Animal Appetite

by Susan Conant

  Now, look. There are more than fifty million dogs in the United States. Lots of people have dogs. Both before and after the seventeenth century, Native Americans of the Northeast had dogs. I have no evidence that Hannah’s captors were even Abenaki. If they were, their totemic animal could’ve been the fox or the wolf or the badger or anything at all. It really doesn’t matter.

  What nags at me is an account I came across in an obscure essay by John Greenleaf Whittier called “The Boy Captives.” Whittier was from Haverhill. The essay mentions Hannah Duston. Mainly it’s about two boys, Isaac Bradley and Joseph Whittaker, who were taken captive in Haverhill in 1695, ended up with an Indian family near Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, and escaped. The Indians didn’t just go after the boys, but, damn it, pursued them with dogs! The boys hid in a hollow log. The dogs found them and started to bark. As Whittier wrote, though, one of the boys “spoke in a low tone to the dogs, who, recognizing his familiar voice, wagged their tails with delight and ceased barking.” The boy then successfully diverted the dogs by tossing them pieces of moose meat. When the Indians appeared, the dogs left with them. The boys made it home.

  Boys taken captive in Haverhill in 1695. Same place as Hannah and only two years earlier. Taken to New Hampshire. Just like Hannah. Captured by people with dogs, in the plural, dogs that had socialized with the captives. I remind you that I know almost nothing about Hannah’s captors. Abenaki? Abenaki whose emblem was the dog? Don’t ask me! And especially don’t ask whether the members of that Abenaki family consisted of twelve members in human form and a little pack of spiritual relatives that wagged their tails at Hannah Duston and licked the hands that later slew their masters. The great miser, history, reluctantly doles out stingy little scraps. Hannah Duston, Mary Neff, and Samuel Leonardson killed ten people. Hannah Duston returned to Haverhill with ten scalps. History has chosen not to tell us whether Hannah’s captors had dogs. Hannah presumably killed the children to prevent them from sounding an alarm and summoning help. If her captors had dogs, wouldn’t she have slain the animals for the same reason? If she slaughtered children, her tender mercies toward dogs would surely have been cruelties.

  One last point. As I’ve mentioned, when Elizabeth Emerson was only eleven, her father, Michael Emerson, was convicted of beating and kicking her. During Elizabeth’s first pregnancy, she named a man named Timothy Swan as the father of her baby. Five years later, she denied her second pregnancy. Elizabeth Emerson lived with her parents. The twins were born in Elizabeth’s parents’ house. Michael and Hannah Emerson were in the house when Elizabeth delivered. She gave birth alone, with no help, or so she testified. Presumed guilty, she was executed for the murder of the babies. Faced with Cotton Mather’s threats of hell fire, Elizabeth Emerson protested her innocence to the end.

  Elizabeth Emerson had no supporters and no defense. I wish she’d had me at her side. In the manner of her sister Hannah, I’d have pointed a finger of accusation. When those twins were born and murdered, who else was in that house? I’d have asked. Who else had already endured the shame of a bastard child in the family? Whom would Elizabeth have shielded? And who was the one person there with a criminal record of violence against children? Against his own child? It’s possible, I suppose, that both Michael and Hannah Emerson killed Elizabeth’s babies. It’s even possible that the twins were stillborn. My finger of accusation, however, would point and, in fact, does point at Michael Emerson, the grandfather of the babies, the abusive father of Elizabeth Emerson, the father of Hannah Duston.

  CHAPTER 34

  So, Rita, judge fior yourselfi. Here is my story about Hannah Duston. By my standards, it has almost nothing to do with dogs. Do I win or lose? Or are all bets off?

  I’ve been tempted to cheat. I came close to saying nothing about the boy captives and the hollow log, nothing about the Abenaki and the totemic animals. I am still tempted. Randall Carey, however, taught me a lesson about the hazards of cheating. I wouldn’t plagiarize. But without my knowledge of Randall Carey, I might fall into the sin of selective omission.

  So here it is. My Aunt Cassie, Leah’s mother and my mother’s sister, was thrilled to hear that instead of diverting Leah from her academic pursuits by encouraging her to waste her time on dogs, I’d finally turned Leah’s attention and my heretofore wasted talents to a respectable field, namely, colonial history. Aunt Cassie said as much to a relative of ours named Louise, who is something like Leah’s and my fourth cousin once removed. We’d never met her. Probably because Louise isn’t a dog person, my mother had never mentioned her and I’d never heard of her. Although Louise, like Aunt Cassie, dwells in dogless apostasy from the family faith, she is religious nonetheless and—there really is a point to all this—recently switched creeds by converting to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As you may or may not know—I didn’t—the Mormon Church is the world’s largest repository of genealogical information. The idea, as I understand it, is that you are obligated to convert your ancestors, posthumously, of course, and that to do so, you need to know their names. An interest in pedigrees runs in our lines. My mother’s obsession with family trees was, however, strictly limited to the ancestry of golden retrievers. If she’d known what Louise found out, she wouldn’t have cared at all.

  I was more than interested. I was outright horrified. It means nothing. It bothers me nonetheless.

  My mother was. So is Aunt Cassie. So is Leah. I, too, am a direct descendant of Hannah Duston.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  With the exception of the imaginary And One Fought Back, the sources Holly consults for information about Hannah Duston are real. Especially useful to the author was Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

  The Haverhill Historical Society’s Buttonwoods Museum is located at 240 Water Street, Haverhill, Massachusetts 01830. For information, call (508) 374-4626.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SUSAN CONANT, three-time recipient of the Maxwell Award for fiction writing given by the Dog Writers’ Association of America, lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her husband, two cats, and two Alaskan malamutes—Frostfield Firestar’s Kobuk, C.G.C, and Frostfield Perfect Crime, C.G.C, called Rowdy. She is the author of ten Dog Lover’s Mysteries and is now at work on her eleventh, Barker Street Irregulars.