Into the Wilderness

by Sara Donati

  She had moved up next to Nathaniel and stood close enough to touch him; in response he reached down without looking to cradle the child’s head in one large hand. There was a sudden lull in the talking and the little girl’s voice came clearly to Elizabeth, although she did not understand the language.

  Richard Todd made a small sound and Elizabeth turned to him. “Mohawk,” he said. “She calls Nathaniel rake’niha, ‘my father.’ Mohawk was her mother’s language. The Kahnyen’kehàka are matrilineal, you see.”

  “Kahnyen’kehàka?” Elizabeth’s tongue stumbled on the strange word.

  “Kahnyen’kehàka is what they call themselves, it means ‘People of the Flint.’ Mohawk is an outsider name for them. They don’t like it, but it fits.”

  “What does it mean?”

  The corner of his mouth jerked downward. “Man-Eaters.”

  Elizabeth focused, trying to absorb this information. She had heard the rumors of cannibalism; all of England had, but she lent them little credence. She was more interested in the role of women in the tribe, but of such things no one talked. But most of all, Elizabeth did not understand how Nathaniel could have a grandfather who was Indian. There was no doubt that his daughter was Mohawk—Kahnyen’kehàka, Elizabeth corrected herself. It followed quite logically from that fact that his wife, who had died in childbed, whom he still mourned, if Katherine Witherspoon was to be believed—must have been Indian. It was all very confusing. She had never known anyone who married outside his own race; in her world, to marry even a Frenchman or an Irishman was a social disaster of immense proportions. In England, a man of good family who married outside his own race would be ostracized and shunned for the rest of his life. The lady and her children would be invisible to any polite society, isolated and ignored.

  “Sarah—Nathaniel’s wife—was Mohawk. Her father was head of the Wolf clan,” Richard Todd volunteered. She wondered if she really did hear something of distaste in his voice, or if that was her imagination.

  “Who is the old man?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Chingachgook—Great-Snake,” Dr. Todd replied. “Some call him Indian John. He is Mahican. Hannah’s great-grandfather.”

  Elizabeth was more and more confused. “I don’t understand.”

  Dr. Todd looked down at her for a long moment. “No,” he said finally. “It’s not very clear. Chingachgook adopted Dan’l when he was orphaned as an infant, and raised him as a son. So he is by extension Nathaniel’s adoptive grandfather. Although the natives would not recognize the validity of such terms. Once they accept a child into the family they no longer think of it as anything but their own.”

  “Elizabeth,” the judge said, holding out one arm toward her to draw her closer. “I would like to introduce you.”

  For the first time Elizabeth noticed that her brother was nowhere in the room. She was glad that Julian was not present, for she was sure that the way Nathaniel looked at her as she moved toward her father would not go unnoticed by her brother. Elizabeth was very agitated and confused by all the things that had happened this evening, and she was suddenly shy of Nathaniel and a little frightened; how should she speak to this daughter of his? To his grandfather? She had never in her life spoken to an Indian, and she was nervous, and annoyed with herself for being nervous. The thought of Nathaniel’s dead wife kept raising itself in her mind and she put it away resolutely. Elizabeth wanted nothing more than to escape to her room to consider all these strange happenings and feelings in solitude, but that possibility was not open to her.

  With a tone which showed him to be deeply moved, her father made her acquainted with Chingachgook, whom he introduced as a chieftain of the Mahican people, a lifelong friend, and someone to whom the judge owed not only much of his good fortune, but his health and life. Elizabeth was very surprised by this introduction, and even more unsure of how to greet such a personage. She was in some danger of becoming truly flustered, but then she looked into the man’s eyes. His intelligence lit up his face so that it shone like a copper farthing. He might be very old, but his wits were sharp, and while his look was critical, it was not unkind. She curtsied deeply with her head bowed and said nothing.

  When she looked up her gaze went first to Nathaniel, and she saw that she had not offended him.

  “Come,” said the judge. “There is food and drink and you must be very tired—John has come very far, Elizabeth, he has been traveling for many weeks in the dead of winter. He honors us coming so directly to our home.”

  Elizabeth had thought to slip away to her own room, and she began to make her excuses; then she caught sight of Nathaniel, who watched her closely. With a barely perceptible nod of the head she understood that he wanted her to come along with the men, that for some reason he thought it important to have her there. She nodded to her father and let herself be escorted from the room.

  VI

  They settled around the dining room table and let what was left of the party carry on in the other room without them. Curiosity saw to it that the visitors’ plates and tankards were full, and the judge kept their conversation going. Elizabeth thought that she would have some time now to be quiet, to think over all that had happened, and to prepare herself for what might come, but she immediately felt herself observed, on more than one front. Julian had come into the room and taken a place at the table. His color was high, his manner extremely nervous. He tried to catch Elizabeth’s eye. Nathaniel’s observation of her was more subtle, but she felt it very clearly. Then Chingachgook addressed her.

  “You remind me of my son’s wife,” he said to Elizabeth. His voice was deeply melodious and his English had an intonation which was unfamiliar to her. “She was one such as you. Wìnganool, longochquen, we say in my language.”

  “ ‘A keen-spirited woman,’ ” translated Nathaniel.

  “Aye, that she was, my girl,” murmured Hawkeye.

  Elizabeth was flustered and gratified, but most of all she felt very much out of her depth, and was almost glad to have Julian interrupt, as he relieved her of the responsibility of a response.

  “What brings you to these parts?” asked Julian, disrupting this easy exchange. He had found his pipe and puffed at it furiously.

  “I come to be with my son and his people.” The old man spoke quietly, but he addressed Julian without hesitation or a hint of apology.

  “Chingachgook is always welcome in Paradise,” said the judge.

  “When I was a boy, these were Kahnyen’kehàka lands,” said Chingachgook thoughtfully. He paused, and looked directly at Elizabeth. “Kahnyen’kehàka—the Mohawk—were a fierce people. They feared no tribe, they did not know hunger. But most of the Kahnyen’kehàka are gone.” Chingachgook gestured to the northwest. “They fought with the British against the new government, and there is no place for them now in their homeland. Only a few of them are left here in the land of the Wolf, but those are very dear to us.” He glanced at Hannah. “We must learn to live more closely together, we who are left behind.”

  “So you plan to take up residence in Paradise?” asked Julian in a deceptively even tone of voice. Elizabeth kept her eyes on her plate, and wished desperately that she had some way of removing her brother from this room.

  The judge stepped into the conversation; there was a warning tone in his words that Elizabeth noted quite clearly, but that she feared Julian would miss. “Some years ago I incurred a great debt to Chingachgook,” said the judge. “He and his people are free to live on my lands, for as long as they remain in my family’s holdings.”

  All the men tensed at this formulation.

  “ ‘His people’ is very loosely framed, Father,” Julian said.

  The judge rose from his place. “Julian, I would speak with you in my study.”

  With a sigh, the younger man followed his father from the room. There was silence for a moment, as if a great storm had suddenly passed by without touching them. Elizabeth suspected that this tension which had grown in the room would return with her father.
There was some unfinished business between the men, that was certain.

  Chingachgook spoke to Elizabeth. “We have not always been dependent on the goodwill of friends. Once my people hunted to the east. There was game for everyone.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s not the case anymore,” said Richard Todd, who sat to Elizabeth’s left. He had followed the conversation with close attention to this point.

  “Well, that’s true enough,” said Hawkeye, with sudden great emotion; his anger sparked in his voice. “The legislature has been up to tricks,” he explained to Chingachgook. “Those who never had to take a gun in hand to feed a family are forbidding woodsmen to hunt. As if they could keep track of the likes of us in the forest. You ask the judge, he’ll tell you about how the rich men sit together and think up laws to vex common folk.”

  “Surely, Dan’l, but surely,” said Reverend Witherspoon. “Surely you agree that we need laws to restrict the amount of timber that can be taken in a season, and to protect the spawning grounds in the rivers …”

  “You don’t get my point. Of course I can’t deny that fools like Billy Kirby don’t know when to stop and put down the axe. He would take down the whole forest if he could, and every animal in it. But a good hunter never shoots a doe with a fawn beside her, and he don’t need laws written down to tell him so. Common sense is enough of a law, for those who don’t let greed rule them.”

  “Common sense can’t be legislated,” said Elizabeth, and the men turned to her. Richard Todd raised an eyebrow in surprise, but the others did not seem surprised at the way she joined in the conversation.

  “That is true,” said Chingachgook. “And well spoken.”

  “It is true,” said Richard, addressing Hawkeye rather than Elizabeth. “But Billy Kirby is a fact. There are too many like him. From that it follows that we need some greater authority to stop men who won’t stop themselves. The citizens of Paradise will enforce the laws passed by the legislature. You know they will take pleasure in doing so.”

  “Aye, you’re right.” Disgusted, Hawkeye shook his head.

  “There is a shortage of game,” said Nathaniel, taking up the conversation. “We were out every day this week and didn’t get any venison till yesterday.”

  Elizabeth looked down when she felt a hand on her own: the child Hannah, who sat to her right, was looking up at her with a shy smile. Elizabeth thought of bringing up the subject of school, when the door opened and her father came back in, without Julian.

  “I apologize for my son,” he said without preamble. “He has much to learn.” He took his seat next to Chingachgook and clasped him firmly by the forearm.

  “It is certainly good to see you here. It has been too long. You’ll have to tell me about things down Genesee Valley way.” The judge sought out Elizabeth and then smiled at her. “This man saved my life a total of three times, daughter. Twice during the wars, and once soon after, when I was traveling the Mohawk. I had every gold and silver coin to my name in the canoe, on my way to the auction where I bought the second patent, this very land.”

  The judge was a good storyteller, and most of his audience was attentive as he told of that last journey, of the run-in with thieves on the road, and how Hawkeye and Chingachgook had intervened when he believed all was lost. While he was telling this story, Elizabeth watched Nathaniel from the corner of her eye, seeing that he was distracted and that his attention wandered between herself and his adoptive grandfather.

  “And there I made a vow to these two that they should have property rights on whatever land I owned, for themselves and their families. And now finally Chingachgook comes to take what I offered him.”

  The judge wound up with a great flourish, and lifted his tankard.

  Nathaniel and Hawkeye exchanged glances. “Might as well make it clear now, Judge,” said Hawkeye. “My father did not come up from Genesee on his own.”

  “Well, I hardly thought he traveled alone in the dead of winter,” said the judge.

  “Falling-Day’s children came along, too,” said Nathaniel.

  “Otter,” said Hannah, speaking out to the table for the first time. “And Many-Doves.”

  “Well, Hannah,” said the judge kindly. “It must be good to have your aunt and uncle come to visit.”

  With a grin to his granddaughter, Hawkeye answered the judge. “That ain’t all of it,” he said lightly. “She’ll have to put up with them a sight longer. They come to stay.”

  The judge glanced at Richard, but before he could respond, Chingachgook held up one hand, much like a battered and seasoned split of oak. His wrists were ringed with faded tattoos in geometrical shapes.

  “There is no peace in the Northwest Territory,” he said. “Little-Turtle has unfinished business with Washington’s troops, and I for one am too old to fight. I come to my friend the judge for myself, and for my family, and for my son’s family. We will settle together on Hidden Wolf, and be good neighbors.”

  “You and your families are welcome for as long as you want to stay,” said the judge, but he glanced uneasily at Richard Todd.

  Chingachgook blinked slowly. “I come to ask something from the judge which is more than his hospitality.”

  There was a small silence.

  “We are grateful for your friendship and your generosity. But we are a people who must fend for ourselves. It seems that the only way we can do that, and live as we must live, is if we own the land we live on, as the whites do.”

  While Elizabeth had been following the conversation closely, she still missed much of the meaning because the names of these people they discussed were new to her. But now she sensed Richard still suddenly: the tension rose in the room like a sudden blast of heat, and Elizabeth knew that something terribly important was happening. Her father was flushed and perspiring, and Richard sat with his hands in a fist on the table. But Hawkeye, Chingachgook, and Nathaniel were as calm and easy as they had been from the beginning.

  “It is not our way to lay claim to land with pieces of paper. We have never understood this manner of the Europeans. But now it seems we must accept this practice if we are to have any chance of surviving.”

  Chingachgook paused and looked around the room, his dark eyes under their hoods of flesh sharp and observant.

  “The judge has more land than he can use. I ask him as our friend, as a man who has always treated the Kahnyen’kehàka and the Mahicans fairly, I ask him as I would ask a brother who has hunted and fought with me for thirty years, to sell us the mountain called Hidden Wolf, where my son and his son’s family live and hunt. So that we can sustain ourselves in these forests, not as his guests, but as his neighbors.”

  As tired as she was, when she finally had found refuge in her own room after the party, Elizabeth found that sleep eluded her for a long time. There was so much to consider that her thoughts collided and bumped together in a crazy quilt of images and colors: Anna Hauptmann’s broad arms and the moon over the forest; the feel of Nathaniel’s hands on her face and the shimmer of his daughter’s smooth golden skin in the candlelight; the smell of burning sugar and spiced rum; the look on her father’s face when Chingachgook had made his purpose known.

  Uneasy, Elizabeth turned from side to side. She did not know what worried her more: her father’s distant and uncommitted response to what had been a clearly presented and—it seemed to her—logical request; the cold look on Nathaniel’s face at her father’s lack of response; or the look Nathaniel had given her, as if to say: “You see, this is what you must understand about your father.”

  Before leaving England, Elizabeth had not thought much about the natives; generally people believed that they had been quiet for so long that they were no longer a threat, that they had become Christian and had settled into a new way of life. Elizabeth realized she knew nothing about them, about how or where they lived, now, or before the continent had been taken by the Europeans. She did not know her father very well, but she could see that he was torn between his debt to the Bonners an
d his terrible love of the land he had acquired with so much trouble, land he prized so highly that he was willing to sell her in marriage to keep it in his own family.

  And there was the matter of Nathaniel’s family, his Indian family. His wife, a Mohawk. She remembered Katherine Witherspoon’s knowing look. She understood now that Katherine had wanted to tell Elizabeth about Nathaniel’s Indian wife, but was unable to do so without seeming to gossip. To tell Elizabeth that Nathaniel had married an Indian, that he had a daughter who was half Indian, this would be equal to telling her that he was unsuitable as even a casual acquaintance. To a white woman of good family, such as Elizabeth was. That was what Katherine Witherspoon must believe, Elizabeth realized. That was what she herself would have taken for granted just a week ago.

  Elizabeth found in herself a deep curiosity, not just about Nathaniel and his family, but about how they had come to the place they found themselves now. He was like no one she had ever known, his life to this point beyond her imagination, his problems beyond her understanding. Elizabeth knew that she could not ask her father for explanations, and that whatever she needed or wanted to know about this new place, about the people here, and about her own future in it, she would have to learn from Nathaniel. That this man, as strange as it must seem, was her only ally here. That they could help each other: she would do what she could to advance his cause with her father, and he would introduce her to this new world.

  She shifted uneasily in her new, unfamiliar bed, and thought of kissing Nathaniel.