Thirty miles we made that day, the last of it along the top of the bluffs. When we came down to the river’s edge we found Goodrich’s men digging in the wet gravel for the roots of water plants. Noah Cluff was stretched beside a fire, which Phoebe tended, while Nathaniel Lord and Asa Hutchins scratched feebly in the dirt. They were a miserable-looking company. Their movements were slow; their eyes sunk deep in their heads.
While we stared at them, a battered canoe shot down through the white water. In the middle was Captain Dearborn, gaunt and bearded, holding to his big black-haired dog. The canoe was guided by the chief of the axemen who had worked at clearing the portages, a Mr. Ayres, a strong and tireless man. Natanis wagged his head as he watched him, declaring he had done two great things—first to venture to take a canoe from Lake Megantic to this point, and then to succeed in doing it. Even with a good canoe, he said, it was a great feat; whereas this canoe, he could see, was worn out and on the verge of breaking in the middle. In the bow was a soldier, sitting as close to the end as he could get. When the bow dipped beneath the white surges, the water foamed against the soldier’s lap and chest and fell away on either side. Otherwise the canoe would have foundered. It came inshore and grounded near the fires.
Natanis spoke quickly to Jacataqua, and she caught her dog by the scruff of the neck and held him. To me he said: “There’s still enough light for us to see. We’ll try to reach Sartigan to-night, so to send out all the rest of Paul Higgins’s men to help these poor people. Tell them they’ll reach the inhabitants to-morrow; and say to the sick captain there’ll be another canoe for him at the Great Falls.”
They vanished in the dusk. Cap Huff and I moved closer to the fires.
“Hey!” said Noah Cluff when he saw me. “Is that you?”
“Who’d you think it was?”
“Can’t be sure of nothing nowadays,” Noah said. He had trouble getting his breath. “Seemed as though the river was all mud flats this afternoon. Thought there was clam holes in it. Thought I saw water squirting up out of ’em from the clams.”
Phoebe lay back to look up into my face. I was glad my mother was not there to see her and to put the blame on me—not that she’d have thought me to blame; but the sight of Phoebe would have made her angry at all the world, and she’d have known that I could best endure her anger.
She had found dried grass somewhere and stuffed it into her jerkin for warmth, and her poor thin neck and face stuck out above this swollen jerkin like a doll’s head fixed on a body too large for it.
“He started to walk in and dig clams,” she said, and smiled up at me. It was a terrible, strained smile. I looked at Cap, and found him opening and closing his hand, as I had seen him do before hitting someone, and I knew the same thought had come into his head that had come into mine: the thought that somebody must pay for all this.
“Can you hold out, Phoebe?” I asked. “It’ll only be till to-morrow.”
“To-morrow!” Nathaniel Lord whispered. “I’d like four pork chops and a chicken and two dozen ears of green corn!”
“Corn!” Phoebe cried. “I’d forgot there was such a thing as corn! I couldn’t think of anything but pumpkin pie.”
“My God!” Cap Huff said. “I never found out who stole that pumpkin pie off me!”
“Listen, Stevie,” Noah said, “you don’t need to worry about her not holding out. It was her kept me from walking into the river to dig clams!”
“You were going to give me some, weren’t you?” Phoebe asked.
“Yes,” Noah admitted.
“Well,” Phoebe said, “I didn’t want them. That’s why I stopped you.”
“Gosh, Phoebe,” said Noah helplessly, “I don’t rightly know what you’re talking about!”
She edged over and slipped her arm through his. “Keep everything full and by, Mate.” She smiled at me, that same terrible, strained smile. “Noah can sail on the Ranger, can’t he, when we get home?”
“Why, yes, Phoebe. Anyone you say. That’s your job.”
I took the raccoon fat from my breeches pocket and held it behind my back. “Here,” I said, going down on one knee beside her and speaking the lines my mother used to say to me when I was little: “Open your mouth and shut your eyes and I’ll give you something to make you wise.” When she did so I popped into her mouth as big a lump as I could get on my forefinger, knowing that if I gave it into her hands she’d eat none of it herself. I held her arms until she swallowed; then gave her the rest of the package. It had scarce left my grasp before she was sharing it with Noah.
“Take some, Steven,” she said, before she turned to Nathaniel Lord.
I told her Cap and I had eaten recently and could hold out until the next day, expecting to hear a bitter outcry from Cap; but he was watching Asa Hutchins and a good-for-nothing rogue named Flood who hailed from Wells or York. These two were standing together, near poor Captain Dearborn, who had climbed weakly from his canoe with his big black dog clumsily striving to be kittenish before him, delighted at being on dry land again.
What ailed Captain Dearborn I don’t know; but he was close to dying of it, whatever it was. All of us went about our duties for more than two weeks thinking he was dead and buried; and indeed he looked ready for burying, even now, his face dead white, and sunken around his mouth and eyes, and a ragged black beard making his face seem more waxy and deathlike than it was.
Ayres held him up and guided him, to keep him from pitching on his face. Even when guided he put down his feet as though he expected to find nothing under them.
Asa and Flood approached Dearborn, quiet and hesitant-like, as hunters steal up to a river bank. Remembering Natanis had given me a message for Dearborn, I went along behind them.
When they reached Dearborn they went around and stood in front of him. Asa did the talking, while Dearborn, being a fine and thoughtful gentleman, stopped and listened.
“Captain,” Asa said, “our bateau got wrecked. We ain’t had any food since the morning we got lost in the swamps. We’re real hungry, Captain.”
“My boy,” Dearborn said, “I know it! I do, indeed! I feel for you and for all the others, and I’m sure God will soon deliver us out of these tribulations.”
“Captain,” Asa said, “there’s a lot of us here that ain’t far from dying and we’d like for you to help us.”
“Why,” said the captain, “I’ll do what I can, but there’s nothing I can do, my boy. To-morrow, I hope—”
“Captain,” said Asa, “this dog of yours, he’s a fine dog. We’d like for you to give him to us.”
The dog, clumsy, fond creature, galloped up to us with his tongue lolling out, and blowing pleased, audible breaths. He pranced a little before Dearborn and then went over to grin amiably at Asa and Flood.
“Why,” Dearborn said, “I wouldn’t—do you mean to eat?”
“Damn you,” said Ayres, “get out of here! You’ll have food in the morning! Can’t you see the captain’s sick?”
“Captain,” Asa said, watching Ayres warily, “I think some of us might die to-night if we can’t get something into us. That dog, he’d feed thirty men. Maybe fifty. We think you ought to let us have him.”
“Why, dear, dear,” Captain Dearborn said, “dear, dear! He’s been with us all the way! I’d no more eat him than I’d eat one of you! Why, bless me, my boy, you don’t want to eat him!”
“Captain,” said Asa, “we’d eat anything! We tried moose hide and moccasins, but they ain’t no good.”
“If you could only wait until to-morrow—”
“It’s now we want food! Captain, let us have him.”
I think Ayres must have made some move to go for Asa; for Dearborn stopped him. “We can’t be judges,” he said to Ayres. “Just because we can hold out is no sign others can. What we can do we must do.” He put his hand around the dog’s nose, pressing it weakly, and the dog looked up at him, grateful and loving. “Take him, my boy,” he said to Asa, “but take him a long way off, and be�
�be merciful.”
Asa hunkered down, snapping his fingers. The dog came to him immediately, taking pride in the friendship. Asa took him by the neck and led him away.
“Asa,” Cap called after him, “you could wait until to-morrow and you know it. If you won’t, I’ll give you two weeks to fatten up in. Then I’ll knock your gizzard out through your ears. You’re a rat, Asa, and if I was as hungry as you claim to be I’d kill you and keep the dog.”
It seemed to me there was no way of knowing how Asa and Flood were affected by their hunger, and no justification for Cap’s violent language. I determined, none the less, to attend to Flood’s gizzard on the day Cap dealt with Asa’s.
XXVII
CAP and I took Dearborn down the river bank on the following morning, his canoe having softened in the middle so we dared not let him sit in it, though Ayres said he would take it as far as the Great Falls or know the reason why. Dearborn was deathly sick, his legs numb and lifeless at times, nor were ours as reliable as they might have been.
Noah Cluff and Phoebe and Asa and the rest had gone on before us. In an hour’s time we heard a screaming, thin and reedy, and musketry fire, so we dropped Dearborn behind a tree and fumbled with our own muskets, fearing the British had come out from Quebec.
Then Cap began to swear; the rich, mellow swearing of relief; for four wild-eyed oxen came lumbering past us, small oxen, but oxen none the less, and two horses ridden by swarthy little Frenchmen in dirty gray blanket coats and knitted caps, from under which long queues hung down. There were sacks of meal thrown across their saddle bows.
Running with the cattle were other Frenchmen with yard-long queues and blanket coats, and Abenakis belonging to Paul Higgins’s band. Thus we had escaped starvation by the breadth of a gnat’s whisker.
We hurried to come up with the others, and found fifty men gathered together. An ox had been left with them, and they had shot it, stripped off the hide for moccasins, and cut the body into pieces with hatchets. The place was a shambles, the men crouched over fires with meat stuck on sticks, and the remnants of the ox still steaming beside the path. Up and down among them went officers telling them to have a care in their eating; but many wouldn’t listen, only tore at their meat like dogs tearing at a gristly bone.
When we brought food to Dearborn, he couldn’t eat. Being low in spirits from his illness, and from thinking, probably, how his black dog would have delighted in the fragments from this ox, he fell to weeping, saying over and over: “The poor men! The poor men!”
I might have had no trouble myself if Cap, seeing Dearborn’s tears, hadn’t begun to snuffle and snivel as well, and if Phoebe, seeing us, hadn’t come running up with her piece of meat and divided it between us. Because of all this, and because there was a weakness in my throat from God knows what, I felt wetness in my own eyes, though I controlled it at last by shouting at Cap, calling him a lazy fool and demanding whether he intended to stand there all day when we had work to do.
We pressed on to the Great Falls, which are less than ten miles from Sartigan; and Sartigan is the end of the wilderness and the beginning of roads and houses. There was an Indian watcher at the falls, an Abenaki, who told me where to find the canoe of which Natanis had spoken, a circumstance that bemazed Dearborn, to say nothing of Ayres, who was waiting for us at the falls when we arrived.
He had no reason to doubt, Ayres said, that this was a howling wilderness, but it seemed to him a strange thing that whenever he and Captain Dearborn needed a canoe, there was always one ready for them, as though it had grown on the nearest bush.
When we had come to the end of the carry around the falls we found two more Abenakis in another canoe, bringing additional provisions to the men.
These braves asked whether Dearborn was the sick captain of whom Natanis had told them, the one who had traveled all the way from Megantic by canoe. When I said he was, one of them quoted an Abenaki saying—“It is easiest to stumble at the end of a journey”—and they unloaded their provisions, hiding them by the trail, and took us to Sartigan in the two canoes.
There was little of note to the place we knew as Sartigan. There were four houses, small whitewashed affairs with thatched roofs, and barns for horses and cows, and a powerful odor of manure over everything. In each house dwelt a stunted Frenchman with a queue hanging to his rump and a face the color of a black duck’s belly.
These houses, unimpressive as they were, had a mighty importance in our sight. It had been thirty days since we had set eyes on a habitation: not a long time, I know; yet to some of us the thirty days had seemed longer than all the years of our lives, and we had thought too often we might never see another house again.
At the edge of a field behind the houses were wigwams; there, the Abenakis told us, we would find Natanis. Near the houses was set up a small shelter in which a young Frenchman sold food—rice and potatoes; milk and bread and chicken. He seemed pleasant, and I thought best to deal with him, since we were ravenous and had no way of knowing what Natanis had found for us.
The young Frenchman seemed glad to see us, and this, I told Cap, augured well for our travels in Canada. The young man demanded hard money for his provisions: a quart of milk being one shilling, a pint of rice one shilling, a loaf of bread one shilling, and a chicken two shillings. No wonder he was glad to see us, Cap said. At such rates he would quickly make enough to buy himself a seigneurie, provided his chickens held out. Nor, Cap added, could starving men question such prices, though for his part he considered them downright dishonest.
He pulled out his shirt-tail from what was left of his breeches, cut loose three dollars from the hard-money armor that protected his rear, and selected four chickens, two loaves of bread, a pint of rice, and a quart of milk. When the young Frenchman hid the three dollars, Cap watched him closely—so closely that I felt almost certain the three dollars might soon be attached to Cap’s shirt tail again.
Natanis and Jacataqua were waiting at the wigwams; and from Natanis, while Jacataqua popped the chickens and the rice into the pot, we had the news: how Colonel Arnold had gone five miles down river and taken headquarters; how all the Abenakis had gone up river to help the army; how Natanis had sent word to Paul Higgins that he and Paul would demand a council with Colonel Arnold in two days’ time. There was nothing for us to do, Natanis said, but eat and sleep ourselves back to health again.
“I’m healthy enough,” I said, “and to-morrow morning I’ll be as good as ever I was. I can see Cap is thin and tired, but I’m better off than he is; so I’ll go back to look after the Arundel men.”
Natanis laughed and took a mirror from behind a bearskin in the corner, holding it so I could see myself; and at what I saw I almost reached for my musket.
My hat was gone, and my hair matted like a last year’s robin’s nest. There were corrugations in my forehead, and grooves between my eyes, and the eyes themselves were red, with black smudges beneath, as though I had rubbed them after cleaning a stove. My cheekbones stuck out above a reddish beard, mottled and stained with pitch and scabs; and what there was to be seen of my lips was cracked and blackened as if from eating hot cinders. My buckskin shirt was torn in a dozen places and my breeches were wrecks, so that I might well have hesitated to appear in public without wrapping myself in a towel. There was next to nothing left of my stockings except what was hanging around the tops of the clumsy moccasins Paul Higgins had given me. All in all, I was a spectacle to make a child flee in terror, screaming it had seen the bogey man.
“You’re needed at the council,” Natanis said, “and there is nothing you can do for your friends that won’t be done by my brothers. You’ll be doing all of us a service if you clean yourself and eat and sleep.”
“What does he say?” Cap asked.
Jacataqua looked up from the boiling chickens. “He says,” she translated, “he wants you to run back twenty miles and carry food to those that need it.”
Cap reached over and caught her by the ankle, pushing forward a
nd upward so that she stumbled backward into his lap. “I’ve wore myself to a shadow,” he said, holding her arms so she couldn’t smack him, “and there’s going to be food carried to me for a change.” He made a show of biting her ear, baring his teeth and growling horribly.
“What do you have for Phoebe to wear?” I asked.
Jacataqua shook her head. “Nothing. These French people have blanket coats, but they’re expensive.”
Cap rolled over, spilling her out of his lap, and dragged his shirttail out of his breeches. “Here,” he said, “take what you need.”
Jacataqua eyed it thoughtfully. “No: it’s not big enough to make a coat for her.”
“Gosh!” Cap cried. “You ain’t fit to travel in polite society! Unstitch the money before I take you over my knee!”
We had a chicken leg apiece, and a cup of broth, and slept until Jacataqua woke us to give us more. She held open the deerskin doorway as we ate, and we saw Smith’s riflemen wading the Rivière la Famine and coming up to the first house, skinny, hairy, ragged men, shuffling along with no attempt at order, but whooping and laughing: glad to be alive.
It was the next afternoon when Jacataqua woke us again. A heavy snow was falling, and Phoebe sat inside the opening of the wigwam stitching at a piece of gray blanketing. Her hair was bound neatly in a blue cotton handkerchief once more, and her cat’s eyes hung at her throat, so she looked more like my old-time Phoebe. There was a grimness about her mouth that hadn’t been there before we started on this devil’s march, but that looked as though it might remain for many a long year.
“You look awful,” she said, seemingly able to see me out of the back of her head. “There’s two weeks’ sewing to be done on your breeches and shirt, and land only knows what you’re like underneath!”
“Pretty bad,” I said, getting myself into a better position to eat the rice and chicken that Jacataqua brought. By this time we could have more: not a meal, by any means, but enough to taste. Phoebe took my cup when I’d finished with it, and drank broth.
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