Wild Yearning

by Penelope Williamson

  The last of his words faded and the smile dissolved from his face as he realized the wigwam was empty. No doubt she was next door at Assacumbuit’s longhouse, visiting with Elizabeth and the baby. Still, he couldn’t help feeling disappointed that she wasn’t there to greet him, especially since he’d fantasized all afternoon about the taste of her mouth and the feel of her breasts filling his hands. He wanted her.

  He laughed at himself. Hell, when didn’t he want her? The only thing that tore him from her side was the need to hunt for food. If they could have lived on love alone, he wouldn’t have left the wigwam at all.

  The air inside was warm from the fire and redolent of bay-berry candles and steam from a French kettle that sat on the coals, bubbling with a mush of corn, acorn, and cattail.

  As he dropped down on the mats beside the hearth to take off his wet moccasins, Ty scooped up a ladleful of the mush and tipped it to his mouth. His stomach was suddenly reminding him that he’d eaten nothing all day except a small piece of quitcheraw—a cake of parched corn sweetened by maple sugar—and he’d probably trekked a good twenty miles all told, most of it dragging the laden toboggan behind him.

  He smiled when he saw that Delia had left a birchbark pail of melted snow by the fire so that he would have warm water to wash with on his return. After living alone all of his adult life, this seemed the greatest luxury to Ty, having a wife to anticipate his every need. He was especially blessed with Delia; she seemed to know what he wanted even before he did. He had tried to tell her all this pampering wasn’t necessary—he would be the happiest man on earth simply for the joy and excitement she brought him in bed. Her answer, he recalled now with a fond smile, had been to quit being a wooden-headed fool. He felt himself grinning inanely at the mere thought of her. God, but he loved her. Delia, his wife…

  A shudder of utter horror passed through him at the memory of that day on Falmouth Neck when she had told him she would make him the best wife ever, and he had rejected her and the love she offered. For the hundredth time he thanked his guardian spirit Bedagi, the gitche manitou, and the Christian God as well for giving him a second chance to take this rare and beautiful woman to wife.

  His stomach full and his feet warmed, Ty now scowled impatiently at the door, feeling suddenly most neglected. He was feeling ill from a lack of kisses. He mentally counted backward —it had been eight hours since they’d last made love. If they weren’t careful, a certain valuable part of his anatomy could atrophy from lack of use.

  Ty was up and pacing the wigwam. Damn it, this was serious. Where was she? Surely one of the other women had told her he was back by now. Grumbling another curse, Ty shoved his feet into his now-dry moccasins. He shrugged back into his moosehide coat, picked up a parfleche of the fresh meat, and headed out the door. Obviously he was going to have to go and get her and bring her back to his bed, where she belonged.

  On entering the longhouse, Ty was met with an astonishing sight. Assacumbuit, that great, proud warrior, was shuffling in a little dance around the fire, bouncing Elizabeth Hooker’s bundled baby in his arms. He was singing, too—a made-up song about a waligit wasis, a handsome baby with hair the color of cornsilk, who would grow up to be a tall, strong hunter and warrior, a great sachem of his people. The baby made little oohing sounds of delight, while Assacumbuit’s daughter-in-law, Silver Birch, kept her head bent to hide her amusement.

  Ty set the parfleche down by the door and entered the lodge quietly, unwilling to disturb this remarkable scene.

  Although there were no windows in the longhouse, bars of dust-moted sunlight came through the smoke holes. The lodge was rectangular in shape, fifty feet long and divided into separate living cubicles, but with a paved central fireplace. The smoke from many fires had blackened the rafters. Even for the Abenaki, whose dwellings were more permanent than most of the other eastern tribes, this lodge was fairly old. Both Ty and the Dreamer had lived in it as boys.

  Assacumbuit’s dance ended with a flourishing jig. He whirled around on his toes … and froze at the sight of his grinning stepson. For the first time in Ty’s memory the mighty warrior appeared embarrassed. He actually blushed!

  “The brat looked like he needed to burp,” Assacumbuit said gruffly.

  “Ah, I see,” Ty replied, his grin widening. “And were you trying to jiggle it out of him?”

  The grand sachem snorted with pretended disgust. “Here, woman, take him.” He held out the wriggling bundle to Silver Birch, who put the baby back in his cradleboard, hanging it from a center pole.

  “So,” Assacumbuit said, “there’s been a rumor singing through the village that the Yengi shot with one arrow a moose with antlers big enough to fill a wigwam.”

  “Um,” Ty acknowledged modestly. “There’s a parfleche by the door.”

  Silver Birch exclaimed with delight as she unwrapped the meat. “Look, Father-in-law, he has brought us the muffle!” She turned grateful eyes on Ty. “But you must take it back with you. It is the hunter’s reward.”

  “Nevertheless we accept the generous gift,” Assacumbuit put in quickly and Ty hid a smile. The old warrior was known to trade a pair of beaver hides for the delicacy, which when made into a stew had a flavor of the sweetest spring chicken.

  Crooning nonsense words, Ty dangled a string of painted bone dice in front of the baby, who stared back at him with unblinking gray eyes.

  Every time he looked at this child, Tyler Savitch the physician was struck anew by the miracle of life. Five months ago, when he had seen Elizabeth Hooker tossing and screaming in a pile of blood-soaked furs, he had been struck with horror, assailed by the memory of his dying mother. If Delia hadn’t been watching him with those big golden eyes, so full of love and faith, he might have given in to his fear. But he couldn’t bear the thought of failing Delia, and so he had fought for Elizabeth and her baby as if he could defeat death through willpower alone.

  The baby’s hold on life had been tenuous throughout the following three months, until his early birth in January. It had been impossible for Elizabeth to leave her bed, let alone make the arduous journey back to Merrymeeting. Now they would have to wait until the warmer weather, when mother and baby would both be strong enough to travel.

  Ty had spent two weeks tracking down the old timber beast, Increase Spoon, to have him take a message back to Merrymeeting for Caleb and the others, letting them know that both women were alive but that they wouldn’t be home until spring. He and Delia both fretted over Nat’s orphaned daughters, but they knew Anne Bishop would care for the girls until they returned. Ty didn’t think Nat had any relatives, except for a distant cousin in England, and so he and Delia planned to adopt the girls as soon as they got back to Merrymeeting.

  Ty suddenly became aware that all his cooing and rattling was a source of considerable amusement to his father. Laughing, he tossed the dice string in the air, catching it one-handed, then dropped down beside Assacumbuit by the hearth. An elk intestine, stuffed with meat, hung from a forked stick over the fire, filling the lodge with the sizzle of splashing fat and the aroma of bubbling grease.

  Silver Birch, the Dreamer’s pregnant wife, watched Ty from beneath shyly lowered lids, her hands neglecting her work. She had been tanning a deerhide by rubbing it with a mixture of brains, elm bark, and pureed liver. Her mother, blind and stooped with age, sat beside her, bent over a stump mortar, grinding corn. Molsemis, Assacumbuit’s five-year-old grandson, played with a miniature bow and arrow, shooting at a target painted on the far wall. There was no sign of Delia or Elizabeth.

  “Where are my women?” Ty asked casually, although inwardly he was a little alarmed. He had been sure he would find Delia within Assacumbuit’s lodge, gossiping with Elizabeth and fussing over the baby.

  Assacumbuit shook a gambling bowl up and down lazily, rattling the dice, no doubt hoping to entice Ty into a game, something which Ty fully intended to avoid since he always lost.

  “Ice fishing,” the old man said.

  Ty’s br
ows quirked up. “Elizabeth as well?”

  “Ai. Your lusifee thought the fresh air would be good for her.” The baby in the cradleboard above their heads let out a loud gurgle. The sachem glanced up, his black eyes as warm as glowing coals. “He’s a fine boy. You ought to take the awakon Elizabeth as your second wife.” Ty had bought Elizabeth from her captor for five beaver hides, so Assacumbuit considered the girl Ty’s slave.

  Ty laughed at the old man’s blatant attempt to acquire another grandson. “Haven’t we been through all this several times? Elizabeth already has a perfectly good husband. And Delia would wrap my innards around the torture pole if I so much as thought about taking a second wife.”

  Assacumbuit chuckled. “The lusifee would truly have you singing your death song.”

  A soft giggle came from Silver Birch. But when Ty looked at her, all he could see was the top of her bent head. The middle part in her shiny black hair was stained vermilion and she wore a finely quilled dress with a string of red and blue glass beads. She had dressed in this elaborate way every day for the past five months. She dressed for the return of her husband, the Dreamer, who was never coming home.

  Shamed and scorned by the tribe for losing the fight to a mere Yengi—even if the Yengi was Assacumbuit’s stepson— the Dreamer had walked out of the village that night. He had not returned, nor had he been seen by anyone since. The Norridgewocks, all except Silver Birch, suspected he had gone to the sacred mountain, Katahdin, where he had sang and danced and fasted until he entered the spirit world of his dreams.

  The wind came up, rattling the bark shingles on the lodge. Ty stirred restlessly. He wanted his wife.

  “Keep your stick in your breechclout a while longer,” Assacumbuit said, reading Ty’s mind and causing him to blush. “A man should not allow himself to become a slave to his appetites. Especially his appetite for a particular woman.”

  Too late, Ty thought with an inward laugh.

  He started to stand up. “I think I’ll just—”

  Assacumbuit’s hand fell on his arm. “Rest easy, my son. They’ve been gone only an hour and I sent the brother of Silver Birch to watch over them.”

  Reluctantly Ty settled back down.

  The grand sachem grinned and shook the dice bowl. “Now, how about a little game while we wait, ai?”

  Stuffing her hands deeper into her bearskin muff, Elizabeth Hooker peered through clouds of her own breathing into the hole they had cut in the marsh ice. “I don’t see anything,” she said.

  “You can’t see them. They’re buried deep in the mud,” Delia informed her, proudly showing off her newfound knowledge.

  She poked around the unfrozen mud in the bottom of the hole with a flint-tipped spear. The young warrior, Pulwaugh, watched critically, chewing vigorously on a wad of spruce gum but doing nothing to help, for it was woman’s work.

  “Ty showed me how to do this,” Delia said, mostly for the benefit of the young Abenaki, who, she suspected, spoke more English than he let on. “The great Yengi warrior Bedagi isn’t too proud to teach his woman how to hunt for eels.”

  Suddenly she gave a sharp jab. Exclaiming with delight, she straightened, bringing up a pair of eels with yellow bellies that squirmed on the barbed tines. “Two of them!”

  “Ugh!” Elizabeth shuddered, backing away. “They’re horrible!”

  “But delicious. Haven’t you eaten smothered eels before?”

  Elizabeth shuddered again. “Yes, but I didn’t know they looked so … so disgusting when they were alive.”

  Laughing at Elizabeth’s foolishness, Delia strung the eels onto a pointed stick that was already heavy with the smelt they had fished from a hole in the lake with a sinew line and corn for bait. Suddenly the sound of demonical laughter disturbed the winter silence, a long, ghostly hoo-oo-oo.

  Shading her eyes from the winter glare, Delia looked up to see a white loon circling overhead. “Glooscap’s messenger,” she said, with a dreamy smile. “He’s predicting a storm.”

  She never saw a loon now without thinking of a certain afternoon on the lake. In November, after the first dusting of snow, the weather had suddenly turned warm again, like summer. The Norridgewocks had taken advantage of the good weather to prepare for the coming winter—preserving food, making and repairing weapons, utensils and clothing, hunting for game. Ty decided to take Delia into the forest to show her how to set rabbit snares.

  He had taught her some things about setting the snares. He showed her how to make the nooses of twisted bark fiber. He told her she must do them in fours, as four was a sacred number because of the four winds and the four compass points. He had taught her a song to sing when she found the traps empty, to drive away the bad-luck spirits.

  But it was too beautiful a day for such serious concerns and before long they found themselves floating on the lake in a canoe, Delia slouching lazily with her back against Ty’s warm chest, secure within the circle of his arms.

  At first their talk was only interrupted by occasional kisses, but soon the talking grew less and less and their kisses got longer and harder, until the canoe began to rock dangerously.

  Delia struggled halfheartedly in Ty’s embrace. “Ty, stop,” she protested. Her heart was palpitating rapidly, although it wasn’t because of the near capsizing. “Remember what happened the last time you tried to kiss me in a canoe.”

  Ty’s lips made a flank attack on her mouth by sneaking up her neck. “The way I remember it,” he murmured against her throat, “you kissed me.”

  Delia’s laugh was a deep, contented purr. “Was I really such a brazen hussy?”

  “Be a brazen hussy now,” Ty offered, and followed the invitation by slipping his hand inside the loose neckline of her buckskin dress to fondle her breasts.

  Suddenly, crazed laughter rent the air above their heads as an enormous, muscular bird crashed onto the lake beside them, dousing them with an icy spray, rocking the canoe, and almost giving them an unwanted bath in the snow-fed lake.

  Startled, Delia sat up abruptly, clutching her opened dress tightly to her chest. She looked into the lake where the bird had dived, but all she saw were the ripples. “What the bloody hell was that?” she demanded so indignantly that Ty burst into crazy laughter of his own.

  Just then a sharp beak poked out of the water, followed by an iridescent, greenish-purple head. Then the whole bird popped up, still wearing his gaudy summer plumage of black and white checkered coat and striped collar. His tiny beady eyes fixed on Delia and he yodeled.

  Delia heard an answering yodel and her head whipped around, for the sound had come from Ty.

  The bird raced in a circle around their canoe, so fast he was almost paddling upright on the water on his big webbed feet. He let out a long, drawn out hoo-oo-oo. Ty hooed back. He laughed, aha-aha-ha-ha. Ty ha-haed back. He yodeled, ha-ha-loooo. Ty ha-looed back.

  As Delia stared at her husband’s smiling, beautiful face, her heart filled up with so much love she thought it would burst. For of all the many facets to this man—Dr. Ty, the healer; Tyler Savitch, the refined gentleman; Bedagi, the Abenaki warrior— Delia decided she loved this Ty the best.

  Ty, the little boy, who could play with a loon.

  A touch on her arm brought Delia back to the present. She looked into Elizabeth’s rosy-cheeked face. “It’s starting to snow again,” the girl said. “Don’t you think we should be getting back?”

  Delia was about to agree—for big flakes were now falling from the sky—when the roses were blanched from Elizabeth’s face and she let out a squeal of alarm, pointing back in the direction of the woods.

  Pulwaugh turned first and he, too, let out a sharp-pitched cry. The hand that fell to the tomahawk at his waist trembled badly. “It’s a ghost!” he exclaimed.

  “Nonsense,” Delia scoffed. She had never known a people worse than the Abenaki for believing in spirits and ghosts. “ ’Tis only a man.”

  The man, although tall and broad-shouldered, was wraith-thin. His clothes
were mere rags that flapped in the wind and his long black hair whipped around his face like a torn flag. As they watched, he raised his hand in the manner of the French priest bestowing a blessing.

  “Why, it’s the Dreamer,” Delia said. She thought sadly of Silver Birch, waiting every day in the longhouse for her man’s return. “Perhaps we should go talk to him. He looks cold and hungry.”

  Pulwaugh shook his head angrily and snapped a series of orders at them, all the while gathering their gear and herding them toward the village. Delia obeyed without an argument. The truth was she was afraid of the Dreamer. She certainly wasn’t going to approach the man alone.

  As they followed their own snowshoe tracks toward home, Delia looked back toward the lake. The Dreamer still stood there, watching them. He looked like a giant black crow, silhouetted against all that white brilliance, and Delia suppressed a superstitious shudder…

  For crows were supposed to be the harbingers of death.

  * * *

  The wind knifed through his tattered buckskins and icy flakes swirled around his head. But the Dreamer was impervious to the cold. His eyes followed the three figures as they shuffled away on their snowshoes and disappeared into the curtain of falling snow. Wrapped up in furs as they were, he couldn’t see their faces, but then he didn’t really care. Dizzy and light-headed with hunger and a fever, he was lost in his own world of dreams.

  He thought he might be a spirit now, although he wasn’t sure. He lived among the spirits on Katahdin, the greatest mountain. No Abenaki had dared such a thing before, or at least dared such a thing and lived to boast of it.

  The Abenaki dwelled and traveled within the woods and on the waters beneath, but the Katahdin was sacred. It was the home of Pamola, the Storm Spirit, a beast with the wings and claws of an eagle, the arms and torso of a man, and the head and antlers of a moose. Pamola, in his rages, unleashed his winds and lightnings and snowstorms on the hapless humans below. To venture up where Pamola had his lodge was to invite a sure and terrible death.