Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  Magpie believed that Pennock’s daughter was almost certainly dead, hung up in a tree to starve, because she had no value. Other Indians agreed. They had found other English bones along the line of the Abenaki retreat, but not the skeleton of such a small child.

  “What do they say?” Pennock would ask at the end of a long dialogue in Algonquian and signs.

  “They have not seen her, but they will look for her.” “Then they think she is alive?”

  Magpie would look at him in silence, unable to tell him that the Indians were only being polite.

  “It’s been a long time,” Magpie would say. “But they will ask.”

  She did not explain that it was the birds who would be asked.

  “The birds have probably forgotten,” said a Cowasuck, speaking directly to Pennock in Algonquian because he felt sorry for him. “But when they come back in the spring, we will ask them.”

  Pennock did not accept these speculations. He believed that Thoughtful might have been taken to Canada by the Abenakis and sold to the Jesuits, who were said to purchase English souls from the Indians with beads and mirrors and hatchets in the same way that the English in New York commonly bought French and Indian scalps. With Magpie on the crupper, he rode his horse into the forest summer after summer, and finally, in an interval of cease-fire between the English and the French, took ship to Canada. He died unsatisfied.

  When the news of Pennock’s death and the details of his will reached England, the Barebones family assumed that the old man had left what he owned to Oliver because his wife’s nephew had the same Christian name and the same curly reddish hair as the old soldier’s only son, who had been killed by the Abenakis. In any case Pennock never described the murder without speaking of the child’s curls and how his boy’s skull had burst so that when the Indian flung him toward the fire and his little body tumbled through the air head over heels and heels over head, as Pennock said, it sprinkled blood onto the upturned faces of the English.

  9

  John Pennock left everything he owned in America to Oliver Barebones except his Irish wolf dogs. These he bequeathed to Gustavus Hawkes as a reward for the boy’s bravery in escaping from the Abenakis and making his long run through the forest to Deerfield. In his will he had specified again that the wolf dogs must be kept pure and never bred to any other kind of dog.

  Now Hawkes stood before Oliver and the rest of the English people in the front yard of Lebbaeus Williams’ house. They had all come out to see him, even the Williamses, who seemed to find him as exotic as the newcomers did.

  “He’s called Gustavus Adolphus Hawkes,” Williams said, making the introductions. “He and his dogs are the terror of the Indians. They think that Gus and his dogs are ghosts. Isn’t that so, Hawkes?”

  Hawkes did not reply. His hands were folded over the muzzle of his musket and his chin rested on his hands. Fanny had never seen anyone who looked remotely like him. He was a big, dull-eyed young man, almost as large as Oliver, but with a different sort of body. Whereas Oliver was bony and rangy, with long shanks and sharp joints, Gustavus was stout, like a man made out of hams that had been strung together and stuffed into a suit of clothes. He was so thick in all his parts that he seemed at first glance to be obese. But then Fanny saw that what looked like layers of fat were slabs of muscle. Standing apart from Oliver, he seemed to be a foot shorter; side by side, their height was almost the same. Gustavus was dressed in Indian moccasins that laced up to his knees, brownish homespun breeches, a loose shirt, and a round Puritan hat with a hawk’s feather stuck into the buckle. He wore a necklace made from the teeth and claws of a bear. Besides the musket he was armed with a hatchet and a large knife.

  Hawkes was accompanied by a pack of dogs—four or five mongrels that dashed around the Williamses’ yard, sniffing and scratching in search of food, and three enormous, sluggish animals that sat in a row with their eyes fixed on Hawkes. Oliver had thought that Sir Cecil’s mastiffs were large, but he had never seen such dogs as these—sitting down, they were at least three and a half feet high from paws to ears.

  “Are those the Irish wolf dogs?” Oliver asked.

  Hawkes gave him a long suspicious look before he answered. “They’re mine,” he said. “Captain Pennock willed them to me.”

  “That is not in dispute, Gus,” Williams said. “Mr. Barebones is quite aware of the terms of Captain Pennock’s will.”

  Rose and Ash came out of the house. Hawkes looked at them with the same wary expression on his round face.

  “He smells like his dogs,” Rose said, whispering into Fanny’s ear.

  Fanny ignored her. “May I ask you a question?” she said to Hawkes. He looked at her but made no other sign that he had heard her. “What is your necklace made of?”

  Hawkes looked down at his breast as though to make certain that he was actually wearing the necklace. “Teeth and claws,” he said.

  “From what animal?”

  “Bear.”

  Rose drew in her breath and examined Hawkes more closely. He looked like a bear: slow, humped, shambling.

  One of the Irish wolf dogs got up and walked with a peculiar swiveling gait toward Fanny; the animal appeared to be taller in its hips than in its shoulders. Hawkes called it back. It wagged its tail and whined, looking back over its odd body at Hawkes.

  “Let him come if he wants to,” Fanny said. She chirped at the dog. It trotted over to her and sniffed her hand. “Yes,” Fanny said, “yes, dog, yes.” She did not touch the animal. It pushed its muzzle under Fanny’s hand and with a flip of its neck tossed the hand onto its back. Fanny patted him vigorously. The dog sidled against her, knocking her back a step before she laughed and caught her balance.

  “You’ve made a friend, Fanny,” Oliver said.

  Hawkes called the animal again. Fanny instantly stopped petting it, and after whining and licking its chops, it went back and sat down with the other dogs.

  “They say you own a ship,” Hawkes said. “Before it sails, tell the master to bring me a wolf-dog bitch on his next voyage to Boston—two bitches and a dog. I’ll pay up to ten pounds each.”

  “The ship has already sailed.”

  “Sailed? Shit!”

  Hawkes banged the butt of his tall musket on the stone path. The Williams daughters, standing together in the doorway to watch Oliver and Hawkes, jumped twice, first at the rude word and then at the clatter of the musket butt.

  Ash broke the silence that followed. “Tell me,” he said, causing the wolf dogs to look around for him in a startled way, “having all these dogs, why do you want another?”

  Hawkes considered the question for such a long time that Ash and the other English people thought that he had not heard it even though it was Ash who had asked it. But finally the American spoke.

  “These are all males,” he said. “They’ll die out if they don’t breed.”

  “Ah. But you have other dogs.”

  “They do the tracking. The wolf dogs hunt by sight and hearing. They’ve got no nose at all.”

  “Why so many small dogs?”

  “The big ones run ’em to death. They’ll go for days, until they run down whatever they’re after.”

  “Like stag hounds,” Ash said. “I should think they’d be useful in a country where there are so many deer.”

  Hawkes grinned. Occurring on such a broad, uninterested face, it was a surprising smile, full of charm and eager response. Clearly Ash had stumbled onto a line of thought that interested Hawkes.

  “They are useful,” Hawkes said, rattling his necklace. “They killed this bear. They’ll fight anything. But the game I hunt is what they hunt best.”

  “What would that be? Bear?”

  “No, not a bear.”

  He grunted. A sly smile played over his face.

  10

  The walk from Boston to the Connecticut required five days, and at first the wilderness was not what Fanny had expected. For one whole day there was no forest at all. They left Boston at
sunrise—six people, five horses, and Hawkes’s dogs—and for all the first day walked west-ward through rolling country. The paths, worn into the earth by the footsteps of animals and Indians, followed the contours of the hills. From the hilltops they could see thousands upon thousands of acres of open grassland, watered by ponds and brooks. Sometimes they came upon a stand of willows by a stream, but the big trees that Oliver had imagined were nowhere to be seen.

  As there were no roads, there could be no wagons. Ordinary baggage—Rose’s trunks, Henry’s books, a crate of muskets Oliver had discovered in the hold of the Pamela—were lashed to litters, crude stretcherlike devices made of oozing green saplings. One end of each litter was hitched to a horse like the shafts of a wagon, while the other end dragged on the ground. Fragile items were slung over the horses’ backs in saddlebags made of old sails, an invention of Ash’s. Fanny’s spinet was transported in this way, wrapped in quilts, with the legs removed. Ash carried his microscope and his pharmacopoeia in a pack on his back.

  Fanny walked behind Hawkes, far ahead of the others, so that she would not have to listen to Rose.

  As she stumbled over the tussocky ground, Rose kept poking Oliver with her walking stick and crying, “Did you ask for a horse for me? Did you ask for a horse for me?”

  Rose had pictured herself riding on horseback through the wilderness, and she was angry because she had to walk.

  Oliver, leaping aside to avoid the point of Rose’s stick, tried to placate her by picking strawberries as he went and giving her great handfuls to eat. The hands and lips of all the travelers were stained red with their juice.

  In some places the berries, as large as the end of a woman’s thumb, grew so thickly in the grass that it was impossible to avoid stepping on them. The pulp and juice of the crushed berries, heated by the sun, made the air smell like strawberry jam.

  Fanny ran ahead, passing Hawkes by, in order to get out of earshot. Huge flights of birds—more, even, than they had seen on Cape Cod—also fed on the berries, flocking and circling to form funnels and wedges that cast dense shadows on the ground, and then rising in their thousands with scarlet berries gripped in their beaks.

  Fanny saw no homely English birds such as sparrows or starlings or wrens. She recognized the swallows for what they were, but asked Hawkes, who had caught up with her while she stood in one place gazing at the teeming sky, to identify others: a plump bird that bobbed along at knee height, showing a white backside and a yellow spot on the back of its head, a blackbird with a lozenge of red and a yellow stripe on the base of its wings, and a small yellow bird with black wings that had an undulating flight.

  “Bobolinks, red-winged blackbird, and they call the yellow ones yellow birds,” Hawkes said, surprised that Fanny should not know what everyone knew. He imitated the calls of each, whistling through his teeth.

  “What do the Indians call them?”

  “The Indians won’t give names to things that be alive,” he said. “They say it steals their spirit.”

  He whistled the bobolink’s three-note call again, and the birds answered from all around.

  He looked back at the horses, tall docile animals stepping slowly through the grass pulling their top-heavy loads. Litters were a bumpy means of transport, and from time to time something would fall off.

  As Fanny watched, Rose’s trunk tumbled to the ground. The latch gave way and clothes spilled over the ground. Rose shrieked. Betsy and Oliver helped her to repack.

  “The berries! Be careful or everything will stain!” Rose cried. “Oh, what a savage place.”

  She liked the sound of that phrase and repeated it several times, watching Ash to see if he heard and admired her choice of words. But his eyes were fixed, as usual, on Fanny. She had turned her back to the scene and was looking at the far horizon. A breeze had risen, causing the grass to sway, and she put her face into the moving air. It lifted her hair and filled her skirt.

  When she turned around, she saw that Ash was watching her with a look of hopeless longing on his face. She moved her eyes away from him as if she had not seen. By now she knew that Joshua Peters had been correct: Ash was obsessed by her. She stared at him. Suddenly filled with purpose, he whirled around and began to help Oliver repack the litter.

  The two men were tremendously companionable as a result of the surgery in London and all that had happened since, and they worked easily together, smiling and nodding in agreement and sometimes pounding each other on the back and shoulders when they had reason for praise or agreement or congratulation.

  Fanny could see that the things they were lashing to the litter would almost certainly fall off again. Hawkes watched impassively, offering no advice and no help.

  “Is that the best way to load the litter?” Fanny asked.

  “There’s no best way. Everything falls off because of the bumps.”

  “But they’ve never done it before.”

  “I’m hired to guide,” Hawkes said. “The woods is no place for baggages.”

  He shouldered his musket and plodded on. Fanny followed. Hawkes’s dogs scouted ahead, galloping in a pack over the ridge lines of the rising country, and every now and then pausing to play some sort of game in which they formed a circle with their heads pointed inward, tails wagging. Hawkes paid no attention to them. After a while the dogs came back and walked with the people.

  The big wolf dog that had taken a liking to Fanny walked close beside her, nosing her hand onto his head so that she would pet him. Suddenly the dog saw something in the grass and exploded into motion. The other two wolf dogs were beside him instantaneously, followed by the slower mongrels. Fanny followed the dogs into the tall grass. They had surrounded a brown roly-poly animal that looked like a huge good-natured rat except that it had no tail. The animal darted this way and that, trying to escape from the circle of dogs. Wagging their tails, the wolf dogs panted and woofed and gave each other jovial looks, like old human friends having a joke together. And then, so quickly that Fanny’s eye could not follow, they killed the animal. One dog feinted an attack from the side, a second seized the terrified prey by the hindquarters, and before it could twist its body to bite this attacker, the third sank its teeth into its neck. With amazing efficiency, the dogs tore the creature apart. What had been fur and whiskers, teeth and eyes, became lumps of raw shredded meat.

  The big wolf dog, its breath reeking from the kill, rejoined Fanny and trotted along beside her, grazing on strawberries. Every few hundred yards, Fanny heard the buzzing of flies. Investigating, she found the evidence of a dozen other wolf-dog kills—scraps of hide, smears of blood, crunched bones—on which swarms of big purple flies were feeding. Fanny caught up to Hawkes again.

  “What are these things that the dogs are killing?”

  “Groundhogs. Look.”

  He gave a shrill whistle. Dozens of the animals sat up by their dens in the grass, as if responding to his signal. He showed her the burrows in which they lived, kicking the dirt around the holes.

  “Do they have a back door in case something comes in the front?” Fanny asked.

  “How’d you know that?”

  Hawkes gave Fanny another long look, but there was less puzzlement in it than before. He was getting used to her. He had never seen an English person who looked like Fanny; from a distance, if you didn’t see her face, you might think she was an Indian. In his eyes, she wasn’t pretty—he liked nothing that resembled an Indian. But she had sharp eyes and ears, things that most English people did not have. She had learned to find the dogs’ kills by listening for the flies—he’d seen her doing it. If the Abenakis captured her, Hawkes thought, she’d never want to come back. But the dogs liked her.

  They did not stop to rest or eat until they reached the edge of the forest. They crossed a river, Oliver lifting the end of each litter above his head and wading the stream behind the horses. Fanny watched from the side of a hill, and then climbed to the top. Hawkes was already there, leaning on his musket as before. The sun was se
tting behind a formation of long dark clouds. Shafts of light radiated from the horizon, whitening the bellies of the clouds, and then the whole disk of the sun became visible as the sky all around it glowed in tints of rose and violet.

  There was not enough light in England to make a sunset like this. Fanny wished once again that Henry could be beside her as she discovered these wonders. Because of the change in the light, the forest seemed very close. The trees were huge. She heard the wind moving through them and saw their filigreed tops tossing gently in the evening breeze, silvering and unsilvering as the leaves turned on their stems.

  The others came up with the horses. By then the splendor of the sunset had faded and twilight was falling. They went down together, following a faint path along the contours of the hill, and entered the forest. Big trees stood all around in the dusk, and when Fanny looked toward the remnants of the sunset she saw curtains of dusty light among the trunks of the oaks and chestnuts. Birds sang in their thousands, hidden in the leafy canopy far overhead. There was no undergrowth. The springy floor of the forest, covered with moss and wiry grass and a few fallen leaves, was like the ground in an English park. An army could have marched through without breaking ranks.

  “What are these trees?”

  “Chestnut, oaks,” Hawkes said. “Farther west you’ll see pine and maple and lots of spruce.”

  “As big as these?”

  He had already turned away. They had arrived at a camping place. It was surrounded by high black rocks. A spring bubbled out of the rocks. Hawkes lay down on his stomach and sucked up water. When he was finished, Fanny kneeled beside the spring and plunged her hand into it. The water was icy cold. She drank and then washed her face, which was dirty and sunburnt after the long walk. The water, utterly free of dirt, tasted of the rocks. Fanny could hear water running over stones.