Into the Wilderness

by Sara Donati

  The river curved and turned on itself again and again, sometimes smooth, more often rushing white; she dreamt of it as a great snake beckoning into the woods, its ancient scaled back glimmering in deep greens, sapphire-blues, golds and tarnished silvers. Then she woke, still full dark, to find that they had pulled up to the bank. Nathaniel had to raise his voice over the steady trill of crickets to be heard.

  He had warned her, while they were still up at Lake in the Clouds, about the portages. There were three, he had explained to her while he filled his powder horn to the brim and did the same for his bullet pouch. The first would be the easiest. She would need to help carry the provisions and gear. He didn’t ask if she could or would, he simply told her what needed to be done. It was not a situation either of them had anticipated, and there was no discussion necessary.

  The sky was filled with stars so bright it was hard to look at them. In this light, Nathaniel’s face seemed stern, almost angry. He helped her out from her spot between the bundles, letting her go as soon as she stood on the bank.

  At her feet a fat frog glistened in the moonlight. It let out a deep croak, and leapt into the river with a splash. Elizabeth felt the spongy give of sphagnum moss through the soft soles of the moccasins she had put on in such haste, along with a doeskin overdress and leggings which Many-Doves had offered. She had let the women dress her as if she were a child, so distressed had she been at the necessity of this deception. Now she was glad of it; the cured leather felt strange against her skin, but it was comfortable and warm in the night chill, and she could move in it freely. Elizabeth patted her chest to feel the crackle of the papers she had secured there.

  She accepted the shoulder pack Runs-from-Bears gave her, and stood patiently while he adjusted it. It was a considerable weight, but slung as it was at that spot on her back where she could best bear it, she felt as if she could walk for as long as necessary.

  “Sata’karite ken?” he asked her. Are you well, do you manage? She pivoted, surprised, to see him smiling at her in a kindly way.

  She nodded. “Wakata’karite.”

  “Many-Doves said you are a good student,” he said, and turned back to his work.

  Nathaniel unloaded the canoe and strapped on a considerable shoulder pack of his own while Runs-from-Bears stacked the bundled furs in a tower as high as his ear. Elizabeth watched as he slung a line around it and then placed one broad leather loop around his chest and a narrower one against his forehead. When he stood up, the long pack of furs stretched down the full length of his back.

  Then, in a movement so fast that she could barely follow it, Nathaniel simply leaned over the canoe, gripped it on either side, and flipped it up to hang suspended above his head like a long and absurd hat.

  That was the beginning of the first portage. They walked through the near dark for an hour until they found the river again, and the process reversed itself. By that time Elizabeth’s knees were wobbling so that she was glad just to crawl into her spot. Before the canoe was back in the pull of the river, she was asleep.

  She woke gradually the next time, aware of the awkward way she slept with her head hard to one side. The sun was coming up, and it was raining, but she was too sleepy to find the oiled buckskin and pull it over herself. And the noise. She swatted feebly around her head as if to shoo it away. Then she felt Nathaniel’s hand on her cheek and she started and sat up suddenly, dislodging bundles from her lap.

  The falls were someplace ahead of them, not in sight. Elizabeth wondered at how loud they could be at what must be a considerable distance. It wasn’t rain that caused her hair to curl, but the fact that the air was dense with mist. This was the one he had warned her about, the portage to circumvent the waterfalls and rapids the Kahnyen’kehàka called Hard-to-Get-Around. They had four miles to walk through the bush, with a full load of furs and provisions and the canoe. As tired as she was, as much as she feared what lay ahead, Elizabeth welcomed the challenge. She was determined not to disappoint him.

  But then, she wondered if she had done that already; displeased him somehow. He was so quiet. Since they had been on the water he hadn’t said a word to her, hadn’t once smiled, hadn’t touched her except when she needed his help.

  They went through the routine once again and then they set off on a well-trodden path. The river quickly dropped away, and the sound of the falls lessened. Elizabeth breathed deeply, glad of the exercise and the feeling that she was doing her part. They had moved fast on the water and this was slow, but she was expending her own energy now and that felt right. Every step took her farther away from her father and Richard Todd. She thought of the unread letter next to her heart and set her jaw a little harder.

  Just when the pace of the march had begun to wear on Elizabeth, they stopped. There was a little clearing surrounded by scraggly pines, hard-packed earth and a well-used fire pit testifying to its ongoing use to travelers. Elizabeth hoped, although she would not ask, that they would rest here, and in fact Nathaniel flipped the canoe gently to the ground at the edge of the clearing.

  “Best look after your own needs now,” he said quietly as he took the pack from her shoulders. “Don’t go too far, and don’t use any leaves you can’t put a name to.”

  She nodded, avoiding his gaze, and went off into the woods. Fumbling with the ties on her unfamiliar clothing, Elizabeth lectured herself sternly on the need for flexibility and self-reliance in new and challenging situations.

  When she came back to them, the men were already eating. Runs-from-Bears handed her a hunk of corncake studded with nuts and cranberries and a piece of dried venison, which she accepted thankfully. Nathaniel was staring into the wood and seemed not to notice her. She sat cross-legged on the ground with her head bowed while she chewed, willing her eyes to clear of tears. They ate in silence and Elizabeth wondered miserably if they would ever talk again. When Runs-from-Bears got up and walked into the wood, she did not watch him go.

  She felt Nathaniel’s hand on her shoulder.

  “Come,” he said softly. “Come, you must be thirsty.”

  A few paces into the woods there was a small spring that erupted from a tumble of boulders, pooled and then ran away in a stream back toward the river.

  Nathaniel lifted her chin with one finger. “I’m sorry,” he said tersely.

  “What are you sorry about?” Elizabeth asked, jerking her head away. “You haven’t done anything.” She knew how terribly bitter she sounded, but she was too unhappy to dissemble.

  “You’re ill at ease and I ain’t helping much,” he said. When she didn’t deny this, he smiled.

  “Don’t have much excuse for it, though. Except things was pretty tense, and I’m quiet when I’m worried.”

  He crouched and leaned forward to drink from the spring, and then, wiping his mouth with his hand, he gestured for Elizabeth to take her turn. But his hair was bound back in a tail and hers was not; it swung forward and caught the water, spraying her with droplets. Concentrating, Elizabeth tried again with her head at another angle.

  Nathaniel watched her grow furious with herself for her clumsiness. Knowing the danger of touching her, he hesitated but then caught up her hair to hold it for her while she drank. The heavy silkiness of it filled his hand and caught his fingers, revealing the slender white back of her neck. That sight made everything in him clutch in a fist of urgency and lust and protectiveness.

  She managed it with his help and gurgled a little laugh, turning to him with water flashing in her eyelashes. Then she stopped, her own face suddenly mirroring the look he knew she must see on his own, the wanting, the tension of not enough time for wanting.

  He dropped her hair as if it were on fire.

  “Now you know how to drink from a stream,” he said hoarsely.

  “Nathaniel,” she said.

  She put her chin up at that angle that meant he had better listen. If it weren’t for the fact that the sun was rising and that back in Paradise people might already be aware that she was gone,
he knew he would take her right here. The stunned look on her face said that she would have him, and gladly.

  She cleared her throat.

  “They can’t possibly be after us yet,” she said. “Curiosity won’t let them near my room until nine, at the earliest.” There was a little catch in her voice, something strange in the way she related this. He met her gaze steadily and she blushed.

  “Your brother knows you’re gone,” he pointed out.

  “Yes,” she said. “He does. But he can’t exactly tell them that, can he? Nathaniel.” She paused, and then that lift of her chin again. “It wouldn’t hurt you to talk to me a little, you know. It won’t make them move any faster, and it would be … a comfort. This is hard for me, if you hadn’t realized.”

  “I realized,” he said, less gently than he intended. “And you’re right, it won’t make them move any faster but it might make us slow down some.”

  Her face clouded at this, and Nathaniel swore softly to himself even as he watched his hand lift of its own accord. It slid through the tumbled hair and his fingers found the nape of her neck, holding her there. She closed her eyes and swayed toward him. Nathaniel met her halfway, dipping with his head to tilt her face up to him. He caught her mouth briefly, and then let her go.

  “Tonight,” he said. “Tonight we’ll talk. Once we’re wed. That is,” he said, with the first full smile he had been able to summon up since she had come sprinting through the night to Lake in the Clouds. “If we don’t find better things to do.”

  They were back on the water by mid-morning. The men paddled hard, and the canoe moved through the twists and turns of the Hudson with an agility and elegance which Elizabeth soon took for granted. Even the patches of white water came and went without causing her much concern; it wasn’t until later, when Mrs. Schuyler asked about this stretch of their journey, that she came to realize how much she had assumed.

  But it was hard to pay attention to anything but the incredible beauty of the river and the lands which bordered it, the mountains in the grip of spring. A good four weeks early, Nathaniel pointed out. And the warm weather was their good fortune. Elizabeth thought of this journey with the added burden of a snowfall or heavy rains and she said a silent prayer of thanks.

  She saw things she had never imagined; a moose with impossibly long legs walking nonchalantly into the water to browse the new shoots, swallows careening and dipping by the tens and hundreds, a doe heavy with fawn frozen at the edge of a marsh, a line of turtles on a partially submerged tree trunk, their knobby shells glowing gray-green in the sun. A bear cub on its own, gnawing at a flyblown carcass of a fox on the shore. Elizabeth pointed this out to Nathaniel.

  “Wolverine,” he corrected her. “Or some call them forest devils.” She looked again and saw the long, bushy tail.

  There were rich smells, the water itself and sun on fertile mud and acres of wildflowers in blossom. At the river’s edge, willows trailed pale fronds in the water where dragonflies hovered.

  And there was Nathaniel to watch, in front of her. He had taken off his shirt in the heat of the sun. At first she looked away, the vestiges of aunt Merriweather’s training still strong enough to make her start at his nakedness. But of course she must watch him, this man she had held in her arms just a day ago. This man she would hold tonight. She was at complete liberty to look at him to her heart’s content. A little self-consciously, knowing that this would not escape the attention of Runs-from-Bears, Elizabeth settled in to make a thorough study. The way his muscles contracted and then relaxed, the shape of each of them as they rolled and flexed in his shoulders and upper arms, the easy, knowing grip of his hands on the paddle. She had time and ease now, to study his tattoo. Like a long bolt of lightning it looped around his left side and up his spine. The rhythmic swing of his hair hid it and then revealed it again where it disappeared into his hairline at the nape of his neck.

  The force of her staring finally caused him to glance over his shoulder, to catch a look on her face that she would have preferred not to share, at that moment. He grinned at her and made a comment to Runs-from-Bears. There was a low grunt, of agreement or laughter, Elizabeth couldn’t tell. She decided not to ask for a translation.

  Gradually she began to take in signs of habitation. A gaudily colored duck building a nest in the wreck of a canoe half-hidden in reeds. At a distance, two men fishing in a marsh. Smoke rising from a cabin peeking out of a grove of pine trees. A canoe paddling upstream, slowly, the boys in it nodding to them in passing.

  It was on the last portage that they first ran into the trapper. He was alone, a small, wiry man with a battered coon cap too large for his head and grime and tobacco juice worked into every crease on his face. He nodded at them from under his canoe, his eyes sliding in a disinterested way past Elizabeth to move greedily over the furs that Runs-from-Bears carried. Elizabeth imagined she saw Nathaniel shift the weight ever so slightly. He was dressed again, his chest crisscrossed with leather thongs and a wide leather belt around his waist that supported a long knife in a beaded sheath, a bullet pouch, and a tomahawk tucked flat to the right of his spine. His rifle was slung easily across his shoulder pack, his powder horn under his right arm.

  When the man was long gone, Nathaniel stopped, settling the canoe on the ground and then entering into a long conversation with Runs-from-Bears that Elizabeth had no chance of following at all.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  But Nathaniel was hefting the canoe again, and he didn’t speak until he had it balanced where it belonged.

  “Bad luck, to run into him,” he said. “We’ll have to move faster.”

  Elizabeth glanced back to where the path disappeared into the wood. “Who was that?”

  “Dirty-Knife,” said Runs-from-Bears with a disgusted shake of his head.

  “To the Kahnyen’kehàka he’s Dirty-Knife, but he goes by Claude Dubonnet otherwise,” said Nathaniel.

  “Peter Dubonnet’s father? My student Peter?” Elizabeth had never seen the man before; he had been in the bush, trapping, all winter.

  “Aye,” said Nathaniel quietly. “And headed for Paradise, no question.”

  “But why didn’t he speak to you?” she asked, mystified.

  “Because he’s Dirty-Knife,” said Bears. Elizabeth saw that there was no further explanation forthcoming.

  “Oh. Well.” She knew she should be alarmed, but instead there was a vague sense of disconnection. Claude Dubonnet would be in Paradise this evening and tell them who and what he had seen.

  “We knew they’d be coming sooner or later.”

  “This is too soon,” Nathaniel said. “And they know we didn’t head for Johnstown.”

  “Can we be in Albany by morning?”

  “It would be better if we could get this settled today,” Nathaniel said. “We’ll have to stop in at Saratoga, hope that the Schuylers have come up early, given the warm weather.”

  “The Schuylers?” asked Elizabeth, with growing alarm. “Do you mean Major General Schuyler and his wife? Catherine?”

  He nodded.

  “My father speaks of Philip Schuyler quite often, Nathaniel,” Elizabeth said. “He considers the general a trusted friend.”

  Runs-from-Bears grunted, a dismissive sound.

  Nathaniel didn’t seem worried, either. “I don’t doubt he tells himself that,” he said. “But I have a feeling the Schuylers’ll be glad to see us.”

  Once back on the water they moved fast on the strong spring currents of the Hudson. In just two hours of winding waterway, they came to the juncture where the river joined the Fishkill, quickly passing what looked to be a small abandoned fort on the north shore of the smaller river. Here the white water was enough to buffet them hard, but Elizabeth’s anxieties were focused elsewhere. On the west side of the river she could see the rising smoke of a small settlement just beyond the trees, and then there was a cleared path up through woods to a setting that reminded her of the England she had left behind. Not the
narrow and grimy streets of London, or the wild, unrestrained countryside of Scotland where she had gone walking with her cousins, but the England of her growing-up years, clipped and tended, the England of afternoon visits and whist tables and musicales. It took her breath away to see that world appear suddenly on the banks of this wild and unpredictable river.

  There was a fine wooden house, Georgian in style but of modest size. Near it were neatly fenced outbuildings of many types; she saw two barns, and at some distance, the steeple of a small church. Placid, fat cows grazed lazily on the pasture which was surrounded by forest. Beyond that, a man with a span of oxen turned soil in a wide expanse of field. In a garden behind the main house, women worked with hoes. Children ran back and forth in a game involving a ball; she could hear their shouting above the river. Then the canoe was at the bank, and there was nothing left to do but to get out and go up to the manor house with Nathaniel on one side and Runs-from-Bears on the other, just as she was, in Kahnyen’kehàka overdress and leggings, carrying Many-Doves’ wedding dress of finest white doeskin carefully embroidered with beads and quills in the pack on her back.

  XXIV

  “Nathaniel!” cried a voice before they had climbed all the way up the bank. “Sakrament, if it ain’t Nathaniel! And Runs-from-Bears!”

  In front of them had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, a huge man dressed in rough work clothes. He clenched an old pipe in one corner of his mouth while he talked, but managed to bellow quite impressively all the same over his shoulder. “You there, Johnnie! Go on and tell ’em in the house, Nathaniel Bonner has come to call and Runs-from-Bears with him, and a young lady just to put the sugar on top!” As if to verify the importance of this errand, he lifted his wig off his head completely, revealing a pate as creamy white and bare as the moon, and set it down again with a determined tug. Then he grinned and stuck out one reddened hand in Nathaniel’s direction, lurching forward at the same time to intercept him.