Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  Thoughtful called to them. For a long time they did not respond. Then one gander, flying at the point of the wedge, broke formation and honked back to her. He told her, Thoughtful said afterward, that the sky was heavy with snow. The geese had never seen so much, and they saw it wherever they flew.

  Ash, who had been studying the habits of migratory birds, told Fanny that the behavior of the gander could be explained by the fact that the leaders of any flock of birds often changed places while in flight, apparently because of fatigue. Fanny did not doubt that this was true, but by now she saw nothing odd in Thoughtful’s conversations with wild animals. To her, communicating with a Canada goose was no stranger than talking to an Englishman, except that the goose was more likely to tell the truth. Gustavus Hawkes, returning from his long scout to the north, had heard the same forecast from the Indians he met along the way. The Pocumtuck, the Massachusett, the Penacook, the Cowass, the Sokoki had also heard the geese’s warning. Up and down the Connecticut River, the tribes were getting ready for a hard winter, laying up corn and beans in underground barns and sending the women out to gather extra firewood.

  Alamoth had had an excellent harvest. Like everything else there, it was organized along lines laid down by John Pennock. Each sex and age group was assigned specific tasks. Hay and clover, which grew on the high ground above the river, were mowed in June and stacked in ricks that straggled along the slope like another village of windowless houses. Millet, rye, barley, and wheat were cut in turn by ranks of men with scythes, then tied in sheaves by the women. Boys picked Indian corn and collected the squashes and pumpkins that grew among the stalks.

  Girls harvested and gathered potatoes and turnips after these had been dug out of the ground by the men and boys. Few farmers outside of Alamoth grew these little-known root vegetables. Pennock had discovered the potato (Solanum tuberosum) in Burgundy, whence it had come by way of the Andes, Spain, and Italy. The French, like Lebbaeus Williams, regarded it as an aphrodisiac; Pennock, noting that it grew cheerfully in poor, stony soil, regarded it as ideal for the lands along the Scottish border, and for the scrubbier fields of New England.

  The Dutch had introduced turnips as cattle feed; these tainted the milk, but increased yields. Pennock was an admirer of Dutch husbandry, in which every inch of land was made to yield the maximum in food, and all excess food was returned to the land in the form of compost or excrement. No garbage littered the dooryards of Alamoth; every house had a compost heap, and every scrap of waste organic matter, along with the contents of chamber pots, went into it. Red Devon cattle, merino sheep, and spotted hogs, fatter than any others in New England, grazed on the second crop of hay and were later let loose to forage among the stubble of the grain fields.

  The ricks of clover-hay meant that cattle could be fed through the winter, and need not be slaughtered, salted, and pickled in the fall merely to prevent their starving during the winter months, as had been done in Europe since ancient times. Alamoth only slaughtered as much meat as it needed for food. Clover formed the basis of a nine-year cycle of crop rotation invented by the Dutch, and was supported by the Dutch method of fertilization, using wood ashes, sheep manure, and pigeon dung, as well as human excrement and compost.

  Once the sheaves of grain were dry, men skilled in the use of the flail threshed the grain in a barn with two open ends, so constructed that the wind funneled through it with great force. Afterward, the grain was winnowed from the chaff by throwing it into the air with wooden shovels. The wind carried the chaff away through the open end of the barn, and a haze of dust hung over the village, softening further the mellow light of the season. The grain was ground into flour by Pennock’s millwrights on millstones from Andernach on the Rhine. Young people husked thousands of ears of Indian corn. Girls and women soaked, pounded, and combed flax and later spun and wove it into linen.

  This orderly division of labor and the strict rules of husbandry that Pennock laid down produced a deep contentment in his city in the wilderness, as he had foreseen. Everyone in Alamoth knew precisely where he belonged, exactly what was expected of him, exactly what his share of the village’s wealth would be.

  But no one knew when the Abenakis and the French might come again. Fall was the most dangerous time of the year, when there were crops to be reaped and no time to spare from work for military duties.

  Fanny told Oliver what she had seen in the woods only a mile from Alamoth.

  “What do you mean they were relations of Thoughtful’s?” Oliver asked.

  “Thoughtful tells stories about them.”

  “Did she see them too?”

  “We weren’t together. I didn’t ask her.”

  “But did she?”

  “Yes.”

  Oliver frowned, then suddenly beamed with pleasure. “She saw them, she talked to them, but she didn’t go away with them. That means she’s happy with us.”

  “Or that they’re coming back for her,” Fanny said.

  Oliver did not hear what Fanny had said to him; his mind was elswhere. The idea of giving Thoughtful all his worldly goods had made Oliver love her. He wanted her to stay here and live to an old age with Pennock children around her. Any child she had would be a Barebones too—and if Thoughtful was John Pennock’s only living child, she was also Oliver’s flesh and blood.

  “They will come back,” Fanny said.

  But Oliver turned his back and walked away.

  Oliver posted boys on the parapets of the village and instructed them to watch the forest day and night for signs of Indian raiders. Hawkes and his dogs went north during the last quarter of the harvest moon, timing their departure so as to arrive along the Saint Francis River in late October, when the hunter’s moon was full.

  Just as the ducks arrived over Alamoth, Hawkes returned. He had a reassuring report to make. The Abenaki villages were quiet. Apart from the usual Jesuits, Hawkes had seen no Frenchmen among the Abenakis. The men were not painted. No more were missing than might be expected during the fall hunting season. Hawkes had been spying on these villages for twelve years; he knew their populations, and could even recognize most individual Indians. He had watched Thoughtful for years before he kidnapped her. By the time he took her, he knew nearly everything about her life.

  These were the good signs. There were other signs that might be less good. By a lake between the source of the Connecticut River and the Saint Francis River, he had stumbled onto a party of three Abenakis and a Frenchman. He recognized the Indians: Talks in His Dreams and Hair, who had made him carry the dead Jesuit, and Used to be Bear, the big ugly Indian who had had his ear sliced off by John Pennock. Hawkes did not know their Abenaki names—he had his own names for them—but he knew their faces.

  The Indians had just killed a moose, but it was obvious they were not a hunting party. They wore paint, their clothes were torn, and there were raw places on their shoulders. That could only mean that they had been down the Connecticut, spying on the English settlements, and had worn the skin off their shoulders portaging their canoes across the miles of rough country between the two rivers.

  The carcass of the moose lay half in the shallow water, half on shore, seeping blood. Minnows swarmed around the dead animal, thrashing in their frenzy to find something that was small enough to eat. The Abenakis sat in a circle with drawn knives, passing the raw liver of the moose from hand to hand. The liver was still quivering, like a small dog that had been skinned alive. They were very hungry; even the Frenchman gobbled the uncooked meat. That, too, was a sign that they had not stopped to hunt during a long journey. Two birchbark canoes were pulled up on the shore, suggesting that the Indians had seen the moose feeding in the water as they were padding by, and perhaps killed it while it swam.

  Hawkes’s dogs had not killed anything large for several days, and weak as their noses were, they were excited by the smell of blood. They lay down beside Hawkes on the pine-needle floor of the forest, but they were beginning to whimper and twitch and lick their jowls. They
gave him imploring looks. Hawkes knew that he could not keep them quiet, so he let them go. He himself remained in hiding behind a ledge about fifty paces from the edge of the water. He did not know what to expect. He knew that Hair and Talks in His Dreams were sons of the woman the dogs had killed the year before. They would be terrified; it was possible that the dogs might kill one or more of them. It was also possible that the Frenchman, or even the Indians, might try to shoot the dogs.

  Hawkes slid his musket forward and put the sight on the Frenchman’s heart. When the Abenakis saw the snarling wolf dogs burst out of the woods, they dropped the moose’s liver and scrambled into the canoes, dragging the Frenchman with them. The dogs did not pursue. Instead they devoured the liver, tearing it apart like a woodchuck, then fell on the moose itself. They lay down in a row beside the ungainly carcass with its huge antlers, growling and yipping like sucking puppies as they worried the crimson meat.

  The Abenakis paddled halfway across the lake, then stopped. Hawkes could hear the Frenchman’s voice very clearly across the water. He was telling the Indians to return to shore. For a long time the canoes lay motionless in the water. At last they started back. As they paddled, the Abenakis tried to talk to the wolf dogs, barking and calling out greetings in Abenaki. The dogs pricked their ears and lifted their blood-smeared muzzles above the moose’s rib cage, then went on feeding.

  The Frenchman unslung his weapon, a musket with a very short barrel, and gave orders to the Abenakis to position the canoe so as to give him a clear shot at the dogs. This maneuver took some time because the dogs were shielded by the moose’s carcass.

  Hawkes was not worried; the canoe was sixty or seventy yards away from the dogs, and the Abenakis would come no closer. Few men could shoot accurately from that range even with a long-barreled musket. All the same, Hawkes called his dogs, imitating the rattle of the woodpecker. The dogs had been trained to respond instantaneously to this signal, and they twitched when they heard it. Hawkes called again. The Frenchman was getting ready to shoot; the stubby firearm was pressed to his shoulder and he was waiting for the canoe to stop rocking before he squeezed the trigger. At the third call, the dogs came slowly toward Hawkes, whimpering and looking back over their shoulders as they slunk across the pine needles.

  The Frenchman fired just as they entered the woods, a shot of at least 150 paces. Hawkes expected the shot to go wild. The solid musket ball was seldom a perfect sphere, and as it flew out of the smooth barrel it had a tendency to curve in flight and strike ten or twenty feet to either side of the target or above or below it. A man of ordinary skill would seldom hit a stationary target at a range beyond thirty yards. Moving targets were usually struck by accident only, and the dogs were now moving very rapidly. To Hawkes’s astonishment, the ball slammed through the trunk of a sapling, knocking a huge splinter off the back side and missing one of the dogs by no more than the breadth of a hand.

  Who was this marksman? Hawkes peered at him. The Frenchman was enveloped in a puff of black powder smoke. The recoil of his weapon had nearly overturned the canoe, which was rocking violently on the glossy surface of the lake. Was this luck? The Frenchman’s musket was a curious weapon, at least a foot shorter than an ordinary French musket, and with a much smaller bore.

  “It was a lucky shot,” Hawkes told Oliver on his return. “No stubby little musket can come that close from more’n a hundred paces.”

  Hawkes said that he wanted to go back upriver to watch the trails from the north. The scouting party, its air of carrying important news, worried him.

  But Oliver refused. “If they’re coming, you won’t be able to stop them,” he said. “All we can do is get ready for them.”

  He handed Hawkes a letter. “Anyway, I want you to take this to Lebbaeus Williams,” he said.

  Hawkes looked at the red wax on the back of the letter. “Go to Boston?” he said. “I should be going north, not east.”

  “It’s an important letter,” Oliver said with his jovial grin. “Especially if the Indians kill me.”

  Hawkes left before the sun came up. At the top of the ridge, by the dead pine that Oliver had seen as a mast for a man-o’-war, he paused and looked down on the village. It was quiet, asleep, dreaming.

  John Pennock began to make a new defensive plan for Alamoth even as he lay in the bloody brook after the Abenakis had departed. With houses and barns and the church burning all around him and strips of his blistered skin fluttering in the current of the brook, Pennock pondered the lessons he had learned that day. He realized that Gustavus Adolphus’ tactics, which were designed to defeat a massed enemy army by attacking it in surprising ways at its weakest points, would not work in America. An attacking force of Indians could not be defeated in the open field like soldiers of the Holy Roman Emperor, but must be kept outside the walls of the town and slaughtered there. Pennock had the soul of a cavalryman, and the idea of hiding inside a fort violated every lesson he had learned in war. But he knew that defense was the key to Alamoth’s survival.

  Alamoth’s stockade, made of thick maple posts set in the ground with the upper end sharpened to a point, had been roughly circular. After the battle, Pennock directed the villagers to build four V-shaped extensions pointing north, south, east, and west. This created a four-pointed star and eliminated the possibility of attackers creeping close to the walls, as Two Suns and Hair and Talks in His Dreams had done, without being discovered. Defenders, posted along the rays of the stars, were able to see every foot of ground outside the palisade. They could fire down on the enemy from many different angles, setting up a crossfire in which no attacker could live.

  Two underground tunnels were built, in addition to the secret tunnel leading out of the Manor, to provide the means for parties of defenders to sally forth and attack the Indians from the rear. Pennock’s law for the defense of the village required every house to keep ten pounds of nocake, twenty pounds of dried beans, a sack of flour, sufficient fat and salt, and two dry cords of firewood (a cord being a stack eight feet by four by four) on hand at all times. Every house in the village was under orders to have at least one musket, fully loaded with buckshot and provided with fifty extra loads, within reach of the table at suppertime and within reach of the bed at night.

  Pennock insisted on buckshot for a sound reason. Gustavus Adolphus’ great invention, the infantry volley, was designed to compensate for the inaccuracy of solid musket shot by firing a great many balls all at once against a mass of disciplined soldiers. But, as Pennock had discovered, the volley would not work against a force of whirling savages; the balls simply passed between them. The old soldier realized that he needed to adapt the principle of the volley to new circumstances. He hit on the idea of using buckshot, many small bits of coarse lead sewn up in linen tubes for quick loading under battle conditions. As the tube burst under the force of the exploding powder, each musket fired a small volley of its own, scattering bits of shot over a radius of several feet with sufficient force to kill if a single pellet struck a vital organ. Even if it failed to kill, buckshot inflicted hideous wounds, being capable of peeling the skin off the muscles as neatly as a sharp knife could do, or blowing out the eyes, or severing an arm. The psychological effect of such wounds, even on savages, was not to be underestimated.

  All these excellent military principles were written down in a large leatherbound book that was kept in a secret drawer of Pennock’s big desk in the library. Ash, who had discovered it in its hiding place, read it aloud, a section at a time, to Oliver, who had inherited military command along with his lands.

  “What does he know about being a soldier?” Rose asked.

  “He need know nothing,” Ash replied. “Pennock knew that his plans must be carried out after he died by men who had never been soldiers, and he wrote them down so that even a fool could understand.”

  “In that case we’ll be safe,” Rose said.

  Oliver took to being military commander of Alamoth with enthusiasm. It was something like football�
��a lot of men all running in the same direction and shouting their lungs out. Oliver’s size, his loud voice, and his jokey fearlessness would have made him a leader even if he had not been the richest man in the village. In his confidence and good humor, he reminded the villagers of John Pennock. He drilled the men and boys, posted sentries, sent out scouting parties, rehearsed attacks with the girls and boys playing the part of the Indians shrieking out of the orchards and the woods to carry out frontal attacks on the stockade. While the alert lasted, Oliver banned football. Like King Charles, he feared that broken shins and caved-in heads might deprive him of soldiers.

  The snow fell before the river froze. This was the most significant fact about the weather, though nobody realized it at the time. The first storm came at twilight on a Sunday, blowing over the western mountains so unexpectedly that heaps of squash and pumpkins, and even a few shocks of wheat, were still lying in the fields. Oliver’s drills had taken the men away from the fields before everything had been put under cover, and about an inch of snow had fallen by the time the villagers, indistinct figures inside the gauzy curtain formed by the big slow-falling flakes, went out at twilight to rescue the crops.

  By morning the snow was knee-deep, and in the filtered light of the early sun, the blurry scene emitted a subdued glow, as if the snow had captured light on its way down from the sky and was now giving it back. It began to snow again at dusk, the same lazy descent of large flakes that stuck to everything. Clear, chilly weather followed for three days. Still the river did not freeze. Then a third, even heavier snowfall began. The paths of the village were like tunnels, higher than the eaves of the houses. Boys flung themselves off the stockade into the fluffy snow like penny-divers into the Thames.