by Robin Moore
Maggie decided that this was not something she was ready to tell, even to Frenchgirl. "Just walking," she said.
Frenchgirl took Maggie's hands and drew her over to the hearthfire. "You are not well, Redwing. Perhaps you should let me carry the fire from now on."
"No!" Maggie answered abruptly, then caught herself. "I mean, no, that is all right. I need to do it. It makes me feel better. I have not felt well. I feel as though my body is not my own. I feel strange all the time. I can't sleep or eat."
Frenchgirl nodded. "Have you missed your time of the moon this month?"
Maggie nodded, "Yes, for two months now. I don't feel myself. All I can think about is death."
Frenchgirl smiled. "No, Redwing, now is the time to think about life."
"What do you mean?"
Frenchgirl smiled. "Don't mothers among your people tell their daughters anything?" "What do you mean?"
"The signs are clear, Redwing; you are carrying Firefly's baby!"
Maggie was stunned. This was the first time the thought had occurred to her.
Frenchgirl was already counting on her fingers. "Your baby will be born during the strawberry festival in early summer. This is the festival we call the celebration of the first fruits. A new life will come among us!"
Maggie stumbled off to bed, her head spinning. It was all so much.
Chapter Eleven
Just as Frenchgirl predicted, Maggie had her child in June, in the time of the first fruits.
The birthing struck Maggie while she was in the cornfields. Frenchgirl and three other women tended to her, and at about sundown, they delivered a Seneca-French-Irish baby boy.
From the first, Maggie felt her mother love flaring up. The baby became her world. It was good to feel a new life come among them after so much hardship.
Maggie still made the nightly trips to Firefly's burial scaffold. It was a great comfort, during the warm summer nights, to sit under that tree and rock the baby still. One evening, a great horned owl swooped down and landed in the pine branches overhead, giving its eerie, hooting call. The baby responded: "Hoot-hoot." For a few moments it seemed that the owl and child were in constant conversation, hooting back and forth. Then the owl flew off. The baby made its sound: "Hoot-hoot."
That was how the child got its name. Maggie called him her little Hoot Owl. Hoot Owl soon learned that he could draw a smile from any adult, even the older males, by pursing his fat, beaklike lips and saying, "Hoot-hoot."
Maggie didn't think much about leaving now. She knew her boy needed the comfort and care the clan women gave. She knew she needed it too.
She didn't think much about the war either. She knew the Seneca and the British were fighting the Americans. But that was happening far away, somewhere to the south, and it seemed impossible that the war could reach this jewel of a valley, here in the heart of Seneca Country. Maggie knew very little about the war and didn't care to know more. She preferred the world of growing corn and laughing babies.
But the war did come to Maggie's village—in early September. General John Sullivan, commanding a huge army of colonists, had pushed his way north, burning the towns of the great Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquois were simply not equipped to stand against such a great military force.
Cornstalk came in with several other runners early one morning, bringing the news that Sullivan's army was coming in their direction, fast.
Women and children snatched up a few essentials and made their way across the river to hide in the forest. If Sullivan destroyed their village, they knew they could head north to the British at Niagara. The British and the Seneca rallied to make a half-hearted stand against the huge army, but decided against it.
Maggie was in the cabin when Frenchgirl came and told her what was happening. The women bundled up their babies and began to make for the woods. But Maggie was cut off by a British officer on horseback.
"I saw your red hair from a distance," he declared. "Where were you taken captive?"
Maggie had to think for a moment. It had been a long time since she had considered herself a captive.
"Central Pennsylvania," she said.
The officer nodded. "Good. Then you will come with me now. We are exchanging prisoners with the Americans. I will see that you get back to your family."
Maggie held her son close. "I am with my family. You leave me be; I'll go to Niagara with the rest." The words were out of her mouth so fast that it took a moment for her to realize what she had said.
"I'll stay with my family," she repeated. Maggie glanced around, but she had lost sight of Frenchgirl.
The British officer dropped his courteous tone.
"This is not a request; it is a requirement. Now, you will come with me."
Maggie clutched her baby close and ran. It was easy to lose herself in the confusion. The officer was on horseback, and that made it more difficult for him to maneuver. She slipped out between the cabins and headed across the cornfields, looking for a place to hide. Then she thought of the thicket, down by the dump. She thought she could get away and hide down there.
Unfortunately, the officer saw her making her way through the dried cornstalks. He spurred his horse and chased her.
Maggie made it to the thicket and began to snake back along the trail. She stumbled into the clearing by the Ragpicker's hut. The old woman was kneeling down by the fire, surrounded by her dolls.
"Old woman," Maggie gasped, catching her breath, "I don't know if you can understand me. But if you have some power, use it against this man." She pointed to the officer, who was on foot, coming through the thicket behind her.
For a moment, Maggie stared into the Ragpicker's eyes. There was a cold gleam there, like starlight on ice.
The officer burst into the clearing, drawing his sword. He was breathing hard now.
"You will come with me," he ordered. "There is no point in running."
Maggie saw that he was right. There was no way she could get away, carrying the baby through the thicket.
"Give me a moment to change my child's clothes and I will come with you."
"No," the man said, "you will come with me alone. I have no use for the child."
Maggie stared at him in disbelief. "But I can't abandon my son."
"Very well," he said. "I will give you a choice." He strode across the clearing and snatched up one of the cornhusk dolls. "I am not a savage. I will permit you to leave your baby with this old woman."
Maggie stood firm. "No, I won't do it. You'll kill me first."
The officer chuckled. "Your life is not at stake. You are too valuable to me. Your child, on the other hand, is of no more use to me than this stupid doll."
To demonstrate his point, he held the doll out at arm's length and raised his sword, ready to sever its head.
Then, out of the corner of her eye, Maggie detected a small movement. The Ragpicker had raised her walking staff and was pointing it at the officer.
The man took two steps back, as if he were recoiling from a physical blow. The doll fell from his hand and lay on the leafy ground between Maggie and the officer.
In that moment, the Ragpicker stepped forward and took Hoot Owl out of Maggie's arms. Hugging the child to her ragged bosom, the old woman turned and hobbled off into the thicket. For the moment, Maggie decided to trust her.
But now the officer was beside her, his hands closing around her wrists, binding them with rawhide.
"You'll bring a good ransom," the officer was saying. "Come along now and no more of this foolish—"
Maggie caught him in mid sentence. She lashed out with her right foot, hit him square in the stomach, and knocked him off his feet.
Maggie plunged into the thicket and ran for her life. When she paused for a moment to catch her breath and free her hands, she could hear him, struggling through the trees behind her, cursing and slashing at the foliage with his sword. She hid behind a dead tree and listened until the thrashing stopped.
&nbs
p; At twilight, when she was sure she was alone, she crept back to the clearing by the Ragpicker's hut. She fetched the cornhusk doll the officer had dropped and placed it carefully in the hut, just inside the doorway. Then she sat with her back against a tree and waited for the Ragpicker to come back with Hoot Owl.
By morning the Ragpicker had still not come, but Sullivan's army had. Maggie watched from the thicket as they marched, with a band playing and banners flying, into the deserted village. She had a sudden urge to walk out of the clearing and ask the soldiers for help. After all, they were her people, weren't they?
But as she watched them destroy the town, she felt afraid of them. And, remembering the British officer, she feared for Hoot Owl. It took two days for the soldiers to reduce the jewel-like valley to a wasteland of smoking rubble. They chopped down the fruit trees, tore up the gardens; they threw the corn in the river or stacked it in the houses and set the buildings afire.
When the army moved on, Maggie was alone in the smoky ruin of what had once been the most beautiful place she had ever seen.
But the Ragpicker's hut was not touched. The soldiers had not gone down into the thicket. The fire, mysteriously, had not burned in that direction.
Maggie stayed at the hut for a few days, hoping the old woman would return with her son. But she didn't.
It seemed that every human being who had lived here was gone now, to another place. Just like the old woman, Maggie lived on what she could scavenge from the garbage piles at the dump. But soon, even that was not a source for food. She walked the fields but there wasn't an ear of corn or a single bean pod left to eat.
Maggie was picking through the garbage pile one night at sundown, hoping to find something to carry back to her fire, when an owl fluttered by, circling over her head. Maggie rose up out of the garbage and watched the owl. It gave an eerie cry then turned and flew south, toward the Allegheny.
Maggie hung her head. She understood. She had to go south and west now, toward Franny. If she stayed here through the winter, she would starve. If she went to Niagara, the British might kill or enslave her. She knew the owl was right. She would go in the morning.
Maggie felt a chill as she picked her way across the burned field to Firefly's burial scaffold. At least this vestige of the old life was still there.
Maggie kneeled and struck up the last fire she would make for her husband. She was sorry that he would have to make cold camps the rest of the way to the Hereafter.
It started to snow a little, a November snow.
Maggie thought how strange it was: how all those months she had dreamed about escaping and heading south. And now that she was doing so, it didn't seem like she was escaping at all: it was more like leaving home.
Chapter Twelve
Maggie had left the village to keep from starving, but there was nothing to eat on the trail south either. She had managed to forage a few things from the Ragpicker's hut: a little cornmeal and a small iron pot to cook it in, a moth-eaten bearskin robe to sleep in.
The snow grew deep in the woods now and it was hard walking. Maggie had wrapped her legs with blanket strips to keep warm. She wore three layers of moccasins but her feet were still wet. She spent about two hours each night drying her clothes by the fire.
Remembering the wolves, she was careful to keep the fire going and slept, off and on, wrapped up in a scrappy piece of bearskin. She wished she had an axe. The only weapon she carried was her sheath knife.
Maggie followed the waterways south, and west, retracing the route they had taken on the elk hunt. It took her six days to reach the Allegheny. The cornmeal was gone and she had taken to living on a strong tea she made by brewing pine needles in her iron pot.
After six days of walking through the deep snow surviving on nothing but pine-needle tea, Maggie came to the old Indian village site of Bucaloons, on the Allegheny River.
It had been burned to the ground and most of the rubble was covered with snow now. Maggie sifted around through the wreckage, looking for food.
Coming down along a half-frozen stream that ran through the village, Maggie saw a cone-shaped object made from sticks lying half-submerged in the water: a fish trap!
Thinking there might be something in it, Maggie stripped off her moccasins and leg wraps and made herself wade into the frigid water, breaking the thin ice with her bare feet as she walked. There was a fish in the trap, a big one, but it had been there for a long time and had begun to rot. Maggie decided to eat it anyway.
Walking back among the ice-covered reeds, she found something she had needed very badly. It was a canoe. Not one of the big, hulking Iroquois canoes but a small, sleek craft covered with birch bark.
The canoe was filled with snow. Ignoring the cold, Maggie used her hands to shovel out the loose snow, praying that the delicate craft had not been harmed. She broke the ice around the outside of the canoe with her fists and waded with the canoe out of the reeds. It floated light and graceful on the icy water. Maggie smiled to herself.
"From here on out," she thought, "the river will carry me home."
Maggie sloshed on up to the bank and built a roaring fire. The warmth came back into her feet and legs as the fish cooked over the coals. Maggie devoured it greedily and thought it was one of the best things she had ever eaten.
That night, rolled up in the bearskin in the rubble of the deserted village, Maggie slept well. She had found the fish and the canoe. It had been a good day.
In the morning, Maggie lingered by the fire, using her knife to shape two canoe paddles from cast-off wood. She went over the canoe carefully, patching weak places in the seams with melted pine pitch. By noon she was loaded and ready to go.
She pushed off downstream and made her way down the frozen river. The force of the water was a little frightening. Maggie had to experiment with the paddle to discover how to keep the bow aimed into the rapids the way she had seen the Indians do. She knew that if the swirls and waves hit her broadside, they would roll the small craft over. Maggie knew that if she fell into the water, she would probably die before she could make it to shore and get a fire going. So she traveled conservatively, choosing the smoothest route down the wide, powerful waterway.
It was the day after she found the canoe that Maggie started talking to herself. When she returned to her diet of pine-needle tea, something in Maggie's mind changed. She felt light-headed and giddy. She knew exactly what was happening.
"Now, Maggie," she said to herself as she paddled, "I have to have a talk with you, dear. We can't lose touch with things now, can we? It'll only be a while more, a few more bends down the river and we'll fetch up on Kittanning, and Franny will be there. Franny'll know how to find Hoot Owl. What will she think if we come up there like a blatherin' idiot? Keep a hold on yourself now!"
To calm herself, Maggie said aloud, "I'm of sound mind and body," even though she knew neither was true. "I'm of sound mind and body," she repeated. She began to sing those words as she paddled, singing them to the tune of an old hymn she remembered from her childhood. She sang to herself for hours as she paddled, sang the tune every way it could be sung, until she had the words strung out long and crazy. She sang: "I'm of sound mind and bod-ee. I'm of sound mind and bod-eee. I'm of sound mind and bod-eeeeeeen She listened to herself and cackled wildly.
"Lord," she whispered at last, "I'm losin' my mind."
That night, like every other night, there was nothing to eat. Maggie rolled up in her bearskin by the fire. When she awoke toward midnight to build up the blaze, she was surprised to find Franny standing over her.
Maggie sat up and threw the bearskin aside.
"Franny," she asked, "how did you find me?"
But Franny didn't answer. She simply reached down to help Maggie up. Maggie reached up to grip Franny's arm but her hand went right through her, like smoke!
Maggie stood up and looked around. There was no one there.
"Maggie," she said to herself, "this is too much, dear, you're seein' thi
ngs now. You're seein' things that aren't rightly here."
She lay down in the bearskin and fell back into a troubled sleep.
Maggie sang and paddled her way south all the next day. Toward twilight, she saw Franny again. This time her aunt was standing on the shore, waving her in.
Maggie dug the paddle hard and angled the canoe over to the bank, almost upsetting in the rough water. She slipped up across the ice and into the woods, but there was no one there.
After that, Maggie made some rules for herself. She had noticed two things about the apparitions. One was that they never spoke to her; when she called to them they never answered. The other was that there was always something strange about Franny. She wasn't dressed for the weather—all she wore was an ankle-length nightdress, making her look a little like an eerie angel appearing in the woods.
Maggie felt the mirage of her aunt standing by the fire that night but she didn't open her eyes, she didn't want to see it.
The next afternoon, she saw the apparition again. This time Franny was standing on a rock in her bare feet, waving Maggie ashore. Maggie paddled right by without stopping.
It was about sundown on that day when Maggie thought she saw a plume of wood smoke hanging in the sky down around the riverbend. When she rounded the bend, she could make out the shape of a log cabin, set back in the woods. But she was not convinced it was real. She pulled the canoe ashore to investigate.
As soon as she stepped up on the bank, a dog, tied to a sapling by the cabin door, started barking. Maggie had scarcely stepped from the canoe when the cabin door slid open and a rifle barrel poked out.
"What is it ya want?" a man's voice shouted.
Maggie grinned. "I'm of sound mind and body," she said. Then she realized that had nothing to do with his question.
"What do ya want?" the voice repeated.
Maggie pulled herself together. "This must be a real place," she thought. "He's speakin'."
Maggie cleared her throat. "Please sir, what is this place?"