by Robin Moore
Maggie felt a great anger rising within her. "Have you lost your senses?" she shouted, "That's the last of our food!"
Frenchgirl began to weep.
"I know," she sobbed, "I knew it was wrong but I did it anyway. I have a wanting creature inside of me, this thing that wants to eat.
"It whispers in my ear, 'Here is food. You can have it. All you need to do is take it and it is yours.'
"I resisted as long as I could. But this morning, the voice was too loud. I had to do it."
Maggie's anger evaporated.
"I understand," she said.
Maggie knew what it was to be hungry and afraid, driven on by voices of starvation's ghosts, voices that tempted and taunted until they got their way.
She thought about all the times when Frenchgirl has been strong and sure and capable, back when Maggie had first come among the Seneca and been given into Frenchgirl's care. Now it was Maggie's turn to care for her friend.
"There is nothing to eat now," Frenchgirl sobbed. "What will we live on until spring? "
Maggie smiled, "We will live on the same thing I lived on when I was a captive in this village. We will live on companionship.
"Frenchgirl, I had wanting creature inside of me then, it wanted love and freedom and you gave me that. That was what kept me alive. And now, I would rather have your companionship in this hard time than all the flour and cornmeal in the colonies."
Frenchgirl smiled. "Thank you, Redwing."
Maggie reached down and used the index finger of her right hand to wipe a tear from Frenchgirl's flour-dusted cheek. And, for no reason that was clear to her, Maggie put her teary finger into her mouth. She tasted the saltiness of Frenchgirl's tears and the graininess of the wheat flour. She rolled the taste around on her tongue, knowing that it might be the last thing she would get to eat for a long, long time.
When Maggie went out for firewood the next morning, she was glad she had nothing to guard. Their food was gone now. She wracked her brain, trying to devise some way of wresting food from the cruel, snow-covered land. Maggie had tried fishing through the ice in the river. She had tried setting snares for rabbits in the deep snow. But her skill and her luck were poorly matched and she caught nothing. In desperation, she had searched the abandoned cabins and the garbage heaps for food. But there was nothing but a great emptiness.
This left the bark on the trees as their last choice. Walking to a stand of maple trees, Maggie drew her knife and began shaving the bark into long strips. They would boil this pulpy, paperly substance in pots to soften it and then they would eat as much as their stomachs would allow. It would at least give them the illusion that they were eating.
Each morning, Maggie passed through the Ragpicker's old camp and each evening she went out to light the fire at Firefly's tree. In between, she did her best to keep her friend alive and to think of how they would live out the next 30 days.
One afternoon, when Maggie came back from collecting maple bark, Frenchgirl greeted her with a big grin.
"Redwing, throw out that bark. I have something special for our dinner tonight," she announced.
Maggie's face lit up. "You found us something to eat?"
Frenchgirl nodded. "I have a real treat for us—Bag soup!"
Maggie laughed. It was the first time she had laughed in days.
"Yes. Come and sit down by the fire. I'll make you up a bowl."
Maggie took off her coat and sat on the ground by the fire. Frenchgirl went to a pot hanging over the flames and ladled a strange-smelling liquid out into a wood bowl, handing it to Maggie. Maggie sniffed the steam rising off of the bowl.
Maggie lifted the wooden bowl to her lips and took a sip. She swished the broth around in her mouth.
"What do you think?" Frenchgirl asked.
Maggie made a face. "It tastes like canvas."
"Well, of course it does. This is canvas bag soup. I made it by boiling up the food bags. I thought there might be a little food clinging to the seams. Now tell me, what do you really think of it?"
"It's horrible," Maggie said honestly.
Frenchgirl smiled. "No, Redwing, you have to use your imagination. This is the sort of soup that is only served once a year, at some great feast.
"Close your eyes," Frenchgirl commanded.
Maggie sat with her eyes closed, the bowl of strange soup steaming on her lap.
"Now," Frenchgirl said, "remember the smell of sizzling venison steaks, with crisp carrots and potatoes and onions."
Maggie began licking her lips.
"Ah," Maggie sighed, "those onions..."
"And now, take another sip and taste the peppercorns and the plump black beans and the hickory nuts..."
Frenchgirl went on to describe the best foods her imagination could conjure up and Maggie sat with eyes closed, sipping the weak broth and nodding. She was so taken by Frenchgirl's descriptions that it almost seemed, for a moment, that she was sipping some rich stew, some concoction of earthy delights. At last she opened her eyes. She had finished her bowl.
"More?" Frenchgirl inquired.
"Only if you will join me," Maggie said politely.
Frenchgirl brought them two steaming bowls. Maggie grinned. "I wonder if this is what they mean at a church social when they tell you to bring a bag lunch?" Both women burst out laughing.
"No," Frenchgirl said, "this is what the British mean when they say they are going to sack a city." They collapsed in laughter.
"This is not funny," Maggie said soberly. Then they both burst out in laughter, rolling on the floor. They laughed for an hour about absolutely nothing. Which was exactly what was needed at the time.
The next morning Frenchgirl couldn't rise from her blankets, she was simply too weak.
"Don't leave me," Maggie said simply.
Frenchgirl swallowed hard. "Thirty days is a very long time, Redwing."
"It is only 28 now," Maggie answered.
Frenchgirl shook her head. "It may be 35, it may be 40, "she said slowly. Then she said, "I want to go out to Firefly's tree."
Maggie tried to pretend that she didn't know what Frenchgirl was talking about. "But you shouldn't go out in the wind," she protested, "I don't think you can walk."
Frenchgirl was adamant. "If I can't walk, you will carry me."
"Listen," Maggie said urgently, "I have an idea. There are people downstream. I'll travel down there and see if I can beg some food from them."
Frenchgirl shook her head. "No, Redwing. I have seen you struggle to bring in the firewood each day. You would die of exhaustion within a few miles. Take me out to the tree now."
"But Jake and Poordevil will be back in a day or two with fresh meat. We can live."
"You don't understand, Redwing," Frenchgirl said. Her voice was only a hoarse whisper.
"What is there to live for?" she asked. "I know how this war will end. And I know that we will be strangers in our own land when it does. Without the land, we are nothing. All the Seneca will be forced to move further west, to accept the hospitality of other tribes. That is no way for a Seneca woman to live."
"No," Maggie said, "you won't have to do that."
She was, at last, saying something that she had thought about for a long time.
"I can take you back to Kittanning with me."
Frenchgirl laughed sadly. "They would not welcome a Seneca there."
"But you could pass for White. No one would have to know you were a Seneca."
Frenchgirl's eyes flashed with anger. "I do not wish to pass for a White! And I certainly would not wish to go back to a brutal world like yours, where the women are treated as cattle owned by their men."
"It's not so bad—"
"Redwing, look at me. Didn't you learn anything when you lived among us? Didn't you learn what it was to be a free woman?"
"But I was a captive!"
"You were free, Redwing, you were free for the first time in your life. I know you understand this."
Maggie dropped her eyes.
"Yes," she said quietly, "It's true. I can't picture going back to being some settler's wife, barefoot and pregnant, with a gaggle of geese and babies to feed."
Frenchgirl nodded. "Then I hope you will understand why it is best for me to go to the spirit world now."
There was something in the tone of her friend's voice which compelled Maggie to do as she was asked.
Maggie pulled her friend's moccasins on her feet and tied the flaps closed. Then she fetched Frenchgirl's blanket.
"It will happen faster if you leave the blanket behind." her friend said.
Maggie nodded.
Frenchgirl hauled herself to her feet.
It was hard going, but Maggie helped her along through the deep snow, thinking that maybe she could still do something.
When they reached the tree, a cruel wind came up, whipping the snow around and causing the burial platform to creak overhead.
Maggie lowered her friend to the ground at the base of the tree. They sat around the charred remains of the burial fire, not saying anything, simply listening to the wind and feeling the cold close in all around.
"I'll go now," Frenchgirl said simply. "I'll go to join Cornstalk and my Little Rabbit and my brother Firefly. Sit here with me, Redwing. In this cold it won't take long."
Maggie tried once again, "Let me take you back to the cabin. I can find us some food, I know it. I don't want you to leave."
Frenchgirl looked up at Maggie, "I ask you this as a friend: Let me go. If we had had this conversation ten days ago, I might have listened to you. But it is time.
"Light a fire for me," she said.
Then Frenchgirl settled onto Maggie's lap and closed her eyes.
Maggie sat in the snow with her friend as the sun was climbing in the morning sky. The sun was bright but the air was bitter cold. Maggie began to sing a snatch of a song, a tune from some far-off place, a farewell and a lament and a lullaby all rolled into one.
It was as if she was singing a farewell not just to Frenchgirl, but to everything that had been—to Firefly and Cornstalk, to the young warriors and the clan women, to the old people and the young children, but most of all, farewell to a life that might have been. She wept, despite herself.
Maggie had no way of knowing how long she sat there in the snow, holding her friend and murmuring her farewell song.
Frenchgirl's body had become still and small and lifeless in Maggie's arms. Maggie knew that her friend had gone to the otherworld.
She prepared the body by wrapping it in the blanket and placing it on the scaffold beside Firefly, where the wind and the cold and the weather could turn the bones and flesh back to earth.
Chapter Ten
It had been two days since Maggie had placed Frenchgirl's cold body on the scaffold. And still Jake and Poordevil had not returned.
Instead, the rains came. Cold, freezing rains that pitted the snow and washed it away, turning the ground around the cabin into a slushy pond. The river ice was melting now, causing the river to rise and flood the low-lying fields. It was a miserable time to be cold and hungry.
Maggie hadn't had any real food for four days. After Frenchgirl passed on, Maggie took to eating boiled bark and sipping pine needle tea, a thin, astringent drink made by brewing white pine needles in a kettle of melted snow-water. This was truly starvation food.
Maggie went about her daily tasks in a daze now, sleeping often, never quite waking, sometimes not sure whether she was awake or dreaming. Strange fears came and preyed on her at night. Sometimes she heard sounds outside the cabin. Her nameless fear took shape in the form of wolves. She knew there were wolves up in the hills. But she had never seen any come down into the village. Sometimes at night, lying in her thin blankets by the feeble fire, she thought she could hear wolves scratching at the log walls with their claws. Or walking around on the roof overhead.
Then, one night, she had a strange wolfy dream: She dreamt she was sitting beneath the burial tree, before her tiny fire, when a female timber wolf stole up into the firelight and sat back on its haunches, watching her with interested eyes.
Maggie spoke out into her dream, spoke to the wolf saying, "What do you want from me?"
The wolf didn't answer her, at least not in words. Instead, the she-wolf turned and loped out across the slushy ground for a dozen yards then stopped and turned as if it was waiting for her to follow.
Then Maggie did a strange thing in her dream. For no reason that she could explain, she went down on all fours and began to run as a wolf runs. Within a moment's time, it was as if she had become a wolf herself, loping gracefully up and out of the village, out into the fields and into the snow-covered grasslands beyond.
Maggie thought to herself, "This is what it must be like to run like a wolf."
The ground disappeared under her feet at a rapid rate as she ran, shoulder to shoulder, with the female, loping up through the fields and into a thick stand of aspen trees which stood trembling in the wind. Maggie noticed that in this place the bark had been stripped from the trees.The snow was deep-drifted around the trunks of the saplings. The she-wolf began digging. Maggie dug too, using her forepaws to pull the snow back, using her hind legs to kick it behind her.
Then, her keen wolfy eyes fell on something dark in the whiteness of the drift: the hoof of a whitetail deer, protruding from the snow.
Maggie and the she-wolf dug faster now, uncovering the frozen body of a young doe.
The human part of Maggie knew that this was a deer that had frozen in the early winter and had been covered by the deep drifts. The wolf part of Maggie knew that, frozen or thawed, raw or cooked, this was food. Maggie sunk her teeth into the frozen flesh and satisfied her hunger.
When Maggie shook herself awake the next morning, she knew that her dream hunger had been satisfied. Now she must see to her physical hunger.
She remembered the story Rory had told, about his dream with the dog, and suddenly, a wild idea sprang into her mind: She would follow her dream and find that deer yard, deep-drifted in the aspen stand. Maggie strapped on her belt, with her skinning knife and hatchet, and set out.
Maggie walked to the burial tree and was not altogether surprised to find two sets of wolf tracks leading off into the fields. It was easy following the tracks in the wet snow. There were physical tracks on the ground and there were the landmarks from her dream to guide her as well. In a short time, Maggie floundered up through the wet snow into the stand of aspen.
She dug with her mittened hands in the snow and was amazed, and not amazed, to sweep the whiteness back from the long, thin form of a young doe, frozen with legs outstretched.
Maggie pulled a length of strong cord from her beltpouch and tied it around the doe's neck. She fashioned a loop which slid over her shoulder. She would drag the deer back to the cabin and begin the butchering. Even though the doe was small and it slid well over the wet snow, the dragging was hard work and Maggie had to stop every hundred paces and rest.
In one place, as she was coming down through a stand of small trees, Maggie caught a glimpse of something sitting upright in the snow. It was the she-wolf. Maggie stood, her breath coming in fast gasps, and locked eyes with the female.
She thought then about her dream, about what it was like to run with the wolf and hunt and smell as a wolf does. For a fleeting moment, she almost wished that she could become a wolf now, leaving this human suffering behind and taking to the hills, to hunt wild and free and join in the wolf songs at night, sleeping warm in leafy hillside dens and playing with the pups in the early morning sunlight. She wished, most of all, that she could become part of it: part of the forest and the snow and the wind that swept the hillsides.
But then that moment passed. She was a human, not a wolf. And she had a boy to find and a deer to butcher. She had human things to do. Maggie drew her hatchet and hacked off the deer's hind legs. She tossed them out into the snow for the wolf.
Then she turned her back and headed for the village.
Thinking bac
k on it later, Maggie wondered if the wolf she had seen was a real wolf or just a ghost-wolf, a dream wolf brought on by some hallucination of starvation.
But whichever it was, the deer she had found was real enough. She drug it back to the cabin and thawed it out by the fire. Remembering the things Frenchgirl had taught her, Maggie respectfully skinned and butcher the deer, slicing the meat thin and setting the internal organs aside for the stew pot.
She ate the first broth of the stew, slowly, savoring the taste. That afternoon, in a sun-melted patch, she found the rising sprigs of the first wild onions and she mixed these with the thin venison, weeping as she remembered Frenchgirl's bag soup, savory with onions.
She used the deer brains to tan the hide. This would be a new set of moccasins.
Sitting by the fire one afternoon, rubbing the hide soft over her knee, she heard a sharp bark. Poordevil!
Maggie leaped up and pushing aside the cabin door, she could see Poordevil trotting towards her, his ears flopping and his tongue hanging out. Behind the dog, Jake trudged through the wet snow, hauling the toboggan. When they got closer Maggie was astonished to see the butchered remains of an elk tied down on the sled.
Poordevil leaped around in the snow, licking her face and almost knocking her over.
"Get the stew pot on the fire!" Jake hollered. "It's elk steaks, elk grease and elk liver fer dinner!"
He was in good spirits, still flushed from the success of the hunt.
"That's a mighty good bear dog you got there!" Jake said as Maggie helped him haul the toboggan up to the door of the cabin, "He sniffed this fella out in the dense thicket of the cedar swamp. I got 'im with a single shot through the heart and lungs. I figger we got enough meat and fat here to last us through 'til spring! How've you and Frenchgirl done?"
Maggie's smile vanished. Of course, she thought, he doesn't know. It seemed like a long time since Frenchgirl had died.
Maggie told Jake about her companion and how she had chosen to die.
Jake nodded, "She died well. Died the way she wanted to. Not many of us get to choose the way we're goin' to go."
That night, after a feast of talk and food, Maggie found the strength to walk out to the the tree and light her evening fire. The quiet tragedy of Frenchgirl's death still weighed heavily upon her. But lighting the fire for her journey to the spirit world was a small comfort, just as it had been when Firefly had first died.