picked up in a handkerchief, but nothing more. Some, Hobomok said, had eaten their cakes at once. Immediately thereafter, though there was only an hour of daylight left, all those in the meadow, saving Morgan’s division, between three hundred and three hundred and fifty men, had rolled their blankets and set off to the northeastward, along the shoulder of the Height of Land. Colonel Greene and Hull were in the lead, so it was evident that Arnold had sent Hull back to guide them.
“They’ve started properly to go to Lake Megantic,” said Natanis, “but I suspect the guide will turn down from the Height of Land too soon and lead the men into the swamps of Maple Leaf Pond or Finger Lake, which are larger and wetter than the one in which you spent last night.”
Paul Higgins, with three men, Hobomok said, had followed behind the last of the marchers, leaving word there would be one Abenaki messenger always on the blazed trail to Lake Megantic along the shoulder of the Height of Land.
With no further talk we crossed the meadow and took up the trail, which led us over and around a tangled maze of precipices and gullies.
In an hour we came to the spot where the men had camped the night before. There lay before us, in place of the trackless snow, a muddy, trampled expanse, the trees slashed by the hatchets of six companies, and thirty blackened circles where the campfires had burned. From that spot onward a blind man might have followed the trail; and as we pressed ahead, Natanis pointed here and there to the boat-shaped marks of Paul Higgins’s leaf-stuffed moccasins.
At the end of another hour’s march we came to a brook that flowed out of a valley between two precipices. The trampled trail of the men turned at the brook and ran downstream along its bank, toward the north. Natanis pointed across the brook at a twisted bull pine; and when I looked closely at it I saw three small slashes close up under a lower branch, all of them perpendicular.
“The trail goes straight,” Natanis said. “This fool guide has missed it and gone down the brook. The brook runs into the swamps of Maple Leaf Pond, where there are no trails.”
“Is there a way to escape?” I asked.
“Probably not,” Natanis said. “Once you are in that swamp there seem to be rivers everywhere. It’s hard to tell bogs from arms of the pond, or either of them from rivers. Your friends will move to the eastward, thinking to skirt the swamp and come to Lake Megantic; but to the eastward they’ll strike Finger Lake, which they’ll have to round. It has so many arms, sprawled out like the legs of a spider, that to round it is like rounding the hub of a wheel by crawling out to the end of each spoke and in to the hub again, and out to the end of the next spoke and in to the hub again, time after time after time.”
“You say there’s no trail through these swamps?” I asked, thinking how we might bring the army out of this place before nightfall.
“It would be useless to go after them at this time of day,” Natanis said, seeming to sense what was in my mind, “because there’s no way of finding them except by following their tracks. We might be forever in coming up with them. Paul Higgins and his men have followed them down the brook; and tracks of one man go up the true trail. This, I am sure, is Paul’s messenger.”
“Go ahead on the true trail, then,” I said, “until you come up with the messenger. I hope to God Paul can help them.”
We went ahead, slipping and stumbling in the snow over country that grew no worse, because it was already as bad as it could be. It was beyond belief, almost, that so great an area could be so battered and crumpled, as though mauled and smashed by a giant hammer, and hurled contemptuously into this forsaken end of the world by the angry god that did it.
At a second brook, which we reached at mid-afternoon, we found a fire smoldering beneath an overhanging cliff, and in the snow a drawing of two Indians shooting at a rabbit, the rabbit being twice as large as the hunters. Thus we knew that Paul’s messenger had come up with one of his advanced messengers, and that the two had gone to hunt.
Here, Natanis said, we must camp; for the brook flowed down into Finger Lake, and it was probable Paul Higgins had told his messenger to wait here, hunting for food.
“I think they need food,” said Natanis gravely. “No man would draw a rabbit larger than himself unless a rabbit seemed something to be greatly desired. Therefore we’ll all go hunting.”
He sent Hobomok to the lower land to look for rabbits or raccoons. “When you return,” Natanis said, “shoot anything, even a crow, if you have found little game. A crow is better than nothing.
“You and I, Brother,” he told me, “will go back along the trail. I saw a dead tree on high ground after we passed the first brook. I think it may be a good tree for us.”
We went back over our trail; and I swore, as we crawled and stumbled over it, that if ever I got free from this damnable land of bogs and dead shrubs with a dreadful aptitude for plucking at a man’s eyes, I’d spend the rest of my life among the level sands of Arundel, and climb nothing higher than the dunes where Mary Mallinson and I had eaten our lobsters and kissed each other.
Nor, having thought of lobsters, could I get them from my mind, but brooded on them while I clambered over rotten logs and clung to ledges. I could almost smell their salty, seaweedy odor, and feel their tender shells crunching between my fingers; and I thought to myself that I could eat twelve, if they were large ones, and as many as twenty-five if they were small chicken lobsters. Indeed, when I really put my mind to it, it seemed to me I might be able to eat thirty, or even a round three dozen, provided I was not hurried, and could dip each one in a dish of my mother’s fresh butter, hot from the stove, and ch
ew a little now and then on thin corn bread, and have an occasional draught of small beer to wash it down.
What Natanis had seen was an ancient white oak that had stood alone in a cup-shaped hollow in the mountainside for many years, lording it over its domain so that no other trees grew near. A bolt of lightning had shorn off its head, and it had died, with two gnarled arms held out to the hills as if for pity. Young trees, knowing nothing of its past grandeur, and caring less, had sprung up near it, weedy and useless-looking, as all young things so often are.
Once Natanis had shown it to me, I could see scratches on the trunk. On its upper side a branch had been blasted off, and the inside had rotted, so that there was a hole in the tree, with claw marks at the edge. This, we were sure, must be a bear hole; but since the hole was forty feet from the ground, and the trunk too large to climb, and since there was no small tree tilted near to the hole, nor any we could cut for a ladder, we were obliged to take thought as to how we should get at the bear.
I have said many times I would never kill a bear cub, because of its likeness to a fat, mischievous child; and I took no pleasure in bear-hunting, their flesh tasting like coarse corned beef, and their appearance being overmuch like a harmless dog, as well as human in many ways—far more human, I often think, than some of my fellow townsmen who spend their days in slander and meanness.
It is painful to hear men brag of killing our Eastern black bears, as though they had done something fine and brave; for the bear is the gentlest creature that lives, almost, and a clown to boot, and timid as a mouse. There is scarce an Abenaki huntsman in all our province who would not willingly attack a bear with his knife alone.
Yet this bear seemed another matter. I wanted him; for we were desperately hungry, and there was sure to be thick fat beneath his fur—beautiful, sweet fat.
Twelve feet from the oak trunk was a scrawny maple, but it slanted away from the oak, so that even after it was climbed, the climber was still out of reach of the hole. We hunted, however, until we found a thicket of birches, close-grown so they were slender and tall. From these we cut a sapling three times my height, trimming off the branches. From a blown-down birch we took handfuls of dry, rotted wood, rolling it in birch bark until we had a dozen small bundles the size of my two fists.
We built a fire, after which Natanis fastened the bundles to the back of his belt and climbed the maple until he was twice my height in air. Thereupon I lighted a bundle of rotted wood, poked the end of the birch pole into it, and handed it up to Natanis.
He slipped another bundle from his belt, and lighted it from the burning bundle on the pole. Hitching the pole upward, he held it out like a fishing rod, and dropped the smoking bundle of fuel into the hollow oak. At once he placed his second bundle on the end of the pole, ignited a third from it, and dropped the second after the first. Bundle after bundle he dropped into the hollow tree, until smoke poured from it.
Soon we heard a sneezing and snuffling, and a small bear, about three times the size of Ranger, scrambled sleepily from the hole and clung to the edge of it, coughing and pouting out his upper lip with fright. I shot him under the left shoulder, and he fell down with no further movement.
This is the one pleasant thing about the killing of a bear: when shot in the head or near the heart he dies at once, unlike a deer, which may run for half a day with a bullet hole in him big enough to kill a dozen bears. Sometimes I have thought a bear may receive a wound that has no great seriousness to it, and yet die of the fright.
However that may be, we were overjoyed to have him. With the help of Natanis’s carrying string we hauled him over the trail and to the overhanging ledge at the second brook, where we found Hobomok and Paul Higgins’s messengers skinning two raccoons. They came shouting down the path at sight of the bear and carried him the rest of the distance for us, whooping ecstatically. When they had taken out the liver and wrapped it in the caul fat from his inside, luscious, delicate fat, they spitted it on a ramrod, catching the dripping in a bark dish. It was not much of a meal, but it stayed our stomachs and gave us strength to skin and quarter the bear.
At dusk two of Paul Higgins’s Abenakis came up with us, one dragging a soldier at the end of a carrying string and the other urging on a second soldier, who constantly fell in the snow, as if drunk.
When we put the soldiers by the fire they became as though dead, seeming scarce to breathe for long periods.
Soon Paul himself came out of the dark, carrying two extra muskets and blankets. He reached at once for a piece of raw bear fat; then examined the two exhausted soldiers.
“This is bad business,” Paul said. “Three hundred of these men, maybe three hundred and fifty, went down into the swamps soon after daylight this morning. Ever since then they have followed the bogs and the arms of Maple Leaf Pond and Finger Lake, in and out and in and out, up to their knees in water when not up to their middles. I gave over following them for fear I might be lost myself and never come out.”
We waited for Paul to tell us the tale, knowing that if he had left the army it was for good reason, and not from timidity, for although I have heard Paul talk of his fear of this and that, I have never seen him feared of anything.
“Their guide,” Paul said, when he had spitted a piece of bear meat and hung it before the fire alongside ours, “is a bad one, and in a panic. He has reached a point where he dares not leave the watercourses, no matter which way they run.”
“Then he’ll follow watercourses in that swamp the rest of his life,” said Natanis pleasantly.
Paul cursed the guide in English; then took a huge bite from his bear meat, a bite big enough to feed my sister Cynthia for two whole meals.
“Here is what I did,” he told us. “I don’t know whether I did right, but it was as near right as I could do without going the entire length of the column to reach Colonel Greene and the guide, and being mistaken for a spy.”
He laughed testily. “It may be I could never have caught up with the head of the column. It was in a frenzy to get wherever it was going.” Again he swore in English. “Through those swamps and thickets, the worst traveling ever I saw, they marched not less than fifteen miles. They may have marched twenty!” He made a hissing sound. “Twenty miles! And all of them hungry and weak, and tripping at every step on the roots beneath the bogs!”
He chewed his bear meat. “They stopped for nothing after they’d been in the swamp three hours. If a man fell into a stream, or lagged from sickness, they left him and went on, hurrying, hurrying, fearing to lose their places in the line.”
He got up and looked at the two soldiers again, felt their chests and nodded encouragingly. “We found four men that had fallen out. One had collapsed in a stream. He was dead. Another had sat down to rest. I took him to dry land, but he died. These two”—he pointed to the soldiers—“could go no farther. One of them lay as he lies now. The other would walk a little and fall: walk a little more, then fall again. It seemed to me they might live after they had slept and eaten.”
“I think they can march to-morrow afternoon,” Natanis said, “if not given too much food.”
“When I saw how they would never leave the arms of Finger Lake,” Paul continued, “I came out of the swamp and went to the eastward until I reached this brook, lower down. Then I went back into the swamp and hunted a piece of high land, a sizeable piece. On it I laid sticks for a fire, close under a pine so the flames would set it alight. Also I made lines in the snow, pointing to the trail, and blazed trees with proper trail marks. Toward dusk I lit the fire and went away a little, to watch.
“In a short time I heard shoutings and splashings, after which some men, led by an officer with a large forehead, dragged themselves out of the swamp and up to the fire, all of them glad to be there. The officer was thin, with lips that purse up into a laugh, as if unwillingly.”
“Major Meigs,” I said.
Paul nodded. “I hope these men, finding my fire and seeing my signs, will know enough to trail me. If they d
o, Natanis can lead them around the eastern end of Finger Lake and down to Megantic before the sun is overhead to-morrow. If not, and if they spend two more days in those swamps, it will be as bad a thing as ever happened.”
He looked up at the sky and sniffed. “To-night will be cold. The swamps will freeze the thickness of my tongue—”
“Thick enough to walk on,” Natanis said.
Paul glowered at him. “Not thick enough for white men to walk on: only for Abenakis with light brains. The swamps will freeze, and if they wade through them for two more days they’ll die, all of them.”
“We’ll get them out of the swamp to-morrow,” Natanis said, “no matter what happens. It may be they’ll come up the brook in the morning, following Paul’s tracks. Paul has done well, and is a credit to the great Abenaki people.”
“Yes,” said Paul, “and I’ll be waiting to-morrow night to hear your jesting and your idle laughter after you’ve cut your shins on swamp ice for half a day.”
We were up at dawn, hoping for sight or sound of Greene’s men. We shook the two soldiers into consciousness and fed them strips of bear meat, small and thin. They fell asleep at once, wretched-looking men, heavily bearded, their clothes and shoes in shreds, and a powerful odor about them.
When we had waited another hour it was plain that the army had not followed Paul’s trail.
“I’ll go into the swamp,” Natanis said, “and see what has become of them.” He left us, traveling with no blanket or pack; and in less than two hours he returned.
“It’s all right,” he said, shouldering his pack and motioning for us to do likewise. “Only one company of men camped at Paul’s fire. The others made fires on unflooded land nearer Finger Lake. Therefore the one company went back and joined the others. The guide is still following the arms of Finger Lake, striving to get around it. I know where they must pass in three hours’ time, or maybe four.”
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