Into the Wilderness

by Sara Donati

  Elizabeth considered the red-faced boy, trying to assess the source of his discomfort: anger, or embarrassment.

  “Do let him go, Nathaniel, before you snatch him bald-headed.”

  With a shrug, Nathaniel stepped away and then made some considerable show of wiping his hand on his leggings.

  “Liam, I wonder if you’d like to come back to school.”

  This earned her a raised brow from Nathaniel, and a scowl from the boy.

  “Don’t know why I should want to come back here,” he mumbled sullenly, rubbing his sore scalp.

  “I don’t know why either, exactly,” Elizabeth said. “But it seems as if you do. Why would you spend your valuable time listening at the window, if you did not?”

  Nathaniel’s sour grin told her that he approved of her tactics, if not of her purpose.

  Elizabeth said, “There’s an empty desk if you’d like it. Now if you’ll please pardon me, we have lessons—” She stopped, remembering Ephraim’s dilemma. A quick glance over her shoulder showed her all of the children gathered in a tight circle, heads bent in utter fascination.

  “Give ’er a yank, Rudy,” came a decisive female voice. “You’re the strongest.”

  “Holy God!” cried Elizabeth, bumping her head on the window frame in her hurry to get into the room. “Children! Wait!” As she pushed through the circle around Ephraim, Nathaniel and Liam came in the door and joined her.

  Nathaniel’s mouth twitched at one corner and then the other. He looked at Elizabeth and then quickly away.

  “It’s all swoll up,” Ephraim announced piteously. “Won’t budge.”

  Elizabeth coughed, and covered her mouth to cough again. She turned away to bury her fit of coughing in her handkerchief. When she turned back, Nathaniel was down on one knee in front of Ephraim, surveying the situation.

  “Don’t suppose there’s any lard to hand,” he said. “Wonder who can run the fastest and fetch me some.”

  In a second, the room had emptied of all the children except for Hannah, who retired reluctantly to the front step at Elizabeth’s suggestion.

  At thirteen Liam was more than twice Ephraim’s size; he had to squat down on his haunches to get a better look. He rubbed the ginger-colored down on his upper lip while he considered the dangling inkpot.

  “Lordy, you don’t need no lard for that job.” He squinted up at Nathaniel. “What you need is a hammer.”

  Ephraim’s head jerked up, and at that moment there was a soft pop! and the bottle fell to the floor with a clank. It rolled away under a desk, trailing a long comma of ink.

  “What’d I say?” Liam looked from Nathaniel to Elizabeth and then at the small blue-stained appendage curled so innocently in Ephraim’s lap. “How’d that happen?”

  “You scared the piss out of him.” Nathaniel laughed, slapping Liam on the shoulder.

  “I did not piss!” Ephraim protested, blushing this time to the tips of his ears. He crossed his hands over his lap.

  “Yes, well.” Elizabeth took on a soothing tone. “It looks as though school is out for today. Why don’t you go home and—”

  “Wash up,” supplied Nathaniel, the corners of his mouth curling uncontrollably upward.

  “In the future—” Elizabeth continued slowly, trying to ignore Nathaniel and find the appropriate tone.

  “Keep your breeches buttoned.” This from Liam.

  Elizabeth scowled at him, and he dropped his gaze in reply. She sighed. “I suppose that does sum it up. Best get along, Ephraim. And tell the others that school is out for the day.”

  The look of confusion and utter embarrassment on the boy’s face was replaced instantaneously with one of unmitigated joy, which gave Elizabeth momentary pause. “I do trust we will not have any repetitions of this unfortunate event, Ephraim Hauptmann. No matter how beautiful the weather.”

  His face went very still. “No, miss. ’Course not.” He paused, and shrugged philosophically. “Didn’t feel very good, anyway.”

  They managed to control themselves until he was safely out the door, and then they laughed until Elizabeth’s ribs ached with it.

  Hannah appeared at the door. She sniffed, and raised a brow in unspoken criticism.

  “Are you coming back to school?” she asked Liam when he had managed to stifle himself.

  He ducked his head in sudden seriousness. “I suppose so,” he said. “Until my brother finds out and takes a switch to me.”

  “Good,” said Hannah. “We need another boy for games at recess. And you need to learn to read.” And she disappeared into the sunshine.

  “Miz Bonner?” Liam paused at the door on his way out.

  “Yes?”

  “I ain’t got any money to pay tuition,” he said. “But I can chop wood.”

  She was careful not to smile. “That would be a very acceptable arrangement, Liam.”

  Staring at his own bare feet, the boy spoke up again.

  “It weren’t my idea, you know. About Albany, and the court. I wanted to tell you I was sorry about that.”

  Nathaniel squinted at her, his skepticism written in the downward curve of his mouth. But Elizabeth remembered Liam as a willing and eager student, good-natured and hardworking, if not especially talented. She was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I am much relieved to hear you say so.”

  The boy nodded, kneading his cap as if he hoped to wring the right words from it. “If you’ve got a taste for duck, well, then come down to Half Moon late this afternoon. Most everybody will be there.” He cast a sidelong look toward them. “Could always use another canoe.”

  Nathaniel hesitated so long that Elizabeth grew uncomfortable.

  “Thank you kindly for the invitation,” she said. “We’ll try to come.”

  “I don’t see why we should not go, Nathaniel. If they are making an effort to include us—”

  “You’re sure that’s what’s on their minds?” he said, gruffly.

  Elizabeth stopped to pick a handful of pink milfoil. She crushed one of the gray-green leaves and inhaled the spicy smell while she weighed her response.

  “Do you think it’s some kind of trap?”

  He looked around for Hannah, who had hung back on the trail to examine a dead firebird. She was folding and unfolding the wing, studying the way the joints worked. With one part of her mind, Elizabeth wondered if Nathaniel noticed his daughter’s preoccupation with the workings of living creatures: if it was unusual, or the normal way of Kahnyen’kehàka children. But his thoughts were elsewhere.

  “They ain’t quite that dumb, or desperate. Not yet. But then we ain’t turned anybody off the Wolf, yet.”

  “Then why should we not?” She heard the impatience in her voice, and then tried to modulate her tone. “Please tell me why we should not go to the village for the duck hunt, Nathaniel.”

  “You tell me first why we should.” His own tone bordered on the edgy.

  “Because my students will be there, with their families. Because it would be good to see the Hauptmanns, and I need to talk to the McGarritys—”

  “You need more society.” He came to a halt in the path, for they had lost sight of Hannah.

  Elizabeth laughed. “Society? Now you are being silly, Nathaniel. But it does seem to me that we need to show our faces in the village, once in a while. We must live among these people, after all.”

  “Your father will likely be there, and Julian.”

  “Father, at least,” Elizabeth agreed. “I will not hide from my father, and I’m surprised that you would want me to.”

  Nathaniel let out a great rush of air, a sound of surrender that Elizabeth had learned to recognize. He was not convinced, but he would no longer oppose.

  “I don’t want you to hide from anybody, Boots.” He brushed his knuckles along her cheekbone. “But I’m afraid you’re in for more than you bargained for.”

  She caught his hand and kissed it. “I won’t be there alone, wi
ll I?”

  He smiled, finally. “Never for a moment.”

  XLIX

  They came down to the village at dusk, stopping just above the lake to survey the shore. Nathaniel remembered fishing the lake as a boy. At dawn or dusk, wading in the shallows or out in the canoe he had felt like an intruder in a world crowded with fish and birds and wild of all kinds. That was before the village took hold and started to grow like a new kind of animal, jealous of its space and food.

  Where now a crowd of children fed deadwood into a growing bonfire, he had once watched a hawk and an eagle wage a screaming battle over a mallard. Asleep on the shore, he had come suddenly full awake to see a bobcat drinking not twenty yards from him, all gold and sliding muscle. But now the shore was crowded with canoes and dugouts and anything that could be paddled, even a makeshift raft. Men paced back and forth, their movements jittery with excitement. Their voices rose like a buzzing on the wind.

  “Like warrior ants, on the move,” said Chingachgook beside him, and Nathaniel grunted in agreement.

  “I don’t see any guns,” commented Elizabeth.

  “Don’t need any, for fledglings,” Hawkeye said. “The wood ducks can’t fly now, not the hens or the young.”

  He pointed out the long, marshy stretch on the opposite side of the lake, just above the village. There, reeds and cattails, cranberry bushes and drowned trees wove themselves into a watery fortress of a good half mile in length.

  Elizabeth squinted into the sky. “Those are drakes, are they not? They seem quite irritated.”

  Mergansers sporting white ruffs like cocked hats circled above the lake, rousted from feeding by the commotion on the shore. Nathaniel felt their agitation whirling and swirling like a rising storm. He put a hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder.

  “It ain’t pretty, this kind of hunting.”

  “Is any hunting?” she asked, surprised.

  “By God, yes,” said Hawkeye decisively. “There’s a beauty to be found in tracking a deer and taking her down clean. She might outsmart you or outrun you. There’s a challenge to it, and a skill.”

  “Perhaps I can go out with you sometime, and see for myself.” Elizabeth had long been curious about Hawkeye’s hunting absences.

  “You make me an apple pie, I’ll take you out tracking,” he promised.

  “Ah.” Elizabeth smiled. “I knew there would be some condition.”

  “I will take you into the forest,” Chingachgook said quietly, so that the whole party stopped short. Nathaniel looked back to see his father and grandfather shoulder to shoulder. They were so alike and so different: both of them white-haired, and straight-backed, tough old men who had outlived most of the people they had loved, but still they stood there looking at Elizabeth with real affection and admiration.

  The dappled light moved on his grandfather’s face and it seemed to Nathaniel almost as if the bone glimmered softly through Chingachgook’s skin. He stepped toward the old man, as if he had cried out in pain. Then he realized that no one else had seen anything alarming. A waking dream, then. Not to be ignored, but not carrying the same urgency as a sleeping dream. He would talk to the women about it when they got home; they could tell him what it meant.

  Chingachgook was telling Elizabeth about tracking, and what would be expected of her. “If you want to learn to listen to the deer, then I will take you. You must listen to them if you want to track them. I will teach you how to sing to them.” His expression was somber, and her smile faded.

  “I would like that.” She sent a glance in Hawkeye’s direction. “And I will learn how to make you an apple pie, anyway.”

  The path had been winding in and out of the wood to deposit them suddenly on a secluded corner of the lake. The men dragged a canoe out of its protected spot under a stand of redbud saplings.

  “You’ll have time enough to practice on that pie,” Hawkeye said gruffly. “Couldn’t go out after a deer now anyway, not until the rut starts; you’d end up in Anna’s pantry.”

  “Anna’s pantry?” Elizabeth laughed out loud.

  “It’s what we call the gaol,” said Nathaniel.

  “There’s a gaol in Paradise? Is it ever used?”

  “Oh, aye.” Hawkeye nodded. “When old Dubonnet—Dirty-Knife’s father—lost his temper over cards and took his tomahawk to Axel, for example. Don’t look so surprised! It weren’t much of a cut—Dubonnet was drunk, and Axel was fast. He’s still drawing breath, after all. But they needed someplace to put Claude until they could decide what to do with him. Anna had an old pantry she didn’t use much, so they put a lock on the door and that’s been the gaol ever since.”

  Nathaniel caught a speculative glance from Elizabeth, quickly stifled when she saw herself observed.

  “Just one night, Boots.”

  “Pardon me?” Her tone was slightly affronted. She didn’t like being so easily read, but Nathaniel could no more pass up the opportunity to tease her than he could walk by her without touching her.

  “I spent a night in Anna’s pantry when I was fifteen. I could see you wondering.”

  “That sounds like a story for another day. I thought we were going to join the party?”

  He gestured her into the canoe with a sweep of his arm.

  Once on the lake his good humor fled quickly. In spite of the way the dusk colored the mountains and the lake reflected it all back, it looked like bad news to Nathaniel. On the far shore the men had divided themselves into the canoes, two to a craft, and paddled out in complete silence to form a fan that took in about the first third of the marsh. They hovered there, waiting for a signal from Billy Kirby.

  Chingachgook had started singing, a low chant to the spirit of the lake. Above his voice Nathaniel could just hear Hawkeye explaining to Elizabeth what was about to happen. The words were indistinct, but he saw her back suddenly straighten and tense. She asked a question, but Hawkeye’s answer was interrupted by a shout from the other side of the lake.

  “Go to it, boys!”

  The far end of the fan moved in first, penetrating the marsh as quickly as the dense growth would allow. There was a great swaying of the reeds, and then the shadows crystallized into distinct shapes: a whole army of wood duck hens with their fledgling young were being forced into the open water by the tightening wedge of canoes.

  Chingachgook’s melody rose and wavered over the lake as if to meet the frantic danger calls of the hens. The fledglings were paddling furiously, some of them trying to lift themselves into the air without success. Nathaniel scanned the marsh and the lake and estimated forty molting hens with broods of six or eight young, no more than a pound each in weight.

  A mottled brown hen made a headlong dash for the narrowing space between two canoes just as there was another shout from Billy Kirby, and the men moved in from the other end.

  They had it down to a science, all right. The man in the rear kept paddling while the one in front harvested. It was amazing to watch Billy Kirby at work: he could grab two fledglings in one fist and twist their necks so fast that all you saw was the heap of feathers as he tossed them over his shoulder into the empty middle of the canoe. All around him other men were hard at work, too, and the air filled with tender new feathers.

  Some of the hens, better and faster swimmers, had made it out of the circle. Now, seeing their young attacked they rushed back, fairly lifting themselves out of the water in their fury. As they came within reach they were grabbed up, too, and dispatched without pause. In a matter of five minutes the canoes were filled with great fluttering mounds.

  “At least it was over quickly,” Elizabeth said on a hoarse, indrawn breath.

  But it wasn’t, not yet. The first full boat had made it to the shore to be met by the women and children. As soon as it had been tipped up and emptied of its cargo, there was a high yodel of excitement, and the Cameron brothers jumped back in to paddle out again at full speed, ready for the next flushing.

  “But they must have more than two hundred ducks,” Elizabeth
said, indignantly. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “They don’t know the meaning of the word,” Hawkeye murmured. And with a disgusted shake of his head and a nod to Nathaniel, they paddled for shore.

  It was very hard to maintain a composed expression. Elizabeth forced herself to breathe in and out evenly; to answer in a normal tone of voice when she was spoken to. They found a spot to stand as far away from the bonfire and the growing mountain of dead birds as could be managed, and there she stayed, greeting her students and talking to their parents.

  Against her will, her attention was drawn again and again to the spot on the shore where the women had begun the work of cleaning the birds. With the help of the oldest children, each carcass was headed, briefly bled, and then slit open without even a rudimentary plucking. The fledglings weren’t good for anything except the breast meat, Anna explained to her.

  Then why not let them grow into maturity? Elizabeth wanted to ask, but the sight of Anna’s strong thumbs digging to separate the meat from the bone was more than she could take; she nodded and turned away as quickly as she could without giving offense.

  Boats came and went, and the hill of inert bodies seemed to get larger in spite of the furious pace being set by the workers on the shore. Nathaniel and Hawkeye were talking quietly just behind her; Chingachgook had walked down the beach and stood watching silently, his blanket wrapped around him and his eyes fixed on some point on the water.

  “Miz Elizabeth?”

  Martha Southern stood off a few feet, her head lowered. She had her new baby strapped to her chest with a shawl, and the little button of a face peered out at Elizabeth with perfectly round eyes. Elizabeth had not seen Martha since her return.

  “Moses is out on the water,” she said, as if reading Elizabeth’s thoughts.

  “Is that your new son?” Elizabeth asked, glad of the distraction. She had heard the story of the child’s birth from Falling-Day.

  “Yas’m, this is our Jeremiah. Three months old.”

  “Congratulations, Martha. He looks a fine, healthy boy.”

  “Yas’m, that he is.”