Into the Wilderness

by Sara Donati

  Elizabeth wondered why she was so very agitated; it was only a bird, after all: she could see it very clearly, its very long, spindly neck and bobbing head, the wattle bright red against the background of snow. Not such a very hard shot, she thought, not for a good marksman with steady hands. The crowd was calling advice to Nathaniel as he stood up to the shooting stand and checked his rifle once more, the well-worn stock glinting in the sunlight.

  “Come on, Nathaniel, we’re depending on you!”

  Yes, thought Elizabeth, it seems that everybody does depend on you.

  There was silence as Nathaniel took aim. He was very much like his father, Elizabeth noted. He had the same long, straight back, and he held his head tilted just the same way, a blue vein pulsing lightly in the slight indentation of his temple where the dark hairs were drawn back. The line of his arm, the juncture of gun with shoulder, the very cloud of gunsmoke seemed to settle into stillness for a small moment. Elizabeth held her breath.

  “Don’t think about the shoulder,” called Hawkeye gingerly. “You’re made of stronger stuff than a little torn muscle.”

  “Think about Miss Elizabeth across the table from you instead!” called Charlie LeBlanc, just as the powder flashed in the pan.

  “Well,” said Hawkeye after a goodly pause. “He pulled too far to the left, ye see. Nicked the bloody bird’s beak.” He spoke to Nathaniel’s back. “The shoulder’s too wound, I told you so.” And he set off down the snowy embankment toward the turkey with Billy Kirby and the other men in tow.

  Nathaniel set to reloading his rifle straightaway. For the moment they were alone. Elizabeth watched as he removed the plug from his horn and poured a measure of powder into the barrel. From a pouch on his belt he took a greased cotton patch—Elizabeth noted with some surprise that it was brightly colored, the kind of fabric a woman would use for a skirt—and wrapped it around a lead ball which came out of his bullet bag. He detached the ramrod from its brackets and shoved this all down the rifle barrel with one firm push. Then he poured more powder into the priming pan. All of this took less than a minute’s worth of quick and economical movements, and the whole time, Nathaniel seemed to be more focused on Elizabeth than he was on his job.

  “I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said, meaning that he had lost his shilling. Then she wished she had remained quiet.

  Nathaniel grinned. “Well,” he said. “I suppose I’ll have to forgo your company at my table. At least for the time being.”

  Elizabeth looked away toward the men arguing over the state of the turkey. “I wouldn’t have thought you would give up so easily.”

  He raised an eyebrow, amused. “There are other birds in the forest,” he pointed out. “And as far as getting you to my table, I expect that won’t be too difficult, either.”

  “Talk is easy,” Elizabeth said lightly, causing Nathaniel to laugh out loud.

  Down the embankment, Dr. Todd was called to officiate. The bird was pronounced scared half to death, but whole enough for the competition to continue.

  “Maybe you’ll get a taste of the bird anyway,” Nathaniel was saying to Elizabeth, and she looked up with a start to see her brother at the shooting stand. She had been so involved with Nathaniel and the scene at hand that it had never occurred to Elizabeth that this was a sporting event—and that Julian’s promise to refrain from participating in such events was being tested for the first time since leaving England.

  “Julian,” she said. Then louder, calling to him: “Julian!”

  Her brother turned, an eyebrow raised.

  “You can’t shoot,” Elizabeth said.

  Julian ignored her, but Katherine came up, flushed with cold and excitement. “Richard loaned him his rifle. Your brother’s agreed to champion me,” she said brightly. “Father would be very glad of the bird, and I thought it worth a shilling.”

  “Julian,” Elizabeth said quietly to her brother’s back. “You promised.”

  Rather than watch her brother check his gun and take sight, Elizabeth turned and walked away. She had just pushed her way free of the crowd around the shooting stand when Julian’s first shot went afield. Clutching her skirt in her hands, she turned back to see her brother throwing another coin to Billy Kirby.

  “Again,” he said, and he traded the rifle for one freshly loaded and cocked. “He must tire of ducking soon, the bloody great monster.”

  “That’s the spirit!” called Billy Kirby gleefully.

  With a sense of dread, Elizabeth turned and caught Hawkeye’s gaze. Nervously, she beckoned him toward her. Nathaniel and Hawkeye came away from the shooting stand to where Elizabeth stood near the bonfire.

  “Please,” Elizabeth said. “Won’t one of you have another try?”

  “Elizabeth, it’s just sport,” Nathaniel said kindly. “Let your brother have his fun.”

  Julian had missed again, and he turned to the crowd. “This next shot will be the one, I feel it. Anyone care to lay odds?”

  Hawkeye and Nathaniel exchanged glances.

  “I’ve got a shilling here for a gentleman who would be willing to champion me,” she said in a voice as calm as she could manage. Elizabeth felt as though Hawkeye were looking straight through her, into the panic curling into a fist in her stomach.

  “Why, that would be me,” said Hawkeye. He turned toward the shooting stand, where Julian was in the process of negotiating the borrowing of yet another rifle. “Hold up there, Billy Kirby, letting one man have all the fun. I’ve got a shilling here and I claim a shot. I got a lady to champion myself.”

  The crowd closed around Hawkeye, who took up his place at the shooting stand and set to checking his rifle. Elizabeth felt Nathaniel’s questioning gaze settle on her face.

  “Can he make the shot?”

  “Don’t want your brother and this turkey on familiar terms, it seems,” he said dryly.

  “I’m determined to keep my brother solvent,” she corrected him in a low voice. “But if he starts in again waging bets, I may not be able to.”

  Julian stood to Hawkeye’s side, eyes narrowed, as the older man took aim. There were hectic splashes of color on his cheeks, his eyes narrow but flashing nonetheless.

  “He has trouble staying away from the betting tables?”

  “You could say that.” Elizabeth nodded. “He had to be bought out of debtors’ prison and put directly on the boat to New-York.”

  Nathaniel’s frown put a crease between his eyes; Elizabeth was taken with a strong urge to run a finger down that crease to the point between his brows, to smooth it away. The urge to touch him was surprisingly strong, so she wound her fingers in her skirts once again, and she met his gaze as evenly as she could.

  “But surely the judge can cope with your brother’s gambling debts,” he said quietly.

  Elizabeth forced herself to look up into Nathaniel’s face. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said. “But my father is cash poor. That’s why there’s this great hurry to marry me off. A better loan guarantee than a daughter with property is hard to come by.” She knew she sounded bitter, and that she was telling too much, offering too much. She knew too that he would take what she offered. She wanted him to.

  Hawkeye fired; the crowd was silent for a fraction of a second, and then began to shout in triumph.

  VIII

  In the weeks after Christmas, Elizabeth began to dream of Nathaniel, so that she grew both anxious before she fell asleep, and reluctant to wake in the morning. While the rising sun touched the frost on her windows and shattered into rainbows, she would lie half conscious in the warm nest of her covers and relive what she had dreamt, blushing and slightly breathless, confused and strangely discontent. She might pretend, in the day, that Nathaniel had not tried to kiss her, or that his interest was unimportant, an aberration, but at night her dreaming self took that almost-kiss and spawned from it a multitude of dream kisses, of growing warmth and intensity.

  So Elizabeth began her days with a lecture. She would comb her hair out before th
e mirror and chide herself for a silly, weak, foolish creature. Every morning she was determined to make a new start in the name of reason and good sense. But still she caught herself staring at the curve of her lower lip. This lack of self-control soon began to wear on her usual placid good humor; Elizabeth went down to breakfast in a contrary mood.

  The first of the new year came, and she was without a place to hold school. Her father refrained from pointing out to her that she had failed in the resolution she had put forth so forcefully at the first dinner in Paradise. Julian would not have been so sensitive as to spare her from teasing, if she had not had his behavior at the turkey shoot to hold over his head.

  He had been avoiding Elizabeth since that event. At that moment when Hawkeye had killed the bird, Julian had sent her one sharp look and then stalked away toward home, leaving a surprised and worried Katherine Witherspoon behind. The other men had thought it was just bad sportsmanship on Julian’s part, but Elizabeth had seen the old fever springing up in her brother, the compulsion which had cost him his fortune. She thanked Providence once again that they were so far from a real city where he might find other men as fond of cards and as careless with their resources.

  To keep her mind off the delays in her plans and—although she did not voice it to herself so clearly—Nathaniel, Elizabeth spent her mornings organizing a work space in her room, putting her books in order, and writing teaching outlines. After lunch she would go for walks, if it wasn’t snowing too hard; she made it her business to visit the children in the village and speak to their parents, hoping to get them used to her presence and accepting of the idea of her school before too long. She came to know many of the villagers well enough to talk to them comfortably. Martha Southern, a shy young woman married to a man old enough to be her father, especially sought out Elizabeth’s friendship and encouraged her to come to the village. Martha had a daughter whom she wanted to send to Elizabeth’s school, and a son who would soon be old enough.

  Elizabeth found that she had most of her time to herself, and this was a great relief. Her father was often out on his errands, and Julian went down to the village where he had got into the habit of sitting with the farmers and other men who spent odd moments in the trading post or in the tavern that adjoined it.

  In the third week of the new year, Galileo made a trip to pick up the trunks which had traveled up the Hudson behind them, and stopped in Johnstown for the post on his way home. Elizabeth came down to breakfast to find letters from her aunt Merriweather and her cousins, but more importantly, her school supplies. She immediately set to unpacking the texts and materials she had bought in such a spirit of hopefulness in England. There were grammars and composition books, volumes of essays and histories, philosophy and math. She was a little shocked now at how poorly she had anticipated the needs of the children of a place like Paradise, but Elizabeth refused to be shaken in her resolve. She spent a good part of the morning making plans and notes to herself, and constructing a letter to aunt Merriweather in which she requested another shipment of more basic texts, more writing materials, a large supply of ink, horn tablets, and after some consideration, storybooks, fairy tales, and mythologies.

  She wanted to engage the children and not alienate their parents, and she spent a good amount of time pacing back and forth in the study while she chewed thoughtfully on the end of her quill. So deeply was she entrenched in her thoughts that she started at the knock on the door.

  Hannah Bonner stood framed against the snowy landscape in her winter cloak. The fur-lined hood was pulled high over her dark hair, framing her glowing face, her teeth flashing white against the bronze skin flushed into deeper shades by the cold. She smiled brightly at Elizabeth and curtsied.

  “I’ve come to fetch you home to eat turkey,” she said by way of greeting. “Grandfather says it’s high time.”

  Confronted with this logic, Elizabeth could see no recourse but to change her boots and go. She resolved firmly not to check her hair, or change anything about her appearance. Then she stopped in the kitchen to tell Curiosity where she was going, and she saw with some vexation that her agitation was not lost on the housekeeper.

  Curiosity raised one eyebrow, pursed her lips, and set Daisy to wrapping things and putting them in a basket for the Bonners.

  “Won’t do to go up Hidden Wolf empty-handed,” she said, and sent Elizabeth on her way without further commentary, but with a knowing look that made her feel Hannah’s age instead of her own.

  Elizabeth had seen Nathaniel, outside her dreams, exactly four times since the turkey shoot on Christmas Day. Twice he had been too far away to greet, driving the oxen he borrowed from her father to drag logs out of the forest. Once he had come to the house to speak with the judge about building supplies and she had not known he was in the house until she saw him on his way out.

  It was at that point that it became clear to Elizabeth that the whole conversation in the dark woods had been a lark, a game: Nathaniel did not dwell on it, nor on her. Then she saw him, accidentally, for the fourth time.

  She had been walking down to the village and heard the cry of a hawk; looking into the forest, she had seen Nathaniel standing in a grove of pine with his axe in his hands, and his eyes fixed on her. Startled, Elizabeth had stood very still. Then he just disappeared into the forest, as if he had never been there.

  Elizabeth did not know what to make of it. He was watching her. Perhaps he had been watching her for days. For weeks. There was no good explanation for it; she pushed away impatiently the images and thoughts that worked their way to the surface, refusing to consider them. But they came to her unbidden, in her dreams.

  And there was no escaping word of Nathaniel. Daily reports on how much timber he had hauled and the ongoing preparations for the building of her schoolhouse came to the dinner table. While she was tempted to retire before Richard Todd’s evening visit, her curiosity always won out, and she ended up sitting with the men, a book in her lap, waiting for him to volunteer details about Nathaniel’s progress without the necessity of asking.

  Now Hannah walked quickly, glancing back once and again at Elizabeth as if to assess her endurance. She had her grandfather’s easy way about her, talkative without being repetitive or tedious, and before they were even through the village and on the path up the first inclines of Hidden Wolf Mountain, Elizabeth had heard about every other child in the village who would be at her school.

  “What about you, then?” she asked at the first opportunity. “Will you come and see what I can teach you?”

  “I can read,” Hannah offered. “And do sums, and write a fair hand, and I know how to sew, and I can spin and weave, and do some beadwork, though I ain’t very good yet at it. And I know where things grow—” She stopped and pointed to a set of tracks in the snow. “Moose,” she said, clearly surprised. “And see.” She pointed farther. “Otter and my father are tracking him.”

  Elizabeth stared for a moment but couldn’t make out much more than a jumble of footsteps in the snow.

  “Who is Otter?”

  “My uncle. His Kahnyen’kehàka name is Tawine—Otter, because of the way he swims. In the north, the Catholics call him Benjamin.”

  “What’s your Indian name?”

  “They call me Squirrel but my skin name is Used-to-Be-Two.”

  Elizabeth wondered about this strange name, but waited to see if the girl would supply an explanation without prompting.

  Hannah pointed out the tracks of a fox, and spots where boneset and wild plum grew thick in the summer. Then she glanced at Elizabeth, and seemed to consider.

  “My twin died at birth. So, my mother’s people say that I am half of what I might have been.”

  It seemed to Elizabeth very important that she make the right response here, but what that might be was a mystery.

  “I’m afraid I have a lot to learn,” she started, slowly. “I don’t really understand very much about the Kahnyen’kehàka—” She paused, not sure of the pronunciation but loat
h to use the term Mohawk, as the child seemed to avoid it. Hannah grinned at her attempt, and Elizabeth went on, somewhat more at ease. “Or the Mahicans, or how they are related—”

  “The Mahicans ain’t Six Nations,” Hannah supplied, trying to be helpful, but making things all the more unclear. “They lived to the east, mostly below the lake.”

  “They live here now, with the Kahnyen’kehàka?”

  “No,” said Hannah simply. “They are all gone now, or most of them. In the wars.”

  “We have things to learn from each other, then,” Elizabeth said. “We should have stories at school about your people, but I don’t know enough to tell them.”

  Hannah smiled, but she was not to be drawn into a promise about coming to Elizabeth’s school.

  “Grandmother doesn’t think much of your kind of schooling,” the little girl said, perhaps a little apologetically. “She says the white men don’t seem any the smarter for it.”

  Elizabeth digested this in silence, surprising herself. Even a week ago she thought she would have had much to say, and perhaps in anger, but even simple things were now so complicated that she saw the wisdom of holding back with her opinion. Soon the opportunity to ask more questions had passed: they were walking uphill, and breathing became an issue. Elizabeth began to think that her idea of exercise had been rather a tame one. The lanes and walks around Oakmere at their very worst were no more than wet and muddy; even the walking holidays she had taken with her aunt had been docile by comparison.

  Off the track, the snow had drifted up to Elizabeth’s hips in some places, but the path they walked was wind scoured and well enough broken. Still, it was rough going, and Elizabeth’s admiration for Hannah was considerable: she moved lightly and quickly while Elizabeth struggled along behind her with the basket Curiosity had packed so thoroughly. The freezing air burned in her lungs, while her fingers and toes, well wrapped in wool and leather and fur, still grew wooden with the cold.