Into the Wilderness

by Sara Donati

  “Don’t tell me you’re fool enough to think the Iroquois are no threat to a white woman,” Moses barked. “There’s plenty who had their women, and little girls too, stole away and never seen again. They have a way of ‘doctrinatin’ women, bringin’ ’em over to their way, and they are good for nothing after that. Except to serve Indian bucks.”

  Anna shook her head. “Now stop, Moses. You’re not talking about the Hurons on the warpath, and there’s not enough Mohawk left to steal a three-legged cow. You know old Indian John, and Hawkeye—you been doin’ business with them these many years. And if you have something bad to say about them, why then I know you’re lying.”

  “Kidnapping?” asked Julian. “There were such rumors at home, but we thought they were exaggerated.”

  “Rumors!” Moses fumed, kneading a mangy cap between his fingers. “Rumors!”

  “Moses had a sister took, when she was just ten years old,” supplied Jed McGarrity.

  The door opened and Richard Todd came in, shaking snow from his hat and his shoulders.

  “Ask Todd here, he can tell you what they do to women. He knows about them. Why, if my sister walked in this room right now, you couldn’t stand the smell, and you couldn’t talk to her, either—she wasn’t gone but three years and she didn’t know her own tongue anymore, just the Abenaki gibberish. And she spent all her years putting out one Indian half-breed after another.”

  Richard greeted each of them. “Who got you started, Moses?” he asked dryly.

  “Mr. Southern has a story to tell,” said Julian. “I’m interested. After all, they live on my father’s property.”

  Moses looked about himself as if he expected an Indian bent on murder and kidnapping to materialize. “I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t let my sister alone with them. There’s that young buck, he’s got a wild look to him. They got no business here in Paradise with decent folk. And you know that I ain’t the only one to think so!”

  “Folks are talking about Chingachgook wanting to buy Hidden Wolf from the judge,” Jed said uneasily.

  “Not bloody likely.” Julian sat up abruptly, dumping the sleeping cat unceremoniously to the floor.

  Moses nodded furiously. “We didn’t rout the English—” He paused and sent a regretful look toward Julian. “Begging your pardon, but we fought hard to get out from under, and I for one won’t stand by and watch the judge hand good land back to the red devils. They seem whupped, that’s true, but let ’em think they got the upper hand and they’ll start coming after our young’uns again, you watch.”

  “There hasn’t been a kidnapping in these parts for twenty years,” said Anna with an uneasy glance toward Richard Todd. “And I won’t have talk like that here. Those people are good neighbors and good customers.”

  “Bah!” Moses scowled, and then jammed his cap on his head. With a nod to the men, he thumped the butt of his musket on the floor. “I’m going. But don’t say I haven’t warned you about your sister and them Indians.” And without a word to Anna he left and slammed the door behind him.

  “What’s this about Elizabeth?” asked Richard.

  “She went up to Lake in the Clouds yesterday afternoon and didn’t come back,” said Jed.

  “Lake in the Clouds?” Richard asked. “But why?”

  “To eat that confounded turkey, with the old man,” Julian said. Then he grinned, one corner of his mouth drawn up. “She got caught up there in the storm. You worried about Nathaniel stealing your intended away?”

  Anna perked up at this. “Intended? Is there some celebrating to be done, then?”

  Richard looked annoyed. “Don’t start rumors, Julian. There is no agreement between your sister and me.”

  “But there will be, if Father has anything to say about it,” noted Julian. “And you seem set on it yourself, if I may make the observation. Unless you’re worried that Nathaniel is too much of a threat.”

  “I’m not overworried about him,” Richard said, irritated to be having this conversion within Anna’s eager earshot, but still unable to keep quiet.

  “Ha!” laughed Anna. “You don’t know how many young women in these parts wish Nathaniel would come steal them away. Not that Dr. Todd don’t have more than his share of eager eyes. Especially,” she added with a wink, “of a Sunday at morning service. Especially in the front pew.”

  Richard looked at her darkly, and she withdrew with a nervous laugh.

  “Hawkeye is probably on the way down with her now.”

  “Well, it’s clear you want to go after her. Go on, then, old boy, if you can’t manage to think of something better to do,” said Julian. He stretched. “Mr. McGarrity,” he said. “Do you by any chance play dice?”

  Jed McGarrity started, his bony shoulders losing their perpetual slump for a brief moment to rise up around his ears and fall away again. “I was raised to think that dice and whiskey were the devil’s instruments.”

  “Ah, well,” Julian sighed. “Too bad, then.”

  Hawkeye suggested they leave straightaway after breakfast. He was afraid there would be another storm later in the day, and he wanted to get down to the village and back again before it hit.

  “She probably doesn’t have the first idea about snowshoes,” said Otter. “She’ll need a lesson.”

  Nathaniel had gone out before sunup and still had not returned, so Otter took Elizabeth outside to see to her instruction. Hannah came along, chattering, to provide assistance and encouragement. Elizabeth was anxious about what they were expecting of her, but she knew there was little choice, and so she stepped out into the morning with a little trepidation but considerable determination.

  The first sun on the new snow reflected and reflected back again until it made her eyes water. Elizabeth blinked and squinted and wiped the tears from her cheeks. Finally she was able to look around her, and she stood stunned. “The cave of wonders,” she said, mostly to herself, but Hannah grabbed her hand and yanked.

  “What’s that?”

  Elizabeth glanced down at her. “From the stories called A Thousand and One Nights,” she said. “The cave of wonders, where everything glittered of gold and jewels. Like this.”

  The glen was awash in snow, the branches of the trees woven thick with it, the boulders grown to strange proportions. And the sun struck what seemed to be every individual flake and set the glen shining in a kaleidoscope of colors.

  Otter was strapping the snowshoes onto Elizabeth’s boots, his hair falling forward to brush the snow into patterns.

  “A Thousand and One Nights?” asked Hannah, awed. “Tell the story!”

  “I’ll save that one for school.”

  Hannah’s face fell. “Then I may never hear it.”

  “I hope you will,” Elizabeth said. “I’ll do my best to see that you do.”

  Otter looked up. “You’ll have some talking to do, then,” he said. And, not waiting for Elizabeth to reply, he took her elbow and helped her up.

  They made it around the corner of the house before Elizabeth got stuck. The snowshoes crossed, and unable to untangle them, she lost her balance and fell backward into a sitting position. They helped her up, and this time they got much farther: past the woodshed, and all the way to the barn, before she stopped again with her shoes crossed. But this time Elizabeth was able to get herself untangled on her own.

  With great concentration she picked up her pace a bit and made it around another corner, moving deliberately in a steady rhythm, and watching her feet. They did two more rounds, and then diverted a little so that Elizabeth could have a try at going up and down an incline; she almost fell once, but after that was fairly steady. Then they returned to the porch, where Otter and Hannah hung back.

  “Try it again,” Otter said. “Show us what you can do.”

  Elizabeth grinned at them, and set off in a ducklike straddle. She liked the feeling of moving, suspended over the smooth surface of snow; she liked the cold on her face. She rounded the second corner in good stride and ran full force into Nat
haniel.

  “Umph!” He let out his breath as he caught her, and they fell backward through the crust of the snow.

  Elizabeth looked down on Nathaniel in horror. For a brief second, their noses touched and her mouth hovered over his. His breath was warm on her face.

  “You don’t have to knock me down to get me to kiss you, you know,” Nathaniel said with a grin.

  With a strength she didn’t know she possessed, Elizabeth leapt away from him and into a standing position. She stood breathing hard, wiping snow from her face.

  Nathaniel got up, too. “I’m sorry,” he said contritely, but his grin would not quite go away. “I shouldn’t tease you.”

  “No,” Elizabeth gasped. “You shouldn’t.”

  Hannah came around the corner and almost sent Elizabeth colliding into Nathaniel again.

  “Whoa!” he called, grabbing her. He turned to Elizabeth but she had already righted herself and was on her way.

  “What did you do to her?” Hannah asked in Mahican.

  “I gave her time to think about it,” said her father. “My mistake.”

  It took all her energy and concentration, but Elizabeth focused on her snowshoes and moving over the surface of the snow; she would not think of what had just happened. She would not. She hoped Hawkeye was ready to go, because she didn’t know how long she could continue not thinking of what she wanted and needed to think about.

  Otter had gone off to the woodshed. Elizabeth fumbled the snowshoes off, and then stood for a moment trying to collect her thoughts. Finally, worried about Nathaniel’s reappearance, she went into the cabin.

  The common room was empty. Elizabeth passed through it and found Falling-Day scraping the moose hide, which had been stretched out on a frame. Many-Doves stood to one side with a bowl in the crook of her arm, mashing the contents with a pestle. The smells were very strong, and Elizabeth drew back a little.

  Many-Doves caught her movement and looked up.

  “I thought, if Hawkeye was ready—” Elizabeth said. The women didn’t answer right away; she saw them taking in her color, and the fact that her breath still had not steadied completely.

  “What’s that?” Elizabeth asked, nodding to Many-Doves’ bowl.

  “The brains,” Many-Doves said. “Every animal has just enough brains to cure its own hide.”

  “Ah. Well. Do you know where Hawkeye is? If he’s ready to go?”

  “Hawkeye went out to set traps,” said Falling-Day. “Nathaniel will take you down to the village.”

  “Oh, I see.” Elizabeth’s smile felt brittle on her face. “Well, then, thank you for your kind hospitality. And the meal. I hope to see you again—” She had been about to invite them to visit her at home, when she realized how strange this might seem to them, and she paused.

  “Goodbye,” she said finally, and turned to go.

  Nathaniel was waiting on the porch with Hannah. They were deep in an intense conversation, in Mohawk or Mahican; Elizabeth thought it might be Mahican. It sounded different from the language Falling-Day spoke to the children.

  “Ready?” Nathaniel asked.

  Hannah helped Elizabeth strap on the snowshoes once again.

  “He’ll take you down a different way,” she said. “Better for the snowshoes.” She smiled, and touched her fingers to Elizabeth’s.

  Elizabeth put her hand on the small, sleek head and nodded. Then she set off into the cave of wonders behind Nathaniel.

  The trail through the woods accommodated only one person on snowshoes, compelling them to move in single file, for which Elizabeth was grateful. With Nathaniel in front of her, she could watch him as closely as she liked, without being observed or required to talk to him.

  He moved purposefully, with a grace that made her own progress seem very awkward by comparison. The long line of his back was so straight that the rifle slung there barely swayed, although in the hush of the woods Elizabeth could just make out, above the sound of her own breathing, the soft sound of the gun’s stock rubbing on his buckskin mantle. Nathaniel had not tied his hair back, and it fluttered behind him.

  The branches bent low under their burden of snow, creating a roof over the narrow path like white arms of young girls crossed and crossed again. Elizabeth’s pace flagged a bit so that Nathaniel pulled quite far ahead of her, walking through a tunnel of snow shot with sunlight. Then he stopped at a rise in the path where the forest fell away, and waited for her to catch up.

  Elizabeth walked toward Nathaniel, drawn forward by his gaze, the force of his attention a magnet she could not resist. She joined him on the little rise and saw the valley and the village spread out below them. From here Half Moon Lake was an irregular bowl of the deepest frozen blue, and the world around it every shade of white. In front of them was an elongated clearing, framed by forest.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, how beautiful. You can’t see this place from below, can you? What is it called?”

  “The folks in the village call it the strawberry field. It’s covered in fruit, in season. Children come up and eat themselves sick. Bears, too.”

  Nathaniel took Elizabeth’s elbow and turned her to him. Her mouth hung open in a little circle of surprise, her lower lip full and bloodred, and he knew that his good intentions were worth nothing. He had tried for a month to stay away from her, but he remembered the promise of her mouth, as if no time had passed at all. This urgency in him was something he had forgotten about, something he thought gone forever; he had done so long without it. It was a surprise, and not an altogether welcome one, that there was something in the world, someone in the world, who could move him like this; it was shocking to want again. Here, in front of him now, her dark hair curling around her face, her skin so pale that he could trace the veins in her throat. So different from Sarah, but with the same core of flint, able to light the same fire in him. And he could see, in the brightness of Elizabeth’s eyes, in the way she drew breath in at his touch, that she felt the same urgency, although she didn’t have a name to put to it. Nathaniel stripped off his mitts and let his hands move up to push her hood back onto her shoulders.

  “You look as if you’ve been eating strawberries,” he said. “Your mouth is so red.”

  Elizabeth stared at him, her breath coming fast. Her blood rushed like a tide, and suddenly Nathaniel came into new focus: his eyes, which she had thought to be hazel but were shades of green and gold and brown, like sunlight in a summer forest; the high brow, furrowed, and the way his hair waved back from a widow’s peak; the small cut healing high on his left cheek; the tiny white indentation on the bridge of his nose; the shadow of his beard.

  “Tell me you don’t want to kiss me,” he said, his thumb stroking the curve of her cheekbone.

  And his mouth, the clean lines of his lips, the blood pulsing there.

  “I can’t,” Elizabeth said hoarsely. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Then do it,” Nathaniel whispered. “Kiss me.”

  Startled, Elizabeth pulled away a little. Nathaniel was looking at her with an intensity that frightened her, and she saw that he meant it, that he was waiting for her to do this. His fingers threaded through her hair. He waited; she knew he would wait forever. She could do this, and take what she wanted, or walk away, and live without it. She felt flooded with heat; there was a tightness in her chest. Elizabeth leaned toward him and, reaching up, kissed Nathaniel.

  His lips were surprisingly soft; Elizabeth hadn’t imagined that a man’s lips could be soft and firm all at once. Especially not this man, who seemed to be carved of wood. But his lips were very soft and gentle and moreover they were cold, while his mouth was not. This contrast was unexpected. His cheek was rough with beard stubble; his hair swept forward to touch her own cold cheek. His smells were strong, unidentifiable, overwhelming.

  A little sigh escaped her as the angle of his mouth deepened and he tilted her head to meet him, kissing her lightly, a brushing; every nerve in her lips set to humming. They stood leaning toward each
other across the awkward expanse of their snow-shoes, joined like a wishbone by the soft suckling of mouths. Nathaniel slid an arm around Elizabeth’s waist, and they crumpled into the deep snow together.

  “Oh,” she said, and he took her mouth, her warm mouth, and coaxed it open. Her whole consciousness was centered here where their mouths joined: the soft persistence, the way his head dipped as he changed the direction of the kiss. They sat in the snow, Elizabeth sprawled against Nathaniel’s lap with her arms slung around his neck and snowshoes sticking up around them at odd angles. The cold was forgotten, all the snowy world around them was forgotten in the world of his callused hands, his rough, cold cheeks, his warm mouth on hers.

  Finally she pulled away and stared at Nathaniel with her whole body trembling.

  “Better comfort than apples, isn’t it?” Nathaniel murmured, his thumb at the corner of her mouth.

  “Oh, no,” muttered Elizabeth. “Oh, no.” She struggled to right herself, managing to situate herself on her snowshoes. She looked around wildly, brushing at her snow-clotted cape. Nathaniel got up to help her and she pushed him away. Then she grabbed both of his hands and squeezed them hard, looking at him with eyes gone suddenly severe.

  “And where is this to go?” she asked. “What are we to do?”

  Nathaniel looked down on her, at her gray eyes daring him to push her too far. On her face was the clear and desperate hope that he would give her an excuse to turn away for good.

  “Where do you want it to go?” he said. “What do you want us to do?” A thought came to him that made him wonder. “Do you know what passes between a man and woman?”

  “I’m a virgin,” Elizabeth said grimly, dropping his hands. “Not an idiot. Of course I know what it means to—to mate.” But she could not meet his gaze. With a surprising change of posture, her back straight and her shoulders set, she faced Nathaniel with a new stillness in her face, a terrible stillness.

  “Is that what you want of me?”

  “It’s part of it,” he conceded. “But it’s only one part. I can’t look at you and not think about touching you. How fine you feel to me, the warmth of you. What the rest of you must be like.”