The two Abenakis from the camp were running up the hill. Hawkes rolled over onto his buttocks and fired his musket, which was loaded with buckshot. Both Indians sat down abruptly in the snow. Waves of nausea rose out of Hawkes’s stomach. He scrambled to his feet and began to run along the slope toward the woods. The wolf dog that had attacked Used to be Bear ran along ahead of him.
Inside the trees, the same mixture of birches and swamp maples through which he had traveled during most of the night, Hawkes paused to reload his musket, passing it from his right hand to his left, but his left hand failed to grip the musket and it fell to the snow. Hawkes remembered the pain in his left arm, and remembering it, realized that he still felt it. Used to be Bear had driven the bayonet completely through his biceps. The wound did not seem to be bleeding much from either of its mouths. Hawkes, holding on to the slender trunk of a birch so that he would not fall down, vomited onto the snow.
Below, a wolf dog, shot through the skull, lay on its side in the snow-choked bed of the Naquag. The big naked Indian walked in circles in the blowing snow, holding on to his bitten arm. The other Abenakis gazed politely in another direction. Hawkes knew that they wouldn’t follow him. The fight was over. They would want to look inside the wolf dogs and eat their livers, so as to mingle their enemies’ strength with their own. Hawkes heard the sound of a pileated woodpecker and looked around, wondering if there were other Abenakis behind him. The last wolf dog licked his face, whimpering, and Hawkes realized that he himself was making the same sound.
Where was Thoughtful Pennock?
19
Philippe, his eyes fixed on the spot were Hawkes had disappeared into the woods, ran across the valley with his rifle in his hands. He had not been able to get off the third shot that he had intended for Hawkes. He plunged into the woods. There was blood on the snow and spilled gunpowder beside a yellow birch tree where Hawkes had reloaded his musket. Hawkes’s tracks, intermixed with blood, went straight for the Naquag.
Philippe, running as hard as he could, ran away from the stream for a hundred paces or so, then parallel to it for a quarter of a mile, then back toward it. At the end of this half-circle he emerged onto a ridge above the stream.
Over the sound of his own hard breathing, he heard a series of loud grunts. Down below, Hawkes, with his wolf dog bounding alongside him, was running through the trees. He was grunting in pain with every step. Philippe put the sight of his jaeger on Hawkes’s back. He had been running too hard to hold the rifle steady, so he rested the barrel against the trunk of a tree.
Hawkes was passing through a grove of stark white birches about fifty paces away. He made a big target, but he was never in the open for more than an instant. No bullet could reach him before it hit a tree. Philippe lowered the hammer on his rifle and dropped its butt to the snow. He reached for his bayonet, thinking that he could outrun Hawkes and use the blade on him or the wolf dog after having used his bullet on one or the other, but the scabbard was empty. He remembered that he had loaned the blade to Used to be Bear. He was carrying two small smooth-bore pistols but he would not be able to draw them in time to shoot the dog if it attacked. Knowing that he could not kill both Hawkes and the dog with the equipment he had, and knowing that he must kill them both or die himself, Philippe did not pursue his fleeing enemy any farther.
“No hope, no hope!” Hepzibah Clum moaned, with tears running down her chapped face.
She and her sister and Jean Judd, who thought that Hawkes and his dogs had come to rescue them, threw their arms around one another and sank to their knees in the snow. They were bareheaded and unbraided, two windblown chestnut heads and Totsie’s auburn one.
“Aren’t they afraid Hawkes will come back?” Fanny asked Philippe.
The Abenakis, having used the women to gather wood, were building an enormous fire on their campground beside the Naquag. Talks in His Dreams had lighted it with a shot from one of Philippe’s pistols. He reloaded the pistol while the flames began to catch.
“Is that his name?” Philippe said. “The Abenakis call him the fat ghost.”
The wind whipped the fire, sending sheets of sparks dancing over the snow. The dead dogs roasted inside the flames like huge bubbling logs. Sleeping Fox had cut off the dogs’ heads and propped them up on a pile of snow where he could peer into the eyes. He had been looking all his life for his father’s head, which the wolf dogs had stolen, and he thought that he might be able to discover where they had hidden it.
There was a little blood on Sleeping Fox’s chest where Hawkes had shot him, but he had not looked after these superficial wounds. Except for Used to be Bear’s arm, which had sustained a compound fracture, the Abenakis’ injuries were not serious. Talks in His Dreams was even less affected than Sleeping Fox; the shot had barely pierced his skin after passing through the three or four layers of deerhide that he was wearing.
While waiting for the meat to cook, Talks in His Dreams had chopped a hole in the ice of the Naquag and spread Used to be Bear’s bearskin beside it. Used to be Bear lay down on his face on the bearskin and plunged his broken arm into the freezing water. After a while he sat up and began to sing again. Talks in His Dreams sat down on the ice facing him, took hold of the other man’s wrist, braced his moccasins against his chest, and set the fracture.
Fanny was quiet. Frowning slightly, she examined the buckshot lodged in Philippe’s cheek. He had a black eye now and a swelling on the cheekbone. The discoloration improved his looks, she thought, by making his face less symmetrical, less grave, younger. Fanny touched the swelling with her fingertip and pressed. The wound oozed yellow matter.
“It’s too late to probe for the lead now even if we had something to probe with,” she said. “You should put hot saltwater packs on it, to draw out the pus.”
They were standing between the steep banks of the Naquag, where there was some shelter from the wind.
Fanny touched his wound gently and said, “What is the sense of what you have done?”
Philippe did not pretend not to understand.
“Sense?” he said. “Shall we speak about the attack by the English and the Iroquois on La Chine in the summer of 1689? A hundred French dead during the attack, another hundred carried off and tortured to death afterward.”
“I know it has all happened before, and what explanations have been made. Have you done it before—you, yourself?”
“No. I am just beginning.”
Fanny’s eyes did not waver. “It appears that you have a gift for your work,” she said.
Philippe rose to his feet, cradling his jaeger in his arms, and studied the clouds as they scudded across the sky.
“We must move as soon as the Abenakis wake up,” he said.
“Move? In the night?”
“The moon is very bright now. It was planned in this way. The march takes two weeks and a day or two, the retreat a little longer, so if you leave the Saint Francis with the full moon you return to its banks at the next full moon.”
He began to walk away.
“Wait,” Fanny said.
He turned around.
“Father Nicolas tells me that I am not a prisoner,” she said. “Is that your opinion also?”
“Certainly. You are a rescued Catholic.”
“Then I am free.”
Philippe nodded.
“Good,” Fanny said. “Then let me buy the others from the Abenakis and let us go.”
“Buy them? With what?”
Fanny turned her back and lifted her skirt. When she turned around again she held Oliver’s ruby necklace in her hand. Philippe looked at it without touching it. When he spoke there was a change in his voice.
“Put it on,” he said.
Fanny unwound her scarf, opened her cloak, and clasped the necklace around her neck. She had never worn it before. The red stones and the gold in which they were set seemed to gather light from her skin.
“What you offer is far too valuable,” Philippe said. “I am willing to ma
ke the bargain.”
“The Abenakis don’t know about rubies,” he said. “Surely if the stones are so valuable, their value can be explained.”
“No. How would you find your way back to Alamoth?” “We would follow the rivers.”
“The English would hang you.”
“Jaghte oghte,” Fanny said.
Hepzibah Clum was standing above her on the riverbank with Totsie beside her. Their lips and chins shone with grease. They stared at the ruby necklace.
“You whore of Babylon,” Hepzibah said. “Poor Gus Hawkes, who only wanted to love his dogs.”
Rose appeared and gave Hepzibah and her sister a shove, as if they were girls in the nursery. “You’d better eat, Fanny,” she said.
Rose saw the necklace too. “What’s that round your neck?” she said. “It matches my ring. It’s beautiful, Fanny! Where did you get it?”
20
The wind captured Fanny like a net. To make herself smaller, she bent her body at the waist and gripped her knees. Snow whipped her face. The gale ripped a tree apart and blew through the forest with a volume that rose and fell, but in a low and somber pitch that never changed. Fanny, pausing chilled and exhausted in the whirling half-light of the riverbed, had the illusion that the wind was releasing bass notes that were too deep for her ear to apprehend. Probably Rose could hear these sounds. She was behind Fanny, walking in Used to be Bear’s footsteps and using him for a windbreak.
The gust passed. Fanny completed the step she had earlier begun to take and reached over her shoulder and touched Solitude. Betsy’s baby was asleep. In the pause in the wind she heard the Judd boy feebly whooping. The Abenakis paid no attention to him now. They appeared to believe that the death of the wolf dogs had put them beyond danger, and tonight they blundered across the country like a gang of farmers, making noise, lighting fires, ignoring sign.
Still, they moved forward under the waning moon as doggedly as ever, never stopping, never slowing down. They had been walking up the Naquag since early afternoon. It was now midnight, the hour of the first contemplation in the Spiritual Exercises.
Father Nicolas, trudging along ahead of Fanny, was engaged in imagining the words spoken by Pontius Pilate after he had examined Jesus. He spoke them aloud: “‘I find no crime deserving of death in him.’” Father Nicolas’ voice was carried back to Fanny on the wind. As he spoke each syllable, he drove his staff into the snow. “They all said, ‘Let him be crucified!’” Father Nicolas cried. “The procurator said to them, ‘Why, what evil has he done?’ But they kept crying out the more, saying, ‘Let him be crucified!’”
Fanny slowed her footsteps and fell behind. Used to be Bear trudged along beside her. He had cut a slit for his head in the center of his bearskin and was now wearing his garment, fur side inward, cinched at the waist with a length of rawhide. It was frozen stiff.
Rose fell into step with Fanny and gave her an ingratiating smile. Fanny supposed this meant that she was going to ask about the ruby necklace, but instead she pointed at the diminutive figure of Father Nicolas.
“What is the dwarf saying?” Rose asked.
Father Nicolas had been quoting in Latin from the Gospel According to Saint Mark. Fanny interpreted.
“‘I find no crime deserving of death’?” Rose said. “Is that what Pontius Pilate said?”
“Yes.”
“He wouldn’t say that about these papists or their savages, would he?”
Rose glared at Father Nicolas’ hunched black-robed figure as it marched through dervishes of snow, shouting out Pilate’s infamous claim to be innocent of Christ’s blood. Rose was limping slightly.
“Your leg,” Fanny said. “Is it all right?”
“It will be by and by,” Rose said. “Tell me the secret of the necklace.”
The Abenakis stopped at last just before moonset, an hour or two after they reached the source of the Naquag. They were in the mountains now. A dense evergreen forest lay all around, with smaller, greener trees than the ones in the valley. They seemed calmer in this dark woods than they had previously been. The wind hardly blew over the floor of the forest, and such noise as it made, whistling through the limber tips of the pines and spruces and hemlocks high above, seemed less wild than the demented gale they had been walking through.
The Indians built lean-tos, separating the party as they had been doing all along—women, including Fanny but not Rose, and the children in one lean-to, Talks in His Dreams and Sleeping Fox in an adjoining one, Philippe and Father Nicolas in a third, and Rose and Used to be Bear in the last one, some distance from the others.
Rose accepted these arrangements without complaint. The others had heard her cries coming out of the sleeping pit on the first night she had spent with Used to be Bear and knew what they meant.
They had all been raped too—the Clum girls one after the other by Talks in His Dreams, Jean by Sleeping Fox—but this had happened while they were still in the lean-tos along the Connecticut. The act had been perfunctory; the Indians seemed to be doing it not for pleasure but for the same reasons that they fed the captives nocake or made them dogtrot or beat them when they urinated or defecated anywhere but in running water through a hole chopped in the ice—to establish the rules of the situation. The women had lain quietly while it happened, side by side, and said nothing about it to each other afterward.
Rose’s outcry, the sound of blows, her undiminished haughtiness in the aftermath, all showed how different she was from ordinary women. Tonight Rose was in no danger. Used to be Bear had a fever. The dog had ripped the skin from his forearm and inflicted deep punctures in his muscles. The walls of these wounds had collapsed, providing ideal conditions for infection. Also, the pain was considerable. Used to be Bear’s radius and ulna had not so much been broken as splintered by the pressure and rotation of the wolf dog’s teeth and jaws.
As he inserted himself into the lean-to feet first, head just inside the open end, and laid himself down on his bearskin, he groaned in his discomfort and dug through the balsam-bough bed to scoop up handfuls of snow for his fever and his thirst. He paid no attention to Rose, who sat cross-legged on the snow near his head.
The moon was down. In the starlight that filtered through the roof of the lean-to, Rose could not, at first, make out Used to be Bear’s features. Of course she knew where he was and what he was doing by smell and sound—the bear grease, the roast wolf dog he had been digesting since morning and which was now escaping from his body in the form of gases, the rasp of his fingernails on his scalp and stomach, the sharp squeak of breath when he moved his arm. Rose ignored sound and smell and concentrated on seeing. Gradually her extraordinary eyes adjusted to the dark.
For a while, Used to be Bear muttered to himself and scratched his skin aimlessly with his unwounded hand. Finally he fell asleep. Rose concentrated on his face—only the face, the lantern chin, the thin scarred mouth that let yellow teeth show through at the left corner, the flat planes of the cheeks, the smashed nose, the missing ear, the eyes. She was, of course, looking at him upside down. His face, dark skin surrounded by darkness, did not have the appearance of flesh and bone, but resembled a face seen in a mirror in an unlighted room.
Rose focused on his left eye, to the exclusion of every other feature. Used to be Bear, who was practically hairless, had no eyebrows and only the sparsest lashes. That morning, while Used to be Bear was walking around in circles holding on to his broken arm, Rose had picked up Philippe’s bloody bayonet and concealed it in the skirt of her petticoat. It had bumped against her poor leg all day long.
Now she took it out, and holding it in both hands as she had learned from watching Used to be Bear, placed the point against his eyelid and drove the blade into his brain. Unlike the real bear, Used to be Bear died without moving or uttering a sound.
Rose retrieved the bayonet, crossed the campground to the lean-to where Talks in His Dreams, and Sleeping Fox were lying with their heads pointing outward, and sank quietly into the sno
w to study first one sleeping inverted face and then the other.
21
When Rose crawled into bed with Fanny, so stealthily that Fanny did not know that she was beside her until she heard what she was whispering into her ear, Fanny’s heart froze.
“It’s a very quiet death, Fanny, not like shooting or hanging,” Rose said. “One must pinch them afterward to be sure it’s really happened.”
She reached up in the dark and pinched Fanny’s lower lip to show her how—not nearly as hard, of course, as she had pinched the corpses’.
Fanny took several deep breaths before she could whisper back.
“The Jesuit?” she said. “Philippe?”
“I haven’t killed them yet. I don’t know if I can. They’re not Indians.”
Fanny groped for Rose’s hand. Rose squeezed her fingers; she really could see in the dark.
“Wait,” Rose said. “What if they follow us?”
“They won’t,” Fanny said, squeezing hard. “We must get away. Now, as quick as we can, before the French wake up.”
Two hours later, Rose and Fanny, running side by side between the high banks of the Naquag, were far ahead of the other women. With an unerring sense of direction, Rose had led them out of the forest, leaving the Frenchmen alive in their lean-to.
Rose slowed down and stopped in the middle of the frozen watercourse. The Clum girls and Jean Judd, stumbling through a whirlwind of snow, came into sight. They were more warmly dressed now. Hepzibah wore Used to be Bear’s bearskin like a jerkin. The other two women were wrapped in hides that Rose had stripped from the bodies of Talks in His Dreams and Sleeping Fox.
Bride of the Wilderness Page 43