by Robin Moore
Now, Jake reached into his hunting pouch and drew out his fire-making gear: flint and steel. He tucked a dry wad of bark into the center of the twig pyramid. Then he tore a square of charred cotton cloth, placed it on top of a chunk of flint.
Holding it down with his left thumb, the old man struck the stone a glancing blow with his striking steel. He struck once, twice, three times, before a shower of sparks flew off the edge of the stone. One spark fell on the char-cloth and glowed orange.
Carefully, using his body to shield the glowing cloth from any wind, he tucked the char-cloth into a bundle of tinder and carefully, almost reverently, began to nurture the flame, blowing on it lightly to coax the glowing cloth into fire. The bundle began smoking, carrying wisps of cedar bark scent up into Maggie's nostrils.
At last, the bundle burst into flame and Jake tucked it into the pyramid of twigs. The bark and fine branches caught and the fire roared to life!
Maggie's eyes were drawn to flame, as if she could derive some warmth just from looking at it. The flames danced, yellow and enticing. But her body was still cold as stone.
Now, she watched as Jake pulled a lightweight iron chain from their cook sack and used his hatchet to cut stout spruce poles, about as tall as he was. Jake lashed them together with the chain and hung the tripod over the the fire. A moment later, a battered iron kettle swung easily over the flames, filled with snow to melt down for tea water.
Poordevil inched up close to the fire, sitting on his haunches and watching with interest as Jake fed the fire.
Then Jake did a very brave thing. He knelt in the snow beside the toboggan. He lifted the edge of his buckskin hunting shirt and laid Maggie's bare, frozen feet onto the warm skin of his belly. Maggie watched as he squeezed his eyes shut in agony.
"Whoee!" she heard him exclaimed, "Them's some cold feet!"
It struck Maggie as comical and made her a laugh at little. She was shivering so badly that she couldn't tell the laughter from the shivers. But it felt good anyway.
After Jake warmed her feet on his belly, he took her frozen hands and gave them the same treatment, holding them against his skin, driving the cold from them.
"Kin ya feel anything?' Jake asked.
Maggie nodded. Her jaw-muscles were still stiff with cold, but she felt a little better.
Then, a terrible thing happened. Poordevil had been so intent on watching the actions of the people that he wasn't paying any attention to his own movements.
The hound backed up and one of his hind legs accidentally struck one of the legs of the tripod, knocking the whole works over. The pot of melted snow-water landed squarely on the fire, putting it out.
Maggie could scarcely believe her eyes. A moment before, a warm blaze had crackled and popped there, promising life and warmth. Now there was nothing but a pile of sodden, blackened sticks.
Too stunned to move, Maggie watched as Jake knelt and raked through the wet wood with his bare hands. A few embers still glowed. The old mountaineer desperately blew on them, trying to coax them into flame. But the wood was wet. Despite his best efforts, the glowing sticks winked and went out, even as he blew on them.
The wind came up now, howling through the trees, blowing fresh snow across the fire, and onto Maggie's bare feet. She tried to draw her feet up into the blanket but found that she couldn't move them. All she could do was to lie helpless on the sled while the snow drifted deep around her.
Maggie began to accept that she was probably going to die. Her body was already very cold and it would be a long time before a substantial fire would be ready. If Jake worked very quickly, he might be able to save himself, she thought. But she knew her chances of survival were very small.
Things seldom go wrong singly in the woods. When something goes wrong, it leads to a second misfortune and then another and another.
It was too bad that Maggie had fallen through the ice. It was a shame that Poordevil had put out the fire. And it was a grave misfortune that Jake was beginning to succumb to the cold as well. He had been working with his hands bared to the cold and now his fingers had turned wooden and useless.
Determined to make a new fire, the old man tried snapping sticks from the dead spruce tree. But his hands would not obey him. They would not grip and release. His fingers were frozen too badly. He had to use the heels of his hands to carry individual sticks from the tree to the log platform and that took a long time.
At last, he managed to lay up the fire. Now Jake reached into his pouch and attempted to draw out his flint and striking steel. But the task of tearing off the char-cloth and nestling it into the tinder was much too delicate for his frozen fingers. He tried, but he just couldn't do it.
Poor Jake was shivering so badly that his flint and steel, his tinder and char-cloth, tumbled from his fingers and dropped into the powdery snow. He went down on his hands and knees and searched in the snow, but his eyes were bleary with cold and he couldn't see anything but whiteness and whiteness and whiteness.
Maggie watched all this with the detached eye of someone who is about to die. She should have been afraid, but she wasn't. She wasn't frightened or angry or sad—she was just very tired. What she wanted most was to close her eyes and settle off into sleep.
A part of her mind rebelled against the urge to sleep. Maggie remembered another time when she had felt this way, when she and Deaf Annie were buried in an avalanche back in Penns Valley. She knew then, as she knew now, that this was how a person froze to death, by giving in to the temptation to fall asleep in the great cold. She knew her life depended upon staying awake. But it was no use. Even though she fought against it, Maggie found herself closing her eyes. She slumped back on the toboggan.
In the darkness that surrounded her, she was vaguely aware of sounds: Poordevil was barking and Jake was saying something to her. But then the wind came up, and she couldn't hear them anymore.
Their voices were drowned out by a new voice: the voice of the wind. The sound of the wind in the spruce trees grew louder and louder, until it wasn't just the sound of wind, it was somehow human, singing to her, right next to her ear. Maggie recognized it as an old woman's voice, cracked and brittle, but filled with sweet melody, singing a strange eerie tune. She couldn't make out the words, but she knew from the meter of the song that it was a lullaby.
Maggie couldn't resist the cold any longer. She surrendered herself to the cold wind and settled off into the sleep that comes before the whiteness of death.
Chapter Four
Maggie didn't feel cold anymore. In fact, she felt very warm.
When she opened her eyes, she was surprised to see that she was no longer in the snowy woods by the river. Instead, she found herself in a gray and misty landscape. She had no way of knowing how long she had slept or how she had come to this strange place. But the musical voice surrounded her, like a comforting cloud.
Then Maggie noticed that she was up to her neck in warm, steaming water. Somehow, her clothing had been removed and she was lying in a wooden tub that seemed to be made from a huge hollowed-out log. The water was a dark greenish- gold; the bath was thick with green hemlock branches, brewed into a strong tea. The fragrant steam filled her nostrils.
Someone was washing her feet with a rough rag. As the rag passed over her skin, she felt the warmth returning to her frozen feet. Maggie peered through the dense steam but could only make out the outlines of a person, moving about at the edge of the tub.
She had no way of knowing who it was or why they were helping her. She knew only that she was warm and cared for and that the kind and gentle hands were washing her body, washing the cold from the pores of her skin. At last, she heard the voice singing close to her ear and she felt the rag coursing over her cheeks and forehead and nose and lips and then —
—Then the singing grew fainter and fainter until it was wind again and then the wind was quiet and she heard the crackle of a woodfire and Poordevil's sharp bark in the cold air. But still she felt the gentle movement of the rag
across her face.
Maggie opened her eyes. She wasn't in the tub anymore. She was back in the snowy woods, lying on the toboggan. And the rag was not a rag. It was the long pink tongue of the wolfy-dog, Poordevil, licking her face and hands.
Maggie pulled herself up on one elbow and looked around. The sun was down now and she was back in the white, frozen world by the river. Jake had a crackling fire going and a bubbling stewpot suspended over the flames.
"Good to see you up and about," Jake said when he saw her stirring, "I was afeared you were gonna freeze solid on me."
Maggie grinned. She spoke, and this time words came out.
"What happened? I mean, what saved us?"
Jake nodded to the fire.
"It was a trick of the wind. Wind came up and blew through them coals. I found a stick that still had a bit of coal on it. I build up some bark around it, just about burn my fingers raw. But I did it. So now we got ourselves a fire."
"It was the wind..." she mused.
Then she asked, "Jake, you didn't hear anything odd, did you?"
"Like what?"
"Any singing?"
The old man shook his head, "Nope. Jest the wind." Maggie nodded. "Strange doin's," she said, more to herself than to him.
Then, Maggie told Jake about the strange dream that had overtaken her while she was in the cold sleep. Jake listened quietly and thought it over a few times before remarking, "Sometimes them dreams takes time to figure out and sometimes ya never do find out what they was about."
Then Jake served up a bowl of hot venison soup. Maggie forgot her dream and settled down to filling her stomach.
It was after Maggie had eaten that the thawing pains began. She knew they were coming. She wanted to fortify herself before the fiery torment started on in her hands and feet. Maggie knew that it is not the freezing that pains a person, it's the thawing out.
Jake stayed up with her for most of the night, nursing the painful stinging of his own fingers, keeping a vigil by the fire and the tea pot. Maggie fought back the pain and wept, despite herself.
At last, after hours of torment, she was empty of pain and empty of tears. She was exhausted. She laid down in her blankets and tried to sleep. But she couldn't. The strange song she had heard in her dream circled through her mind again and again. It seemed to her that the dark figure by the bath had been the old woman from the Seneca village.
She wondered about the Ragpicker, wondered if her so-called magic was responsible for saving her life. She wondered if there was anything the old woman could do, anything anyone could do, to keep a person from dying when their time had come.
"Well," Maggie thought, "Maybe my time hasn't come yet."
Maggie wondered long and hard about the old woman. She remembered the very first night she had seen her. It was on a cold winter's night, about this time of year. This was after Firefly had died and after she had placed his remains in a tree out in the fields beyond the village. Every night, she made a small ritual of trekking out after the evening meal and lighting a fire at the base of the tree, so Firefly would have light on his journey to the spirit world.
She was sitting under the tree one night, staring into the flames of her tiny fire, when she caught a glimpse of some movement in the garbage heaps down at the edge of the field. Maggie knew that there were wild dogs who lived down there, fighting over the scraps of things that people had thrown away, and she thought maybe she had seen a few of the scavengers making their nightly rounds.
But when she looked more closely, she was astonished to see an old person, dressed in dark ragged clothing, poking through the garbage with her walking stick, as if she were looking for something. Maggie watched her for a along time, saw how the dogs milled around and fell back when she gestured with her stick, almost as if they were obeying her.
Later, back at the cabin, she asked her companion, Frenchgirl, about what she had seen.
"Oh," Frenchgirl had said, in that light, lilting accent, "that is the old witchy-one, the one they call the Ragpicker."
Frenchgirl explained that the old woman lived alone in the thicket down by the river, living on whatever she could forage from the refuse heaps. She said that most people were a little afraid of her. Some said she had magical powers. There were rumors that she could kill you with a glance. Or make you sick by blowing a hairball or a sharp bone into your body. Others said that she captured and ate small children for her meals. And still others said that she was simply a crazy old woman who lived off in the woods and wanted nothing to do with the rest of the Seneca.
One night, driven by her curiously, Maggie slipped down through the thicket by the river, searching for the old woman's camp. It was quite dark that night and Maggie had a difficult time making it down through the deep snow.
She heard dogs, fighting over garbage back on the refuse heaps. Moving quietly, she slipped past them and pushing ahead, without knowing why she was taking such a crazy chance. She followed the glimmer of firelight she saw in a clearing in the thicket.
Creeping up through the dried thorns and bristle briars, Maggie could see an open fire burning in the tiny clearing. At the edge of the clearing sat a conical hut, its roof heaped with a mass of hide and bark and garbage. Suddenly, the bark door was pushed aside and the old woman crawled out on all fours and stood up.
Maggie would never forget her first glimpse of the Ragpicker. Her face was lined and wrinkled, like a crabapple left to sour on a tree. Her hair was wild in the wind and streaked with gray. Her shapeless garment hung on her like a ragged tent. And she wore curious shoes, pointy-toed deerskin moccasins.
Then a strange scene took place: The old woman seated herself by the fire, reached into the bosom of her robe and took out a bundle. Maggie watched as the old woman unwrapped it and drew out seven cornhusk dolls, about as large as the woman's forearm, and sat them on the ground around the fire.
Maggie noticed that these were like the child's dolls the girls in the village played with, dressed in bits of hide and cast off cloth, and each one without a face.
As Maggie watched, the old woman stirred a pot of corn soup and spooned out a portion for each doll, feeding them and wiping their mouths with a bit of filthy cloth. Then she took each of the dolls to her breast and nursed it, singing a strange song in an old, cracked voice.
It was then that Maggie remembered where she had first heard the lullaby which had come to her in her dream. It was on that night when she had peered in on the Ragpicker's camp.
Then the old woman had gathered up her dolls and disappeared into the hut, closing the flap behind her.
Maggie had never understood what she had seen that night.
But, one thing was sure. In a week or two Maggie would be back in Little Beard's village. She would go down into the thicket, down to the last place she had seen Hoot Owl, by the Ragpicker's hut. And she would see what she would see.
Was it possible that the old woman and the boy could still be alive? Maggie felt in her bones that they were. But, if so, where would they be and how would they have survived the winter?
There were more questions than answers. Maggie couldn't think anymore. She closed her eyes and slept.
Maggie and Jake didn't make any miles the next day. They stayed in camp and rested Maggie's tired feet and at last on the second day, she felt well enough to go on.
In all of their days of traveling, they hadn't seen another person on the river trails. Now and then, they passed the burnt-out ruins of the Indian villages Col. Brodhead's 600-man army had torched when they marched upriver in September. Just as General Sullivan had done in the country further north, Brodhead destroyed everything in his path: wiped out the cornfields, burnt the bark huts and log cabins, scattering the river people, sending them out into the wilderness to survive the winter without food or shelter.
The river valley was abandoned and sometimes it seemed to Maggie that she and Jake were the only people left on earth, walking alone through the great white world.
Then, an hour before sundown on their twelve day of walking, both Maggie and Jake caught the unmistakable scent of woodsmoked layered in the cold air. Looking ahead, Maggie saw a column of smoke rising from the hillside above the river bend.
Maggie was in the lead, while Jake plodded behind, hauling the sled. Maggie waited until Jake pulled up behind her.
She nodded toward the smoke.
"What do you make of it?" she asked.
The old man's breath was coming in fast clouds. He stopped and looked, squinting his eyes against the glare of the setting sun.
"Could be indins," he said, "Maybe a small huntin' party. In that case, we'd do best to wait until dark and slip around them. I don't think they'd welcome any guests during the starvation time. Besides, they might still be a a little irritated about being burnt out and they might decide to take it out on us.
"On the other hand, they might be white folks. Trappers 'er maybe soldiers. Hard to say. I can't imagine what they'd be doin' out in this weather."
"Yes," Maggie said lightly, "a person would have to be crazy to be out in this weather."
The old man grinned. "I spec' yer right. Why don't you stay here with the sled and the dog and I'll slip up there and see what I kin see."
"Sounds right to me," said Maggie.
They pulled the toboggan up into the trees and Jake slipped on his hunting pouch and checked the priming on his rifle.
"I'll be back afore dark," he said. And then he was gone.
Maggie sat on the toboggan and held the dog, trying to conserve her warmth, hoping she wouldn't have to sit in the cold for too long.
The snow along the hillside was hard crusted and crunched loudly under Jake's snowshoes. He worked his way up as close as he dared. Then he stepped out of his snowshoes, tied them together with a leather thong, and slung them over his left shoulder. It was slow travel from there on out but Jake took his time, working his way up the side of the hill, meaning to come up on the camp from behind.