Into the Wilderness

by Sara Donati

  By the second day on the trail to the northwest, Elizabeth had begun to like him very much, and to learn how much she didn’t know. The business of staying alive in the bush was serious and exhausting but also absorbing. With his guidance, she had managed the rudimentaries of cleaning small game and fish. Struggling with a possum—an animal she found almost too ugly to eat—or the skinning of a rabbit, she was very thankful that there wasn’t time for him to go after bigger animals.

  Rabbits were the quickest game, but she soon learned that while they were available in abundance, they were also too lean to sustain people who walked hard all day long. Bears addressed this problem with a supply of rendered bear fat, which he squeezed from a skin directly into his mouth. Elizabeth could watch him do this, but she was not so hungry that she could manage it herself. The corncake, dry now and requiring much chewing, was filled with nuts and she hoped these would meet her needs for the time being. It was certainly true that she was hungrier than she had ever been in her life.

  Elizabeth learned to strip kindling with her fingers from a birch trunk, locate deadwood, and although she was terribly slow at it, to start a fire with flint and iron. Above all other things, Elizabeth was learning to see in the woods: Runs-from-Bears pointed out wolf and deer and panther scat, beaver dams and lodges, old abandoned duck nests appropriated by mice, the way that squirrels scattered refuse on the ground beneath the trees they favored, raccoon tracks like the imprint of the human hand, how to tell otter from fisher prints, and the alternating pattern of the black bear’s track. They skirted a thicket of hawthorn and he stopped to show her the way a shrike had impaled a small mole on a long thorn. She thought she would be very hungry indeed before she resorted to stealing the shrike’s dinner, but she didn’t say this to Bears.

  Sitting in the early morning with her food, Elizabeth looked at the stretches of white cedar lining the shore of the little lake where they had camped and she saw that deer had been foraging there, shearing off the underside of the foliage in straight lines that aunt Merriweather’s gardeners would have been proud of. Interspersed with the cedar were ragged spruce branches hanging low. She asked Runs-from-Bears about this.

  “Deer don’t care much for spruce,” he agreed. He said this once in Kahnyen’kehàka and then repeated it in English.

  This was the fourth full day out of Saratoga, and deep in the bush. They were eating the last of the corncake and dried berries, but Bears thought they would get to Robbie MacLachlan’s by midday, and he didn’t seem concerned about their lack of provisions. Elizabeth watched Bears eat, more neatly and fastidiously than she could manage without fork or spoon. There wasn’t a wasted movement to the process, and he seemed to take little pleasure in it. His eyes scanned the bush as he chewed. Elizabeth knew that he was seeing things that she couldn’t even imagine.

  She was looking forward to Robbie MacLachlan, although she barely dared admit this to herself. Only four days walking and she was tired to the bone, and gritty, and she feared that she smelled. Much of her exposed skin was itchy with welts; she had learned, finally, what Nathaniel meant with his threats of the blackfly, although Bears told her they weren’t bad this year. He certainly seemed to suffer less from them than she did. Mrs. Schuyler had given her a home remedy, but thus far Elizabeth had resisted the pungent ointment.

  The early morning sun shone on Bears’ hair so that it cast out blue-black tones. The tattoo that stretched over his cheekbones to meet on the bridge of his nose seemed to shine in the same shades of blue, standing out in relief against his skin, deep bronze and scattered with the evidence of a hard-won battle with the pox. Looking at him now, Elizabeth realized that his tattoos were not an abstract design of fanned lines, as she had thought, but identical to the tracks he had pointed out that a black bear had left on smooth tree bark.

  “Does tattooing hurt?”

  “Hen’en.” Yes, of course.

  “Then why do you do it?”

  Bears touched his cheekbone with one finger. “The pain is important.”

  Elizabeth had the idea that she was slowly coming to see the way Bears thought. She wasn’t surprised, now, to hear him accept the pain as a natural and necessary thing, instead of denying it. She decided to keep this to think about on the trail, when she would have long hours to consider it carefully. Something to keep her mind off Nathaniel.

  “Do you think much about Many-Doves?”

  He inclined his head at her. “As much as you think of Nathaniel.”

  “Why do you call him Nathaniel, and not by his Kahnyen’kehàka name?”

  “I call him what he is. Right now he is Nathaniel.”

  Elizabeth thought about that in silence for a while.

  “Why do the Kahnyen’kehàka call Nathaniel Okwahorowakeka?”

  “Wolf-Running-Fast,” translated Bears.

  “Hen’en, ohnahó:ten’ karihóni’?” Yes, but for what reason?

  He blinked solemnly, which, she had slowly come to understand, was an indication that he would reply to her question with a question. “What do you know of the wolf?” he asked.

  Elizabeth knew very little of wolves, she realized, and she admitted this openly.

  “Wolf is a hunter,” said Bears. “But most of all, Wolf never hunts alone. The pack is the most important thing, and he hunts for the pack and with it.”

  “But Falling-Day told me he had another name—”

  “Deseroken. She gave him this name, Between-Two-Lives, when he came to live in her longhouse that winter when he took her daughter to wife. But before that he was Wolf-Running-Fast. He would tell you this,” Bears concluded. “If you asked him.”

  “But he’s not here, and you are.”

  He nodded, satisfied with this logic.

  “You make me work very hard for the answers to my questions,” Elizabeth pointed out.

  “You ask many questions,” Bears said. “Quid pro quo.”

  She could not suppress a laugh, to hear Runs-from-Bears switch from Kahnyen’kehàka to Latin. He pursed his mouth at her. “You are surprised.”

  “Hen’en.” She wiped her brow with her kerchief. “I forget sometimes that you have had European schooling as well. You do not let it show, normally.” Suddenly encouraged by the turn in the conversation, Elizabeth found herself asking a question which had long bothered her.

  “Why—” She sought the right wording, and then moved forward cautiously. “Why is your head not shaved?”

  She had surprised him, something that did not often happen.

  “We are not at war,” he said. Then, seeing that she didn’t understand, he raised his hands to his own head, and grasped his hair at the crown, a handful, twisting it up and away. Although he more and more often spoke Kahnyen’kehàka to her, he said this in English.

  “A warrior who takes my life honorably in battle takes my scalp back to his people, as proof of his skill and bravery. I would do the same to him. I have done the same, but not often. I was very young in the last wars. Now there is no fighting here. If I were to go north to Stone-Splitter or west”—he gestured with his chin—“to join Little-Turtle, then I would shave my head again and dare my enemies to take my scalplock.”

  He was watching her, his eyes hooded.

  “You are thinking we are savages, and in need of civilization.”

  “No,” said Elizabeth. “I am hoping that you never have to shave your head again.”

  “Hmm,” said Bears, and she saw that she had surprised him again. “Toka’nonwa.” Maybe. He rose. “We have about six hours to walk, Looks-Hard, and we’d best get going.”

  Her legs were still quite stiff, but Bears kept a steady pace that did not tax her overmuch. And Elizabeth enjoyed the walking. Her pack contained primarily her own things and some of the dwindling provisions; for the first part of the day, at least, it did not seem heavy to her. It helped to have the freedom to move. She wore the shirt-like overdress and leggings that Many-Doves had lent her, nonsensically it seemed, with her own
shift underneath them. Her hair was plaited now and tied with a strip of rawhide, and the end swung with the rhythm of her walking at the small of her back. Tucked into a wide belt was a knife in a beaded sheath which Bears had taught her how to sharpen on the first day. Thus far she had used it only for cleaning game, but it was good to have it anyway. In a little purse she carried a sharpening stone, a tinderbox, and a small store of buckshot sewn into elongated linen capsules.

  She was still wearing Many-Doves’ moccasins, and she was very glad of them. Elizabeth wondered how she would ever wear her own shoes again, or even her beloved boots with their elegant little heels and fine needlework. She thought much of Paradise, particularly of her students, and of Hannah, who was her daughter now. It would have been a wonderful idea, to have a daughter, if it hadn’t been for Richard Todd. He had managed to steal this joy from her, and Elizabeth resented it deeply.

  What was so very frightening about this was not the memory of Richard’s hateful smile when he claimed Hannah as his own child, but the complete lack of emotion from Nathaniel. No mortification or surprise or anger. Things Elizabeth would have expected, even if—and this was an unwelcome thought—Richard’s claim were true. She told herself, as she had already a hundred times, that it did no good to contemplate his incredible declarations until she could talk to Nathaniel about all of it. She wondered with considerable discomfort if Nathaniel might have told her more of Sarah, and of Sarah and Richard, if she had been willing to listen when he tried to talk to her about his first marriage. She could not help thinking that he should have told her, anyway.

  They began climbing again, through the woods on a path that Elizabeth could barely discern, although Bears showed no hesitation at all. Above their heads a woodpecker drilled in the soft wood of a cedar above a clinging mass of orchidlike flowers with brilliant crimson stripes. There were birds all around, busy with their nests. She had found out that many of them did not have Kahnyen’kehàka names and so she had stopped asking, satisfying herself with observing their habits and making up names of her own. So engrossed was she at the sight of a porcupine perched up high and stripping buds from a maple tree that she did not notice that Bears had stopped dead in his tracks.

  He swung his rifle around and up in a fluid gesture. Elizabeth had barely picked out the buck grazing upwind from them when the shot sounded and the animal leapt wildly into the air and then fell.

  “Robbie will be glad of the meat,” he said by way of explanation. The birdsong had stopped, replaced by the echoing of the gunshot.

  They walked into Robbie’s camp a few hours later, although Elizabeth did not realize that they had done so until Bears had hefted the small buck over his shoulders and dropped it to the ground.

  But it was a homestead, of a sort. There was a small natural clearing, sunlit, and surrounded by stands of birch and maple. The woods as far as she could see were completely clear of underbrush; she had come to recognize the significance of this, the difference between tended forest and bush. Off to one side there was a deep fire pit, lined with rocks and well used, with a trivet on one end and a spit on the other. On two sides of this open hearth there were logs at a comfortable distance. One of them, the one that faced away from the mountain and looked down the trail, had a shiny spot in its middle. The cabin itself she had not seen at all at first glance, because it was built into the side of the mountain. It was not so much a cabin as a lean-to, stripped logs weathered into the color of granite, with a roof of evergreen boughs over bark. There was one small window, just an opening in the wall with a propped-up shutter. It was a tidy place; the walls were hung with snowshoes and traps at regular intervals.

  Bears had pulled back the rough pelt that served as a door, hooking it back over a great rusty nail on the wall. He called in, a kind of whooping hello in Kahnyen’kehàka and then in English.

  When it was clear they were on their own, they made themselves comfortable in the clearing. Bears set to butchering and cleaning the buck. While Elizabeth knew that she should watch this process, she was glad to forgo the lesson for the moment to fetch water from a mountain spring behind the cabin. She filled the cavernous iron kettle and began to cut the chunks of meat he passed to her into pieces, using a flat rock as her board, and shooing away flies with ever-increasing irritation.

  They worked for a few hours, until there was a stew cooking over the fire pit: venison and wild onions she found growing nearby, dried beans and squash and corn from the stores in the cabin. The smell of it made her stomach growl, but this was such a common experience in the recent days that she had learned not to be embarrassed by it. The rest of the meat Bears hung on hooks inside a hollow tree stump as high as himself. It was capped by a little shingled roof, and it had a door on leather hinges. There was a pile of split oak under a tarpaulin, and he used this to start a slow fire in the bottom of the tree trunk. He showed Elizabeth how to feed the fire, which would burn for days until the meat was thoroughly smoked.

  He had held back some of the raw liver, and he offered her a strip.

  “Makes the blood strong,” he explained.

  She could put it on a stick and thrust it into the flames, or she could do as he did and chew it raw. Elizabeth saw him grin at her, and so she ate it raw to show him that she could.

  Her handkerchief, now in a truly deplorable state, could not deal with her bloodied fingers and dirty hands, and so she went to wash in the spring. In that quiet corner between the cabin and the mountain, she took a few minutes to think on her own. It occurred to her that she had now spent more time with Runs-from-Bears than she had ever spent with Nathaniel. This was not a welcome thought, as much as she was coming to like him. She could hear Bears singing softly to himself. The black-fly song; he had taught it to her, and she hummed along.

  The blackfly is bringing a message

  He’s coming to tell us how poor he is.

  The truth of the matter is,

  He is so old-fashioned and brings

  always the same old message.

  She washed out her handkerchief and then used it to clean her hands and face and neck. Even with only cold water and without soap or other conveniences, she felt better for it. Elizabeth listened to Bears while she unplaited her hair and finger-combed it, sorting out every tangle until her hair fairly stood on end, snapping and crackling with energy. There was a clean shift in her pack, an appealing idea, but then Elizabeth looked down at herself and decided that she would wait to change until she could have some sort of bath, even if it was in the cold waters of the lake they had passed on the way to the cabin, the one called Little Lost. With a sigh, she spread her wet handkerchief on a rock in the sun and walked back around the corner to the clearing. There she stopped short, for Bears was no longer alone.

  · · ·

  He was without a doubt the biggest man she had ever seen. Far bigger than her uncle Merriweather, who dwarfed all the men of the neighborhood. Bigger than Bears by half a head, at least, and half again as broad. Not fat, certainly, but layered with slabs of muscle. When he turned toward her it seemed to take forever, and to go on with the thoughtfulness of a tree flexing in the wind. He was old, more than seventy: the great sweeping mustache, his eyebrows, and the hair tied to a tail at the nape of his neck were blindingly white. His eyes, slate-blue, peered out at her from a nest of wrinkles.

  Two things happened when their gazes met, both of which surprised Elizabeth. He smiled shyly, revealing a set of teeth as astoundingly white as his hair, and at the same time he blushed a shade of scarlet she had never before seen on any human being, male or female. This change in color was so furious, fast, and profound, and it flared so bright in contrast to his hair and teeth, that she was immediately put in mind of aunt Merriweather’s prize rose campion, rose-red blossoms with their cover of woolly white down. Her own smile faltered to see him color so, for she thought that he must be uneasy about her sudden appearance.

  He had pulled the cap from his head and stood at attention, although
he did not look away.

  “So here she is, then,” he said. His voice was soft and somewhat higher than she would have guessed, on the basis of his size. “But look at her, she’s nae but a great mass o’ hair and eyes sae big as moons. A bonnie thing, tae be sure, but ower young tae be oot traipsin’ through the bush wi’ the likes o’ you, Bears.” He bowed in Elizabeth’s direction with tight military precision. “So there’s nocht tae do but make oursel’ acquaint’. Robert MacLachlan, at your service, Mistress Bonner.”

  “Please.” Elizabeth glanced at Bears, who was clearly content to stand back and watch her handle this encounter on her own. “Please do call me Elizabeth.”

  “Oh, no, that wadna do.” His color had faded somewhat, but then he tilted his head hopefully and it flared again.

  “I would like you to,” she said. “I would be honored.”

  “Wad ye noo? And wha’ will ye call me, then?”

  “Whatever you like.” Elizabeth laughed.

  “Aye weel. Ma mither called me Rab, and most o’ ma friends call me Robbie, but Cora Bonner, bless her immortal soul, Cora called me Robin.”

  “ ‘For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy,’ ” quoted Elizabeth, and she thought that he might ignite, so bright did he blush. “From Shakespeare,” she explained, embarrassed for herself more than for him.

  “Oh, aye. Hamlet. Though the man borrowed Sweet Robin fra’ an auld Scots song.” He threw her a sideways glance. “But he put it tae guid use, wi’ Hamlet. Will ye read aloud, then, if ye’re asked nicely?”

  “I have done,” she said solemnly. “Though I have no books with me.”

  He waved a hand dismissively. “Aye, but I do. Great lot o’ good it does me, though, for ma eyes canna manage the print on the page these days. Muny’s the evenin’ I spent at Lake in the Clouds listenin’ tae Cora read, and readin’ in turn.” He raised one perfect eyebrow. “She was a rare woman, was Cora.”