Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  His mood was broken by a piercing scream. A young woman was running toward him, shrieking in uncontrollable rage. Two Suns wanted to get out of her way because she was clearly mad, but then he saw that three huge dogs bounded beside her. Two Suns recognized them as the dogs the crow had warned him about. He hardly had time to think about that before he noticed that the woman was carrying a red-haired child in her arms.

  That must be my daughter Squirrel, he thought happily. But then he saw that the child was a little boy. By now the dogs were on him. One of them knocked him down and bit him on the leg. Two others attempted to seize him by his shoulders and neck, but their teeth skidded on the heavy bear grease he had rubbed onto his skin. He hit the dog that was biting him on the head with his war club and it let go and gave him a look of befuddled surprise.

  Two Suns jumped to his feet, snatched the child from the woman’s arms, swung it by the legs, and smashed its head against a tree. Then he threw it high into the air and watched it fly end over end like a hatchet. Ordinarily Two Suns would not have done this. He had never liked to kill children, but in this case he reasoned that the dogs would run after the child with the idea of fetching it back to its mother. He was right. The wolf dogs bounded along under the dead child until the moment it fell into the flames, and then stood with their heads at one side and their ears pricked, watching the little body cook. They did not make a sound. By now Two Suns was sure that these were not dogs, but ghosts.

  At this moment, Hope Pennock, howling while strings of saliva flew from her mouth, knocked Two Suns to the ground and leaped onto his back. He thought that she might break his neck in the way Pennock had killed the other Abenaki. In fact, Hope nearly choked Two Suns to death before the bear grease saved him again and he managed to twist from her grasp and split her skull with his hatchet. She was the strongest woman the Abenakis had ever put into a story.

  Squirrel was invisible to Two Suns until he had killed her mother, but the instant that happened, he saw the little red-haired girl standing calmly in the middle of the fight. Even though she was standing up with her eyes open, she seemed to be asleep. Two Suns picked her up, carrying her over his arm with her head in the crook of his elbow so that her little skull would come to no harm. He looked down into her face and asked if she wanted to wake up. Because she was asleep, she did not answer. “That’s all right, daughter,” Two Suns said. “Sleep. I’ll make you a papoose frame as soon as we find some saplings and you can sleep while we run away.”

  After Two Suns killed Strong Woman and found Squirrel, the Abenakis decided that it was time to go, even though the old man, Flying Leg, had not stopped dancing in the fire. It would have been more polite to stay until he died, but the Indians thought that the English at Deerfield and Hatfield must by now have noticed the smoke from the burning town, so they tied the captured girls and the bigger children together with a rope looped around their waists and drove them up the hill.

  They took the Jesuit’s corpse and the bodies of the three slain Abenakis with them. Gustavus Hawkes, the oldest and strongest of the male captives, was detailed to carry the dead Jesuit. It took four warriors to hold Gustavus while Two Suns, who was the expert in these matters, tied the body to his back. The boy was terrified by the corpse, and Two Suns had to beat him to make him carry it. This was no easy matter, with the priest’s legs wrapped around Gustavus’ waist, the arms tied around his shoulders, and the bald head, eyes wide open, lolling on his shoulder. Three other big boys, brothers to Hepzibah Clum, carried the dead Abenakis.

  The Indians expected to be pursued by a strong force of English. As soon as they were deep enough into the woods, they found a stand of pines and hauled the bodies high into four separate trees. Then they split up into three or four small groups, each Indian keeping the captive he had claimed for himself; some had taken more than one prisoner, reasoning that some were bound to die on the journey.

  There were five Indians and six captives in Two Suns’s party. Two Suns had claimed Thoughtful and a girl of thirteen as his prizes; the other English were Gustavus Hawkes, who was still trembling in disgust over the dead Jesuit, and the Clums. Two Suns hit the boys on the fleshy parts of their bodies with his war club a few times to frighten them and make them weaker. He wasn’t sure that he could win a fight with them, especially the big one, because his wounds, especially the bite from the ghost dog, were very painful.

  Also, he did not want to die because he had finally found his daughter and wanted Thin Ice to have the pleasure of seeing her. Two Suns strapped Squirrel into a papoose frame made from a green sapling and hung her on the older girl’s back. So as to leave no tracks or scent in case they were followed by dogs, the Abenakis traveled in the brooks, splashing through the shallow water at a dogtrot.

  Birds spoke to Two Suns from the poplars and willows along the bank. He asked them if they saw the ghost dogs coming. They didn’t answer, but then he heard a crow cawing about a mile away, followed by the scolding of some blackbirds, and he led the party into the woods to hide.

  Before they could find a place to conceal themselves, however, the wolf dogs attacked. In their absolute silence, they just materialized in the middle of the Indians, knocking two men to the ground.

  Two Suns seized Thoughtful in her papoose board and climbed a tree. Two other Abenakis did the same, tugging the Clum boys after them by their ropes, but the dogs had the other two Abenakis before they could move. The three dogs killed one Abenaki, and by the time Two Suns stopped climbing and looked down into a shower of blood, they were in the act of killing the other, a man named Yellow Rain. One of the dogs held Yellow Rain’s head between his jaws like a ball.

  Two Suns had never seen animals as strong and quick as these. Of course he did not believe they were from this world, so he didn’t try to kill them with arrows. He began to sing his story, in case the dogs killed him too. It would not have surprised him if they had seized the tree he sat in in their jaws and uprooted it. But then Two Suns saw that Gustavus Hawkes was running away through the forest, calling to the dogs to follow him, and they bounded after him and disappeared.

  The journey continued. The Abenakis and their captives dog-trotted, never stopping to rest, from morning to night. The smallest of the Clums fell in a brook and broke his ankle. The Abenakis killed him with a tomahawk because he would not be able to travel farther.

  Squirrel was still asleep. At night, Two Suns gave her and the older girl and the surviving Clums a mouthful of nocake, a gob of bear grease on the end of his finger, and a long drink of water from whatever brook they were following. Then he hung Thoughtful up in her papoose board in a tree. The Clums were tied, lying down, to trees by their wrists and ankles. The girl slept with her hands tied in front of her, attached by a thong to Two Suns’s left wrist. These details were an important part of the story because they told the listener that the Abenakis were observing the proper decorum in regard to captives.

  Because Two Suns and the other Abenakis were very tired after the battle and two of them were slightly wounded, they slept very soundly at night. On the twelfth night, when the party was deep in a hemlock forest in the Green Mountains, the Clum brothers escaped. There was no time to stop, so the Abenakis made no attempt to find the boys, who were never seen again by anybody. The Abenakis and the two girls pressed on to the north, and after twenty-six days of hard travel, arrived in the village on the Saint Francis River.

  Thin Ice loved her daughter Squirrel, especially when she saw that the ducks had been right about her red hair. This was something the Abenakis had never seen before. They realized after the first novelty of it that red hair was ugly. They had never seen freckles either, and tried to wash them off. Finally Thin Ice cut Squirrel’s curly hair short on one side and long on the other in the Indian style, and that made her somewhat more beautiful.

  Squirrel did not wake up until the snow was on the ground and the river froze. She ate in her sleep. Thin Ice and Two Suns and the whole family talked to her as if she we
re awake, telling her their stories and her story, which was naturally short as she was only three years old. When Squirrel did wake up, she spoke Abenaki in a deep voice, like Flying Leg, only softer. Nobody was surprised by this: what other language would she speak, how else would she sound?

  Her skin was so pale that the Abenakis could see the light inside her, and that was the name, Light Inside, they gave her for the use of her husband when she got one. All Abenakis had several names, some of which only the person himself knew.

  Squirrel never grew more beautiful. Thin Ice did not think she would ever grow breasts, but outward beauty was not important in Squirrel; it was the light inside that made the Abenakis say that they would sooner part with their hearts than part with her.

  Two Suns gave the girl who had carried his daughter to Canada on her back to the Ursuline nuns at Three Rivers. They were very glad to get her, and later on the mother superior asked if Squirrel could come to the convent in the winter to learn to read and write and speak French.

  “We wonder,” Two Suns said. “Squirrel was lost for many years, and we only found her two years ago, so we haven’t remembered her entire story.”

  “She must learn the story of Our Father and the Savior and the Blessed Virgin,” the superior said.

  “We’ve already told her those stories in Abenaki. You don’t have to talk to the Blessed Virgin in French.”

  “No. But it’s the only way to talk to the French, and it would be a good thing to have a daughter who understands them perfectly.”

  Two Suns himself only understood one French word in every ten or twelve, and this had led to trouble; the French sometimes did stupid things, such as paddling into a rapids at night and drowning themselves, if they did not understand what you were saying to them.

  “Very well,” Two Suns said, “but if the English come to buy back their children, remember that this girl is not English. She is my daughter Squirrel, an Abenaki who got lost and was born from the wrong woman.”

  “We will be very careful with her, Two Suns,” the nuns said. “We know your story.”

  “And when you came back to Alamoth with Hawkes,” Fanny said, “did you recognize everything?”

  “I remembered the things that were described in my story,” Thoughtful replied. “The hanging rock where Two Suns ate the bear, the dead pine where the crow talked to him. But this is not my place.”

  “It would have been if the Indians hadn’t carried you away. You do know that Alamoth and all the land around it belonged to your English father.”

  “Magpie told me that. But these people are very strange.”

  “Then why did you come back?”

  Thoughtful looked at her in puzzlement. “Hawkes stole me. I went for water with Thin Ice and the dogs killed her. Then he tied my hands and carried me here. I would not walk.”

  “The Abenakis didn’t follow?”

  “How could they? They don’t know how to kill the dogs.”

  “Then you’ll stay here forever.”

  Thoughtful stood up in her voluminous Puritan dress and looked to the north. She held a kitten against her cheek.

  “Maybe not,” she said.

  17

  Almost as soon as he laid eyes on Thoughtful Pennock, Oliver realized that her father’s will had been a mistake. This strange girl who had the manners of an Indian and the voice of an old man was John Pennock’s natural daughter, for whom he had searched the Indian villages until he died. Nobody, least of all Oliver, could possibly believe that the old soldier would have willed his possessions to a nephew by marriage if he had known that his own kidnapped child was alive.

  Yet it seemed that Pennock may have known all about Thoughtful. She herself knew that Pennock had been looking for her. He had even come to Two Suns’s village on the Saint Francis River, and she had seen him there.

  “He came to the actual village where you were being held captive and did not find you?” Oliver said. “How can that be?”

  Fanny translated. As was her way, Thoughtful answered what she regarded as a lie embedded in the question rather than the question itself.

  “Captive?” Thoughtful said to Fanny. “Nobody ever wants to go back to the English, doesn’t he know that?”

  “No. That’s not what he wants to know. How did it happen that your father didn’t find you if he came to your village?”

  “He did find me. But he did not see his daughter.” “How do you mean, Thoughtful?”

  “He looked at me, standing as close to me as Oliver is now, but naturally he saw an Abenaki, not an English girl.”

  Oliver listened to Fanny’s interpretation of these words. “Pennock didn’t notice an Indian with red hair and freckles?” he said. “Very mysterious.”

  “Not to Thoughtful’s way of thinking,” Fanny said. “Magpie was there,” Thoughtful said. “She saw me too.”

  Oliver waited a day or two before questioning Magpie about this episode. To divert any suspicion Rose may have had about his purposes—he had not told his wife that he was thinking about renouncing his inheritance—Oliver asked Magpie to guide him to the big firs that Captain John Pennock had mentioned in his will.

  He and Magpie set off at dawn, walking up the river with Oliver’s land, meadows and forest and mountains, lying all around them as far as the eye could see. It took the better part of the morning to arrive at the grove of firs. Not even the monumental oaks of the eastern forest had prepared Oliver for the reality of these trees, which were not European firs, as Pennock had thought, but North American white pines. None of the hundreds of pines was less than one hundred feet high. Some individuals, rising 250 feet into the sky, had trunks that six people holding hands could not have encircled.

  After walking through the fragrant grove for half an hour or so, gazing upward at his magnificent, useless trees, Oliver sat down gratefully beneath one of them and pulled the corks out of the two-spouted pottery canteen filled with ale that he had brought along for his midday thirst. Magpie had brought a small chicken for his lunch. She tore it apart and fed it to him piece by piece. Oliver kept offering to share, but after he was finished, Magpie ate nocake instead, sitting in profile to him and gazing out over the valley at the blue hills beyond the river.

  Magpie thought that Oliver would go to sleep when he finished, but instead, he took her hand and squeezed it. No Englishman had ever touched her before and she wondered, unlikely as it seemed, if he wanted to get on top of her before he took his nap. She knew that his wife did not lie with him, a circumstance that made Rose even more baffling, because all the other English people Magpie had ever known could think of nothing but copulation and drinking and talking.

  But Oliver only wanted to ask questions. “Magpie,” he said. “I want to talk to you about Captain Pennock and Thoughtful.”

  This came as no surprise. Thoughtful had told Magpie in signs what Oliver wanted to talk to her about. She was not eager to discuss these matters. Looking at his broad face, Magpie saw what a good-hearted man Oliver was. She gazed out over the valley in silence, wondering what to do. Oliver seemed to understand. He squeezed her hand again.

  “Just tell me all about how you and the captain looked for Thoughtful all those years,” he said. “We’ve got all day.”

  So Magpie told him, in her flat droning English, about every village she had visited with Pennock—Pocumtuck, Cowasuck, Penacook, and finally, when the war with the French was over for a little while, Abenaki and French. In Quebec, the governor himself had received Captain Pennock and had him to dinner, with Magpie sitting between him and the governor as the governor’s wife smiled at her while listening to Pennock. The French kept lists of all the English captives, but there was no record of a three-year-old girl having been brought back from the raid on Alamoth.

  “Of the twenty persons captured,” said the governor, “fourteen died on the march and never reached Quebec. It was a very difficult campaign.”

  “It’s terrible, the war,” the governor’s wife said
. “My niece was captured by the Mohawks, ferocious savages sent against us by the English, and though she was an innocent girl, she was violated many times. God mercifully arranged that she should have no memory of these events.”

  “He is often merciful in such matters,” Pennock said. “I should like to visit the Abenaki villages, if that is possible.”

  “It is possible, Captain, but on the basis of the facts, it will almost certainly prove to be futile.”

  “Nevertheless I must go. I have been searching for my daughter every since she was taken.”

  “Then naturally you must continue,” said the governor. “Surprises are always possible. I will send an officer from my staff to assist you.”

  Pennock had already encountered surprises. He had brought a thousand pieces of eight with him with which to ransom the English captives from Alamoth. Of the six who had survived, five had refused to return to New England. The sixth was an Ursuline nun who was forbidden to talk to men and who was, in any case, too old to be Thoughtful.

  All the captives had turned papist. Most had forgotten how to speak English; few remembered their own families, and none remembered Pennock when he appeared before them. They might all have suffered from some infectious disease that had destroyed their Englishness and left them with the illusion that they were Indians. More likely it was something other than a disease. There was a Jesuit in every village, and Pennock naturally suspected that they had worked some sort of religious spell on the English children, having got them young. The youthful ensign from Saint-Malo who was escorting Pennock made a French joke of it, quoting an English clergyman who had said, after his own children had refused to return with him, that it would be easier to persuade Frenchmen and Indians to go south with him than to redeem his own people.

  “C’est fort aguichante, la joie des autres,” he said—the joy of others is mighty seductive.

  In Two Suns’s village, Pennock encountered the milkmaid, Hepzibah Clum’s older sister, who had been captured by Talks in His Dreams. She was the only one who remembered who she had been in her previous life.