Savage Liberty

by Eliot Pattison

  The barmaid brought a plate of fried apples, but no one seemed interested in eating now. From the street came the ragged sound of fife and drums, inexpertly played.

  “How would the major know that?” Conawago asked. “How would he know they wouldn’t follow for a day or two?”

  Strangely, Brandt suddenly became aware of the powder horn in front of him and, with a nervous glance at his companions, covered it with his hands. “The major, he knows everything.” He looked about the tavern, back in the present now. “He’s ’bout the greatest hero folks in these parts have ever known. I remember that day we finally arrived here. They didn’t come after us right away, but when they came, they was an army of demons. We had to split up and take indirect routes to throw them off. We were more dead than alive, all played out, and near starved to death as we marched through the gate. Little more than a few mushrooms and raw acorns for a week and more. As soon as folks here see us, they begin cheering. ‘Huzzah, huzzah, the saviors from the north!’ they call, and we stood tall and straightened the rags of our uniforms.”

  “And you came back here after the war?” Duncan asked.

  “It’s the refuge, don’t ye know. Rangers need a refuge to make ready fer the next battle. We ain’t done with the ’Nakis, I know that in my bones. Gotta keep ready, wait for orders.”

  Duncan leaned toward Brandt. “So the next battle is to free the hero from his chains.”

  Brandt looked up in alarm, glancing nervously at the other tavern patrons. “Keep yer voice down!” he whispered, and slowly nodded. “A misunderstanding is all. He ain’t any more a traitor than you.” Duncan and Conawago exchanged an ironic glance.

  One of the resident doves flew through the rafters overhead, shedding a small downy body feather as it flew. Brandt stared at it with the fascination of a small child as it drifted over their table; then he made an unsuccessful attempt to grab it, his action pushing it in another direction.

  Duncan gestured to the powder horn that Brandt kept fingering. “I remember rangers who etched their stories on their horns. Is that one about St. Francis?” As he slowly extended his hand, trying to reach the horn, Brandt snatched it away, tucking it under his arm. “Not yer nevermind, nevermind, nevermind,” he echoed. His high voice was getting hoarse.

  “I seem to recall,” Conawago observed, “that Major Rogers tended to argue with British officers as energetically as he fought the French king.”

  The old corporal gazed at the Nipmuc with half-lidded eyes. He seemed to be sinking into an intoxicated torpor, and then he bent toward Conawago, his eyes burning with sudden energy. “T’ain’t spit and polish what wins a battle, it’s guts and vinegar, it’s moving through the forest as stealthy as a catamount, it’s standing to reload even though the bullets be flying around you and piss be running down yer leg.” Brandt drained his tankard and grew more solemn. “The major won the battles, but the generals who despised him got all the rewards.”

  Conawago pushed the plate of apples toward the corporal and signaled for more ale. “It’s enough to make a man bitter,” the Nipmuc observed.

  “It’s him what wrote the book of ranging rules that the damned lobster-backs now teach their own soldiers. He should have been made one of those knights or dukes or such.”

  Duncan leaned forward and whispered. “Is it the army that now accuses the major?”

  “God rot ’em, yes! Because he wants to save this great land from the likes of those pissant generals!” Brandt looked down at the table. The stink of ale was heavy on his breath. “He sent me a letter a few months ago,” the scrawny corporal confided.

  “A letter from the hero of St. Francis must have been an occasion for all here at the fort to celebrate,” Conawago suggested. “You probably read it out loud to all the town.”

  Brandt flinched at the words, and he craned his head, surveying the tavern’s customers with sudden suspicion. When he looked back, his eyes narrowed. “Once a ranger, always a ranger.” Brandt knuckled his forehead. “Knights of the forest,” he recited. It was one of the slogans ranger officers used for recruiting.

  “You make it sound like he gave you a mission, Corporal,” Duncan observed. “Written in purple ink perhaps.” He pushed down the temptation to ask if Brandt had also received a gold coin. He had been paying off his debts.

  The grizzled ranger fixed him with a bristling gaze. “Ye’ll get burned poking yer finger in someone else’s fire.”

  “Once a ranger, always a ranger,” Duncan repeated. “I was a ranger,” he reminded Brandt. “So were Branscomb, Oliver, and Chisholm.”

  Conawago placed a hand on Duncan’s arm as if worried that he was pushing the unsteady corporal too hard, but Duncan pushed anyway. “I supposed a man as cunning as Rogers could find ways to get messages even while he is in prison.”

  Brandt’s eyes flared. Duncan had found the line he could not cross. The corporal pressed his arm more tightly around his powder horn. “Damned few he can trust,” Brandt shot back. “Who else but the faithful from ’59? Branscomb, Oliver, and Chisholm were with me in that special hell, sure. The man who stands beside ye when the ’Nakis come screaming down the hillside to eat yer heart, that’s the one ye can rely on.”

  Duncan leaned close to the old ranger. “There’s a new call from the north,” he whispered. “Saguenay.”

  Brandt’s eyes suddenly burned with a new light, and he began frantically searching the pockets of his much-patched waistcoat, finally extracting a leather-wrapped bullet like the one Daniel Oliver had worn around his neck. He stared at it, all signs of drunkenness gone, then gripped the ranger amulet tightly and stood, staggering only slightly. With a determined glint, he marched out the rear door of the tavern.

  “TEN, ELEVEN, TWELVE,” MUNRO COUNTED as the red-coated figures climbed out of the whaleboats on the river below them. “A dozen lobsterbacks plus an officer. Tough-looking bastards. They all have long swords. Dragoons, like Noah said. Dragoons like at Worcester.”

  Duncan and his friends had crossed the river in the dim light before daybreak. He pushed back an alder branch to see the soldiers more clearly. “Dragoons need horses,” he observed.

  Munro nodded. “Odd for them to arrive at dawn,” he said. “They must have been rowing in shifts through the night.” As he spoke, two more whale-boats appeared out of the river mist, one manned by a bedraggled group of men who wore red bands around their arms—the Massachusetts militia sent by the governor. Duncan puzzled over the black uniforms in the second boat. Then he saw the man sitting on the central thwart, a broad-rimmed hat on his head and a black book in his hand. Wheelock and his Christian soldiers were bringing up the rear of the flotilla from Agawam.

  Someone on the fort ramparts gave a sharp whistle. Someone else near the gate began energetically blowing a tin horn. Men and women began appearing—some rising from blankets laid out near slumbering livestock—and watched as the soldiers marched in a column of two toward the fort.

  “Wheelock’s not going to have the pomp he was expecting for his arrival,” Conawago observed, his words filled with foreboding. The soldiers had not waited for the reverend, for they had a mission and were not interested in ceremony. They had to be part of the dragoon company Beck had been riding with. Duncan nodded grimly, then pulled on his pack, lifted his rifle, and set out for Lake Champlain.

  The rough track they followed could be considered a road only with the same hyperbole that the military used in calling a hill with a trench a fortification. No doubt the army had urgently dispatched troops to clear the path during the war to make it passable for wagons of materiel, but in many places it was now so heavily rutted by intersecting creeks and so crowded with undergrowth that no wheeled vehicle could pass. By midmorning they reached a verdant mountain range that stretched to the north, and they had to climb around a tangle of trees that had tumbled down a steep slope in an avalanche. They passed over enough straight, clear sections, however, that Duncan found himself pining for Goliath, who would have
taken joy in stretching his legs over such terrain. The thought made him gaze westward, wondering if he would ever see the horse or even Ishmael again. The task he had given the young Nipmuc had been almost impossible, and more than once he chided himself for pushing the youth to undertake it on a stolen dragoon mount.

  “So is he truly touched in the head,” came a voice over his shoulder, “or was the corporal putting on a cunning act for us?”

  Duncan paused to let Conawago catch up with him. The old Nipmuc had been lost in worried contemplation ever since they’d left the Connecticut. “I have been weighing our time in the tavern with Brandt,” his friend said. “Is he a lunatic on a mission or a sane man on a lunatic mission?”

  They walked a few more paces. A pine grouse flew across their path. “Perhaps both. He is a man alone,” Conawago continued. “His life was defined by his time with the rangers, and the St. Francis raid has tainted his mind. He has lost the scent of battle, lost his commander, lost his brothers. The unsteady mind of the old ranger drifted without those anchors to hold it. But did you see his eyes when he rose from the table last night? You lit a fire in him that burned away his alcohol. Your words triggered something inside him, as if he suddenly had to commence his mission.”

  “I think Major Rogers, lying in chains, has finally given him orders, through the one who writes in purple ink.”

  Munro, now walking beside them, had been listening. “T’weren’t no rough musket he brought to the tavern last night. It was a ranger’s gun, a lovingly maintained long rifle that he leaned against the wall when he arrived. He was planning to leave, at least the part of him that’s a ranger was planning so,” Munro said, as if he had decided that Brandt, who had lost his family in Indian raids and experienced the horrors of the St. Francis expedition and who knew many other violent encounters, was made of several broken parts.

  “And he kept his powder horn hidden,” Duncan said. “He didn’t want me to study it, snatched it away when I tried.”

  “But he showed it to me,” Munro explained, “up in the hall when it was just the two of us. I admired the handiwork and told him I had etched my battles on my own, so he showed me. Seemed like the usual images a soldier in the field makes. A bear, a stag. A star-shaped fortress at one end and another box like a fort at the other, connected by a rambling line.”

  “Ticonderoga is star shaped,” Conawago observed, “and Number Four is a box.”

  “Aye, connected by the line that is this road. And there were images spaced along the line.”

  “A map, you mean,” Duncan said. “A map he needs for his mission.”

  Munro nodded. “Except surely an old ranger would know how to get to Fort Ti or Number Four.”

  “Rogers wants him to do something else, not at the forts. What else was shown on the horn—along the road?” Duncan asked.

  Munro shrugged. “Trees. A mitten-shaped lake with little fish in it. Something like a chimney.”

  “A chimney? Why a chimney?”

  “Don’t know, Captain. Does it matter?”

  “Whether Brandt’s mind is cracking or not, somewhere inside it he holds a secret we need, a secret that has something to do with the sinking of the Arcturus, or at least the French who sank her. Rogers found something at St. Francis, something he could use in the war against the French. He came back to Number Four, then returned to Champlain over the road that was being constructed then. He discovered that the war was almost over and he did not need to use his secret, so he kept it for another opportunity. Brandt said the road was completed in 1760, a few months after the raid on St. Francis. By then the war was finished in North America. Odd that a man of Rogers’s rank and his corporal would come to work on the completion of the road. It was a time of victory parades and celebratory balls in Albany and New York, where Rogers would have been feted, but he chose to come back into these mountains and build a road. That doesn’t strike you as strange?”

  Conawago grinned. “And tell me, Duncan. What would be your choice, a starched-collar ball in the city or a walk in paradise?” he asked good-naturedly, with a gesture that took in the rolling hills around them.

  Duncan knew that Conawago needed no answer to that question.

  “ ‘Heavy hearts need busy hands,’ Brandt said,” Munro recalled. “But why would Rogers have a heavy heart? He was a hero, perhaps the most famous man on the continent for months after St. Francis.”

  “He had a spy in the French camp, someone who had soured on King Louis,” Duncan suggested. “Rogers had become a son of the New Hampshire wilderness. English walked those mountains, but so did French from the Quebec country. There’s no clear border even now between Quebec and the English-speaking colonies. The outcome of the war was not certain then. His spy told him not to worry about immediate pursuit, but he also gave Rogers something that would help the British cause in the war, I’m convinced of it.”

  His companions had no chance to reply, for suddenly Molly ran past them, Will a few steps behind. As they rounded a curve in the road, they could hear men’s voices ahead of them. Duncan and Munro instantly slipped into the shadows and checked their weapons, but Conawago, undaunted, continued and after a few paces began to laugh, bringing his friends out of hiding.

  The scene reminded Duncan of an Italian circus he had once seen as a student in Holland, complete with clowns and a performing monkey. Ahead of them, where tall trees bent toward each other to turn the road into something of a tunnel, Ebenezer Brandt was clutching his belly, laughing hysterically. Solomon Hayes was repeatedly running up a fallen log that had lodged five feet up the trunk of a huge maple, then leaping, arm outstretched, up against the trunk as he tried to reach higher and higher. His hat moved up the side of the tree, always just out of his reach, seeming of its own power. Sadie was swinging back and forth on thin branches, squawking in alarm, her efforts to retrieve the hat as futile as Hayes’s.

  Munro instantly assessed the situation and raised his gun. “Spiny pig,” he announced. “They’ll go for anything that smells of salt.” He lifted his rifle and fired, hitting the tree just above the hat. The frightened porcupine dropped its prize and scurried to the far side of the trunk.

  Hayes darted after his hat and with a quick whistle called Sadie to his shoulder.

  “I thought you were going north,” Duncan observed icily.

  Hayes hesitated, seeming confused by Duncan’s tone. “Perhaps you hadn’t noticed this is the only road that leads anywhere near north,” the tinker replied. “Northwest to the lake, then north along the trails that follow its shore.”

  “The Connecticut goes north.”

  Hayes began extracting the short quills embedded in the inside of his tattered hat. “The northern settlements are not upriver, they are up Champlain.”

  “French settlements,” Duncan shot back.

  “I seem to recall a treaty that made King George their monarch.”

  “You know what they say about treaties. Just a means for each side to build strength for the next war.”

  “Mere tinkers are hardly engaged in affairs of state, McCallum.”

  “Mere tinker, Hayes? I saw you at Number Four. You were sending messages with tribesmen who had come to the fort.”

  Conawago produced a canteen and stepped between them, extending it to Hayes. “You know he seeks his wife among the northern tribes, Duncan. Of course he sends messages. To trappers, to Mohawks, to Micmacs, to Hurons and Passamoquoddy. What would you expect?”

  Munro extended a twist of tobacco to Brandt, and the two old soldiers spoke in low tones, laughing as Brandt pointed to the splintered bark that marked Munro’s victory over the spiny pig.

  “I am not blocking your path, McCallum,” Hayes stated in a brittle voice, gesturing up the road. “By all means, continue. My hat and my monkey are no concern of yours.”

  Duncan glanced at the tinker’s shabby hat and pushed down an ungrateful remark about wasting everyone’s time over an old rag. He was tempted to force the tinker to
unpack his coded books right there.

  “I believe the road passes by that lake in the distance,” Conawago observed, pointing toward the north. “I wager the soldiers who used this road built a campsite there. We’ll have a fire going and a hot meal ready at sundown. We’ll look forward to your company.”

  Hayes impassively brushed off his hat and set it on his head. “Your Highland friend doesn’t want me in his camp.”

  “But I do,” Conawago cheerfully replied. “There will be room for all of us. And fried trout for all if I can arrive early enough.”

  Duncan shot his friend a petulant glance, then set off at a rapid pace up the road. He grew more suspicious of Hayes each day, angry at Conawago for defending the tinker, always despairing that the more he struggled to grasp the secrets that plagued him, the less he understood.

  AS CONAWAGO HAD ANTICIPATED, THERE was indeed a campsite with a pleasant prospect waiting for them when they arrived at the lake hours later. They had made good time, and Duncan agreed to join Will and Munro in a swim while farther down the shore Conawago dropped his horsehair line into the current where a brook emptied into the lake.

  Duncan felt an odd sense of urgency as he dove in, feeling a sudden desperation to be cleansed. Here in the depths was at least a world he understood, a world that his totem spirit and the Hebridean boy within him both adored. The tannin-stained water combined with the long rays of the sinking sun to create a vista of golds and browns beneath the surface. Speckled trout watched him, then lazily swam away. A huge pike, as old as the mountains, studied him, as if evaluating him as a possible meal, until four black legs churned the surface above, and with a powerful stroke it disappeared into the murk.