Supply wagons, fur traders' pack mules, voyageurs' canoes and his own blistered feet eventually delivered Olfert Dapper into the Territory of Sagadahock, that province of Britain located east of the Kennebec River in the vaguely delineated colony of Maine. The French had their own name for the region, Acadia, and their own longstanding claims of ownership, but in the village of No Popery Dr. Dapper encountered few French, all of them Huguenot refugees. The local settlers were mainly recusants from the Roman-leaning reign of Charles II—English Puritans, Dutch Calvinists, and Salzburger Lutherans, plus a sprinkling of Anabaptists and a few Jews. Surrounding the village were largely ignored populations of Micmac, Abenaki, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot Indians, most of them good humored and rather bewildered. Dr. Dapper rather took to the Abenaki. He found their peaceful dispositions and placidly bleak view of the universe comfortingly akin to his own.
For the rest, he liked neither his fellow colonists—whom he judged ignorant, unsophisticated, mostly illiterate, and generally too poor and unimaginative to be worth the effort of swindling—nor his enforced frontier existence. The houses of No Popery were, without exception, constructed of rough-timber, their roofs either thatched or bearing a fine crop of grass, for better insulation, their chimneys built from clay-covered logs, their windows not even of horn but mere oiled paper. Sanitary arrangements were worse than anything he had endured aboard ship, and the climate was, as he wrote in his journal, "…insalubrious in the extreme, being pitilessly hot and miserably cold by turns, and plagued in all seasons by wicked varieties of insect life such as never we encountered in the Netherlands. Nor is this all, for there are wolves larger than the European sort, whose main prey is a kind of monstrous deer known to the Indians as a moose, and there is also a creature like an unspotted leopard, and great bears too, and not a soul with whom one can exchange ideas in a civilized manner. In truth, they are welcome to their Sagadahock, the lot of them, and it to them, and I am surely the most wretched Hollander that ever was. Worst of all, by acclamation they have made me their physician, and apothecary as well, as it was on the ship…"
Coming from as small and topographically tidy a country as Holland, with its gray, sea-menaced flatness and its cathedral skies, he was overwhelmed in both senses of the word by this New World. Everything was too big, monstrously big—trees, animals, rivers and bellowing waterfalls, even the very seasons themselves, storm and snow and April alike—while the shocking splendor of the changing leaves, the wildflowers, the vast, foggy hills, the dark, virgin, sweet-smelling earth made him want to hide. I would be better in prison. I have no business here.
There are a limited number of crises and emergencies for which a ship's doctor, however counterfeit, needs to be prepared. Fractured limbs, scurvy, drunkenness, various souvenirs of Venus, even treatment after a disciplinary flogging—these can be anticipated and prepared for, even by a reasonably experienced impostor, with, in general, no worse damage left in his wake than might be expected from a genuine doctor. But in an isolated settlement of assorted dissenters, fanatics and castaways, stranded in a completely strange land, with neither impressive-looking implements nor reasonably harmless medications at hand (though the local Abenaki were sometimes whimsically helpful here), Olfert Dapper was most often the only resort of people who had fallen down cliffs, abruptly removed hands or legs while cutting firewood, contracted a disease of which he knew neither the name, the cause, nor the treatment, or come off second-best in some encounter with a bear or a panther. Even had he actually possessed a medical degree, it would likely have proved worse than useless, faced with the dangers and mysteries of Sagadahock. He felt almost as sorry for his patients as he did for himself.
"Wretched Hollander" or no, paradoxically, he was held in higher respect in No Popery than he ever had been in his homeland.
Until recently he had been acceptably successful in his various questionable enterprises, if successful can be defined as getting away with it. Not a day of his life had been spent in prison, physical labor or repentance: a situation that felt far more natural to him than holiness to a saint, since sainthood involves constant struggle and failure, and struggle again. If he had not had a single true friend, there had been few true enemies—or, at least, none who knew where he lived—and it can honestly be said that he had borne ill will toward no man living. Nor woman, either, if it came to that; except perhaps for one Margot Zeldenthuis, who had long since vanished from his life, along with the forty-nine guilders under his pillow. Yet he sighed more often than he cursed when he thought of soft-footed Margot. Like his victims, Olfert Dapper had always had a streak of romance in his nature…just less than they.
In No Popery, to his horror, he was needed. There was no one else in the village who could do what he did, even if he could do little. Gaining trust had always been his living; more than that, it had been his gift, his art, his entire existence and his purpose for existence. Trust bestowed, trust gratefully volunteered, was another matter entirely, and Dr. Dapper would have been the first to admit that, if there had been anyone in his new life to admit it to. His patients—who, for the most part, paid him in venison, wild turkeys, rabbits, vegetables from their small gardens, and labor around the tiny house they had built for him—remained admiring and utterly loyal, whether or not his medications, all invented out of thin blue air, were successful. Socially, he ranked with the minister, a grim, lantern-jawed soul named Giles Kirtley, lean as a winter wolf; slightly ahead of Matthew Prouty, the schoolmaster; and he was a frequent guest at far more well-provided tables than was even Nathaniel Markham, the wealthiest farmer of No Popery, who had real clapboards covering the raw frame of his house, and real glass in his windows. These, according to the lights of the village, were successful men: Dr. Olfert Dapper was celebrated.
But the nearest thing he had to a friend, or even a drinking companion, had liquor not been harshly forbidden in No Popery, was an Abenaki Indian named—as near as he could ever translate it for Dr. Dapper—Rain Coming, who dwelled with his tribe in a birchbark village some three or four miles away. He was short, square-built and ageless, his skin the texture of granite and the color of a worn old coin, and he actually spoke only a little more English than the handful of Abenaki words that Dr. Dapper had awkwardly acquired. Yet somehow they were comfortable in one another's company, and could spend unlikely amounts of time together in complete silence. The Indian's herb lore, proffered in brief grunts and gestures, had resulted in more than one miraculous-appearing cure, for which Dr. Dapper received the credit. In return, he did his best to teach Rain Coming how to cheat at cards. That enterprise failed, due primarily to the other's complete lack of the competitive instinct; or, rather (at least, so Dr. Dapper always felt), to Rain Coming's serene certainty that whatever the game, he had already triumphed simply by taking part, and there was nothing further to say. Dr. Dapper would have given a good deal to possess such inborn assurance.
Rigorously honest with himself, if with no other, Dr. Dapper never blamed Mistress Remorse Kirtley, the minister's thin, whispering wife, for luring him into temptation. While she was hardly the most attractive woman of his extensive experience, marriage to the good Reverend having bleached most of the color and spirit out of her, curiously she aroused Olfert Dapper's occasional sympathy as well as his lust, which was not something that had happened to him before. Her husband suffered frequently from what Dr. Dapper pronounced to be "dyspeptic lassitude," but which even a middle-aged Dutch cardsharp could recognize as a stomach exhausted by constant and indiscriminate overeating. He treated these regular complaints with various decoctions of dandelion, mint, wormwood and yarrow, and spent much time in the kitchen with the grateful, attentive Mistress Kirtley, carefully explicating these remedies to her. In this manner they became well-acquainted, though Dr. Dapper was careful never to presume on the warming relationship. The first commandment of his chosen profession, passed down through every age of mankind, remained, as it still remains, " Thou shalt let them come to you
.… "
The days passed, and the seasons passed: the hottest summer Olfert Dapper had ever endured crisping into the most dazzlingly delightful autumn by far, then hardening into a winter as merciless as any he had known in the Netherlands—more so, indeed, for the complete lack of civilized refuge, such as a lively coffeeshop or a cheerful bordello. Dr. Dapper spent those endless months most often in bed, or huddled at his fireside with a quilt over his shoulders, his feet in a bucket of heated snow water, and his mind lost in memories of a Utrecht pub, drinking spiced jenever with Margot Zeldenthuis. Would she remember him, after all this time? More to the point, would that Eck en Viel idiot recognize him on the street, and could his States-General cousin, or whatever he was, still be holding a grudge? How much longer must he remain exiled in this fearful, barbaric place? He thought of the canals of Utrecht, and of the sharp wind over the Rhone, and for the first time since coming ashore felt no slightest trace of hope.
Spring slipped up imperceptibly, its timorous inroads into the iron cold like the forays of the turning tide just beginning to nibble at a child's invulnerable sand fortress. Dr. Dapper was yet suffering from chilblains when Rain Coming, whom he had not seen for a good month—and whom he rather suspected actually hibernated during the worst of the winter—came to tell him that the ice was two days from breaking on the Kennebec, and that the first rains, a day after, would almost immediately produce the various wild herbs Dr. Dapper had grudgingly begun to depend on for his improvised medicines. They set out together on the first nearly-warm day in April, with a pale, watery sun overhead and a small breeze honing its edge on the back of Dr. Dapper's neck.
They walked for a long time, in and out of pine groves, crossing muddy meadows, up and down the slopes of thickly wooded valleys and ravines. Their path seemed aimless, almost without direction, but periodically Rain Coming would halt and nod toward a few tiny petals in the shadow of a tree, or a fungus growing on that same tree; a single mushroom poking its brown head out of a patch of damp grass; a few queer-looking leaves, invariably hanging somewhere out of reach. And Olfert Dapper would dutifully climb and stretch, tug and twist and pluck, sometimes digging with both hands to fetch some plant up by its roots, and then drop his find carefully into the sack he carried at his waist, and trudge on beside the Abenaki. The sack grew heavier.
It was nearly twilight, with a half-moon already rising, when Rain Coming finally grunted in satisfaction, and they turned back toward No Popery. Weary as he was, Dr. Dapper was anxious to move quickly, knowing that the great wild cats whose broad footprints he had seen several times—"catamounts," the villagers called them—hunted mainly at dusk and dawn. He also knew that the black bears of the region were just waking now from their winter sleep, most often hungry and irritable. He walked increasingly close beside Rain Coming as the sky darkened, even bumping against him from time to time.
When his companion halted abruptly, and he heard, directly ahead, the sound of a large body moving in a thicket, then glimpsed the shadow in the moonlight, Dr. Dapper froze where he stood and refused to go further. Rain Coming's nods and earnest gestures of reassurance made no difference, so the Abenaki finally shrugged—something Dr. Dapper had never seen him or any Indian do before—and walked calmly on, quickly vanishing into the same thicket. He did not look back.
The threat of abandonment changed Dr. Dapper's mind for him, and he hurried to catch up with Rain Coming. The Abenaki had halted again at the far edge of the clearing, staring toward a rough, stony meadow slanting slightly uphill. They had come that way, and Dr. Dapper remembered glimpsing deer there, and stumbling over two or three burrows of the badger-like diggers the colonists called "land-beavers." But now there was nothing at all to be seen in the meadow…
…except something that should not have been.
Dr. Dapper did not write of it for a long time, for reasons that he never could explain to himself. When he did come to describe what he saw that spring night, remembering his fear that he might have been hallucinating out of weariness, he wrote: "…by moonlight its coat is a kind of golden-gray, the very color of the moon itself. It seems a sturdy-built creature, though rather small—I cannot imagine it bearing a person of my stature for any distance. The hoofs are indeed cloven, as Pliny attests, though he is much in error regarding nearly every other aspect of the beast. The tail is lionlike, the mane as long as that of the wild ponies of the English moors—though less thick and shaggy—and the celebrated horn above its eyes would seem disproportionate in length and evident mass to the musculature of its rather slender neck. Yet so is the unicorn made."
Dr. Dapper cried out at the sight, a loss of self-control quite outside his usual humors. The unicorn wheeled on the instant, its horn fiery as a new scar in the moonlight—and then it was gone, leaving no footprints behind on the wet and muddy hillside…leaving nothing but the wondering glory in Dr. Dapper's eyes.
Rain Coming looked at Dr. Dapper without speaking, and Dr. Dapper looked back at him. There was no need to speak on either side: what had been seen, even for the single crystal moment, was greater than accusation, beyond apology. They walked on back to the village of No Popery together, bound in an understanding far greater than when they had set out that morning, so long ago.
What Rain Coming thought of their encounter, Dr. Dapper never knew, nor expected to know. Indeed, when he asked his friend whether the Abenaki tongue even had a word for unicorn, Rain Coming pretended not to comprehend, and grew plainly irritated when the matter was pressed further. He came less often to the village in those later days, and was even less conversational when he did. He seemed to Dr. Dapper almost to have set his body aside to follow in his puzzled heart whatever that moment on the meadow had meant to him. A good—if uneasy—Netherlandish Calvinist, Dr. Dapper mused at times over the question of whether Indians could become saints.
Dr. Dapper missed his friend, but Rain Coming's place had largely been taken by a conflagration of yearning to see the unicorn again. He spoke to no one about it—certainly not to the Reverend Kirtley, who would have immediately denounced his vision as a sending from hell. Nor did Dr. Dapper consider taking Prouty, the schoolmaster, into his confidence, for the man was even more fearfully rigid than the Reverend, who at least had his unshakable faith to bolster him; while Prouty, Dr. Dapper suspected, needed only the least suggestion that the universe was not as he had been taught—such as the existence of unicorns—to push him quite over the edge of reason, likely into Quakerism, or something worse. Dr. Dapper had enough on his conscience, such as it was, without the added responsibility for destroying Master Prouty's trembling foundations.
It does say something to his good, surely; to the influence that the simple life and simple values of No Popery had had on him—or perhaps it was only the silent, mysterious reproach of Rain Coming—that it never occurred to Dr. Dapper that there could be immense profit in the possession of a live unicorn, or even the hide, hair, and horn of a dead one. He merely wanted to see it again; and he knew without questioning, as one sometimes knows these things, that he never would be allowed to see it alone. It had clearly never been meant for him in the first place, but rather for his wise and strangely innocent companion, for Rain Coming of the Abenaki. Whom do I know in this savage land who is wise and innocent in that same way, who deserves to see what I by chance saw? With all their talk of Jesus, and all their damned endless praying, there must be someone!
And it was at that moment, in the spring, that Remorse Kirtley came to him, as he had known she would.
It was not an occasion of sin that brought her, but the perfectly legitimate pretext of her husband's rebellious stomach quarrelling with his eight-course dinner, as it and he were habituated to do. If Dr. Dapper could possibly attend on him…?
Remorse Kirtley was not a beauty, but her eyes were the deep, sweet brown of a sunflower heart, and her mouth, close to, was not nearly as thin and prim and small as it appeared most of the time. Indeed, she was definitely standing closer to h
im than was at all proper for a good Puritan wife, and it was with a real and regretful effort that Dr. Dapper banished temptation and agreed to accompany her once more to the Reverend's bedside. A thought had occurred to him, gazing into those sunflower eyes.
While the infusion of wild grasses that he had learned would not only soothe the Reverend's much put-upon intestines but send him off to sleep as well was steeping, he told the minister, "That, I fear, was the last of the herbal medicines that I have gathered with my heathen friend of the Abenaki. Tomorrow, or the next day, I must go forth again to replenish my supply, and I would ask that you give your wife leave to accompany me. These plants grow close to the ground, and my eyes are not what they were."
Reverend Kirtley was a fool, but not quite the fool he seemed. Having long since reassured himself of his wife's holy unattractiveness, his main objection to her passing an afternoon in Dr. Dapper's company concerned not what she might do, but that she might be thought to be doing it. "It would give the impression of unseemliness," he protested, "of impropriety. Surely another—a child, perhaps, to avoid false appearances…?"
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