XV

CAP HUFF refused to let us put into Portsmouth, saying he had nothing there worth getting. I suspicioned there were other reasons for his indifference, having to do with the gaol and those who had put him there. So we ran on to the eastward, rounding the Nubble into Wells Bay and dozing in the warm, smoke-laden land breeze, which brought us swiftly to Arundel on the flood tide that night.

There was a pother on our arrival. Having felt the bitter white Kennebec mists of autumn, I put my mother and sisters to work knitting woolen stockings for the two of us out of double yarn, long enough to reach a foot above our knees, and short ones to wear over them. There were woolen shirts to be collected, and tools to be assembled for carrying in my pack, as well as fish-hooks, needles, awls and mirrors for Hobomok and Paul Higgins and the others.

Wherever I moved Ranger moved with me, knowing I was going away, and pressing against my legs so that I fell over him a thousand times. My mother and the girls, with their hands and eyes busy at their knitting, moved like folk in a dream, so that we fell over each other as well. By midnight our dispositions were so near to souring that I declared I would make no more preparations, even though we froze and starved for it; so Cap and I sat before the fire in the gathering-room, with knitting needles clicking around us like maple branches after an ice storm, and told my mother and sisters, between draughts of flip, how our camp at Cambridge had seemed, and how General Washington had looked and what he had said, and how our men had plenty to eat, and how the British in Boston had next to nothing to eat, and how we could beat them if we had powder, which we had not, and what General Washington had worn, and how he was beloved by all, and all the other things that womenfolk must have recounted to them so they in turn can recount them, with their own additions, to the neighbors.

When I turned to my mother’s affairs, and spoke of the difficulties she would have in managing the inn, she scoffed.

“Tchah! she said. “What is there about this inn, with Malary and the girls to help me, that’s more difficult than the managing of any house! Put your mind at rest! All our drinkers will be gone to war, and there’s money at hand—what your father left, and what we’ve earned from trading in furs and from the sloop.”

“If that’s so,” I said, “why was it, when Phoebe was engaged to James Dunn, that I could never leave this place for fear of her getting married and leaving you helpless?”

My mother started up, exclaiming she had forgotten to put the beans to soak, and Phoebe yawned, declaring we should all be abed if we proposed to go out with the early tide. My sisters, who had reached the heels of our stockings, went off upstairs with her, gabbling over nothing; so Cap and I sat alone by the fire, drinking our flip and hoping the days to come would find us in no worse circumstances.

The next morning, when we dropped down the river and across the bar, we looked back at what we were leaving and wondered, as I think those who go away to war have always wondered and always will wonder, when we should see it again—my mother and sisters and Malary on the hard gray beach at the turn of the shore, waving and smiling, though I well knew they felt little like smiling; young Ranger, the image of his father, his ears erect and his tail moving slowly back and forth, hopeful until the last of being called to follow me; the garrison house, gray and comfortable behind the dunes, smoke rising in a blue plume from its squat chimney; the little early-morning waves dropping weakly on the beach, as if in patient sorrow at our going; the ledges brown and glistening on the pearly surface of the sea, and the water near the shore so glassy and so sheltered from the soft west wind that the far blue line of Wells and York seemed floating in the air.

That night we dropped anchor at Parker’s Flats, off Georgetown Island in the Kennebec, Phoebe declaring it was better to take our time about it than to hang ourselves up on a ledge. We took ten fat flounders from the flats, and Phoebe made a chowder from them, adding pork scraps and sliced potatoes and ship’s bread and butter and an onion, so that we put in our time profitably.

We helped her to weave an instrument to wear on her wrist—four musket balls wrapped in leather and enclosed in braided strips, the strips narrowing to a tube, and ending in a bracelet. When the bracelet was on her wrist the tube lay in her hand, projecting six inches beyond it. At the end of the tube were the musket balls, tightly laced in place.

Men, Phoebe said, were a pest, continually clawing and mauling at a woman; and with this in her hand it would be easy to discourage them.

“Ho!” Cap roared, slipping his arm around her waist and pulling her so tight against him that she looked like a coonskin against a barn door, “what could you do with that when a man does this to you?”

He bent his big red face down toward hers. Misliking his rudeness, I set out to pull him away and throw him overboard, when Phoebe flicked up her hand so that her new machine tapped against the back of his head. He released her, his eyes as loose and rolling in their sockets as those of a bass staring up at a grasshopper; and after he had wobbled around, as though he had drunk too much rum, he leaned against the mainsail and slid sidewise onto the deck, where he lay looking thoughtfully at the stars.

We came to anchor the next morning off the lower tip of Swan Island; and before the anchor rope had done thumping on the deck a canoe put out from the headland and twisted toward us down a guzzle. The Indians in the canoe were young men, strange to me, so I ordered them back with word that Steven Nason had come to visit with Jacataqua and Hobomok. They shook their paddles at me, shouting “Brother!” to let me know my father’s name had not been forgotten, and when they had taken word back to the headland, five canoes returned.

I recognized Jacataqua among the paddlers, for she was like her mother, only smaller and rounder; but Hobomok I would never have known. He had grown thick through the chest and shoulders, and his face was loose-skinned and deep-lined, like that of a clergyman addicted to discourse and praying.

They brandished their paddles and whooped at me, keeping up a doleful howling until they had swarmed over the sloop’s thwarts, when Hobomok seized me by the wrist as though it had been a pump handle, and Jacataqua took me by the waist and wedged her shoulder under my arm. She was pleasing and soft, with the same red glow on her cheekbones that her mother had, as though a light were shining up at her; and neat, too, with blue wampum at her brow and throat, and a deerskin jerkin over her leggins, such as her mother wore.

For one who so powerfully disliked Indians, Cap Huff’s behavior was strange. Engulfing Jacataqua’s arm in his bear’s paw of a hand, he pointed first to me, roaring, “Brother!” He then pointed to himself and said, “Brother!” after which he poked Jacataqua in the chest, unnecessarily hard, it seemed to me, and bellowed, “Sister!” Jacataqua laughed, threw her arm around his neck, and kissed him, at which this hulk of a man whooped more loudly than any Indian and scrambled up the sloop’s mainmast in an excess of emotion.

Phoebe scrutinized Jacataqua with care, and from time to time coughed a hard, dry cough, which I had long ago learned was a sign matters sat ill on her. Therefore I put an arm around each of them, saying to Jacataqua, “This is my sister.”

Phoebe pulled away, saying, “No! No! No sister!”

Jacataqua smiled up at me. “I speak English better than my mother.” She went and sat by Phoebe, picking up her hand and holding it. “Steven knew my mother,” she said. “His father made us brother and sister long ago, when they were following the white girl.” Phoebe freed her hand, then put it back in Jacataqua’s again.

“How did you learn to speak English so well?” I asked.

She laughed. “Boys come to see me from Gardinerstown and Pownalborough; sometimes from Fort Western and Arrowsic Island and Brunswick—oh, many places.”

Cap Huff descended the mast and regarded her with admiration. “Wait till you see what’s coming up from Boston in a week or so,” he said. “You’ll speak two or three languages after that.”

“What languages?” Jacataqua asked, wide-eyed.

“Oh, Irish,” Cap said, “and Connecticut, and Harvard, maybe.”

“I speak a little German,” Jacataqua said.

“German!” Cap bawled.

“Gottverdamte!” said Jacataqua. “There’s nothing but Germans across the river in Pownalborough.”

“Well, I’m a—I’m a sculpin!” Cap muttered.

Jacataqua couldn’t keep her hands off Phoebe’s cat’s eyes and brass-studded belt and the rest of her odd belongings, so I left them for Hobomok, and found Natawammet squatting with him on the sunny side of the hatch, looking little different than I remembered him. His throat was scrawnier and his knees showed signs of wear. I was glad to see them; and from the tone of their voices when they called me “Brother,” they were equally glad to see me.

Rabomis, they told me, was dead, having pitched from a canoe in the Five Mile Ripples and broken her neck against a rock. Jacataqua had been made sachem in her stead because she was known and liked in all the adjoining settlements, and received many favors from white men. Woromquid had set off for Quebec two years before with three Assagunticooks, and none of them had ever been heard of again. All of the Norridgewocks had gone to St. Francis and Beçancour to live, and most of the Swan Islanders too, for the settlements had pressed so close around them that there was game for only a small number.

With the turning of the tide Phoebe left us, declaring she couldn’t lose the favoring wind. We sent two men with her, to ride through the Chops on the sloop and make sure she came to no harm. Beyond the Chops I knew the wind would take her safe to Arundel.

I watched her at the tiller, fingering her cat’s eyes and squinting into the west, little more than a shadow larger than on the day when she fastened my hunting shirt to her father’s cabin; and I wondered what it was that Nathaniel Tracy had seen in her. I was reminded, too, to ask Cap, some day, what possessed him to want to put his sweaty paws on her.

Fearful of what cussedness Cap might inflict on my friends because of his dislike for Indians, I consulted Hobomok, saying it might be well to tranquillize Cap by showing him something he couldn’t understand. Also I said I had heard Hobomok had become a skilled m’téoulin, able to walk ankle deep in rock and scream terribly.

I have never learned why these two things—screaming and seeming to walk ankle deep in hard earth or rock—are the signs of a great m’téoulin among the Abenakis; but it is so and always has been so. There is no trick about the screaming, which a m’téoulin practises in remote places, starting when a young man, so that in time he is able to scream fearfully, in a manner beyond the comprehension of those who have never heard the scream of a m’téoulin. About the walking there is a trick, though I have never learned it; nor have I understood why it should so fill the Abenakis with amazement and terror. When a m’téoulin walks thus his feet appear to sink deep into the ground, as though he walked in the soft sand at the bend of a tide river; and I have heard it said that the footprints of a powerful m’téoulin are often found sunk deep in stone.

When I invited Cap to smoke a pipe in Hobomok’s cabin, he protested that he would not smoke with a dirty bug-eater, especially since the tobacco would be mixed with rat’s fur and stink-bush leaves; but I told him that even though what he said were true, which it was not, we had been sent to make ourselves useful, and this was a part of it.

We entered behind Hobomok, who took a pipe from a shelf at the far end of the cabin, filled it, and gave it to me while Cap looked on, grumbling. Then he turned from us without a word and left the cabin.

“Now what ails this ill-begotten bug-eater?” Cap asked; but in that moment Hobomok rejoined us. He seemed to swell and tower upward toward the roof, and his face was hideous. He took three short steps toward us, dragging his legs like a man wallowing through a snowdrift. I could feel Cap, breathing hard, fumbling at his waist for his knife. Before he could reach it, a convulsion swept Hobomok’s face and body. His eyes bulged, and from his contorted mouth came a shriek so piercing and so awful that, although I had prepared myself, it came against me like a clammy hand, drawing frozen fingers along my spine, and piercing my ears like knitting needles.

Then he turned from us and went out. I looked at Cap, and found him staring glassy-eyed at the door, his hands and his mouth half open. I had heard my father say that when a good m’téoulin screamed unexpectedly in a room, no person in that room could move. Perhaps the strange walk of the m’téoulin, followed suddenly by his scream, first holds and then numbs the attention of those who hear him. It may be that which happens to a hen when a boy holds her beak against a board, draws with a piece of charcoal a long straight line from the tip of the beak outward along the plank, and presses her head against it. The hen remains there, helpless and unmoving; and so, too, did Cap stand until I shook him. During the remainder of the time we were together he called no Indian either lousy or ill-begotten until he had first looked over his shoulder to see whether he was overheard.

What with the vagueness of Colonel Arnold’s orders, and General Washington’s mislike for Indians, and the low opinion both those officers held concerning my thoughts on bateaux, I scarce knew what to do. I considered myself handy with a paddle; but I could no more navigate the upper Kennebec without Indians who knew the waters and the country than I could visit Boston without breeches. The Kennebec country is wild: more tumbled and torn than can be imagined by any man who has not struggled through it. Therefore I decided I would do for Colonel Arnold what I would do for myself.

Leaving Cap at Swan Island to get information from the women and make sure they made proper buckskin garments for Arnold, I set off up the Androscoggin with Natawammet to ask help from Paul Higgins and his Assagunticooks—the assistance he had promised months before.

From the start we seemed doomed to disappointment; for we paddled into a northeaster that drove buckets of water down the front of our shirts; and when we came to the falls of the Androscoggin, where Paul Higgins’s people had always pitched their wigwams, we found nothing but a piece of bark wedged in a cleft stick, and on it a drawing showing that the town had been removed to the southern end of Cobosseecontee Pond, which lies between the Androscoggin and the Kennebec.

When we had labored on to Cobosseecontee and around its winding shores until we had come to the Abenaki camp, we found only women and boys and old men. We smoked a pipe with the old men and learned that Reuben Colburn had paddled in from Gardiners-town and persuaded Paul Higgins to travel to Cambridge with his warriors and offer his services to Washington. Higgins, they said, had at first refused, saying he had promised his help to me; whereupon Colburn had told him, and rightly, too, I thought, that he would obtain more credit by going to Cambridge himself, since any orders I might give would also come from the great chief in Cambridge.

As a result of this, Natawammet and I sat down with them on the shores of Cobosseecontee to shoot deer and ducks and await Paul Higgins’s return; for knowing General Washington’s opinion of Indians, I suspicioned that Higgins might be received in Cambridge without overmuch courtesy, and that unless I did something about it, his help might be withheld when we needed it most.

On the afternoon of our third day of waiting we had returned from across the pond with two bucks and were skinning them on the shore, surrounded by gabbling squaws and noisy boys, when a silence fell, and the women scuttled off into the bushes like so many chickens at sight of a hawk overhead. I looked up to see Paul Higgins, in leggins and belt cloth, standing silently on the bank with his hands on his hips, glowering at me instead of leaping down to thump me on the back in his accustomed manner. Behind him were a score of Abenakis, all gloomy. Thus I knew I had been correct in my suspicions. I made a to-do over him, dwelling on the feast we would have with the venison and raccoon fat I had got while awaiting him, and going at once for the mirrors, awls, and scissors I had brought as gifts—gifts Paul needed. It had been long since he had trimmed his hair or beard. He looked more like a walking juniper bush than a man.

I liked Paul Higgins, despite the sneers of his white neighbors who pretended to find fault with him because he was overly free with his wives, marrying a squaw one year and putting her aside after the lapse of three or four years. I noticed, though, there was little complaint from the squaws; and I had reason to believe the white men who were bitterest against him would have done the same, if marriage customs among us were as lenient as those of the Abenakis.

Having been taken by the Indians when small, he had few of the white man’s evil habits, being neither foulmouthed over nothing, nor a drunkard, nor given to spreading malicious reports concerning his neighbors. For that matter, there was little of the white man about him. He was browned by exposure to the sun, and spoke with the softness of the Abenakis instead of with the nasal rasp of our own people.

At all events, I took pleasure in his company; and knowing this, he bore no grudge against me for his misfortunes, so we feasted harmoniously together.

He spoke bitterly of his journey to Cambridge. With him, he said, had gone nineteen of his braves, as well as Swashan, a sachem from St. Francis who had come to offer his help against the English. When they were admitted to the presence of Washington, he said, he had spoken quickly and to the point, saying they had lived at peace with their neighbors for many years; and now having been told the freedom of the land was at stake, they offered themselves to assist in preserving it.

“When the great chief had heard us,” Paul said, “he thanked us in fine words, and told us if there was need for our services he would send a message. Then he let my braves come away without food or drink or presents. Yet I know he is sending an army against Quebec. If there is no need for us now, there is no need for us ever. We resent this, my brothers and I. It sits ill on us to be held in such low esteem.”

For my ears he added angrily, in English, “Let ’em go to hell in their own way!”

I couldn’t blame Paul for his anger, knowing how I would have felt if I had offered my services and had them put aside in this manner; neither, knowing a few of the difficulties of the road to Quebec, could I let him be lost to us if I could hold him. I had liefer try to sing under water than speak in public, but I knew I must make the attempt, so I got perspiringly to my feet.

“Brothers,” I said, “many years ago I heard my father speak of war to the white chief who will lead this army against Quebec. In this talk he said the Abenaki method of making war was better than the white man’s method, and that white men, in making war, perpetually sought excuses to follow stupid counsels.

“Brothers, Washington is a great chief, just and fearless, but he has taken bad advice. He has taken the counsel of men who pretend to know the river Kennebec and its ways, but do not know it. They have told him to use bateaux instead of canoes. I have said to him, Brothers, that canoes are better than bateaux, but the advice he has had seems better than mine, so he must follow it. Now this cannot be changed; but it’s not my business to weep because bateaux are being used. My business is to go in a bateau.

“Another thing, Brothers: many years ago the great chief was traitorously used by Western Indians. This is something I mention without pleasure, but I do it so you may know I speak the truth, as my father spoke it to your fathers. The great chief doesn’t know the Abenakis of the Kennebec and the Androscoggin as I know them and as my father knew them. I ask my brothers if it wouldn’t be better to find some way of letting this knowledge be known to all the world, rather than to sulk like children because the great chief thinks all red men are like the red dogs of the West.”

With this I sat down, quaking internally and hoping the St. Francis chief, Swashan, would be silent, but fearing he wouldn’t because his conscience was too vulnerable.

No sooner was I down than he was on his feet, important and indignant. “Can my brother give this counsel,” he demanded, “when he knows my people have stood firm against the English for tens of years? A slight has been put upon the honor of my tribe—”

With this I broke the rules of Abenaki speech and got to my feet. “I answer my brother before he goes farther than is wise,” I said. “My brother knows the St. Francis Abenakis were a thistle under the belt of all New England for many years, when my friends of the Androscoggin and the Kennebec were living at peace with us and suffering unjustly for crimes their St. Francis brothers committed!”

“Micmacs: Etechemins from the Penobscot: Passamaquoddies!” broke in Swashan, glowering at me.

“St. Francis Indians!” I insisted. “Ask Hobomok! Ask Paul Higgins! In their time I had this,” and I struck the red scar on my forehead, “because Indians from St. Francis murdered my neighbor and stole his daughter.”

“Led by a Frenchman,” he growled.

“Yes, Brother,” I said, “led by a Frenchman. But what did we care who led them? Murderers led by a hangman are no worse than murderers led by a priest. Within our memories your St. Francis people have done things we hate. All the more reason, then, that you should cease to babble of your honor and look for a way to put yourself right before the world.”

They were silent, staring at me with beady black eyes. I could feel they were pleased rather than angry at my attack on Swashan, and were turning over in their minds how they could save their pride and still, as I had suggested, set themselves right with the world. At the same time, I knew that whatever they did, no matter how brave or self-sacrificing, they were doomed forever to be naught but Indians to most—one with Mohawks and Micmacs; Sacs and Foxes; Nipissings and Pottawattomies and Winnebagoes.

“Brother,” Paul said at length, “the great chief didn’t want us. This we cannot forget or change.”

“Brother,” I said, “that’s not the question. The question is this: If an army marches to Quebec by the Kennebec, does it need you? If it needs you and you. don’t give it help, then I may think what I please. It pleases me to think you offered help to further your private ends, and not to assist this country and your white brothers.”

Again there was silence while the braves, huddled in their blankets, watched me with glittering eyes.

“I have traveled toward Quebec,” I said, “with Hobomok and Natawammet and Woromquid. There was never a moment that I was not in need of them and helped by them. The army that goes to Quebec will need the help of every Abenaki on this river.”

Paul Higgins shook his head. “I won’t go with this army,” he said. “We have met coldness already, and I won’t risk meeting open disgrace.”

“Brother,” I said, “answer me a question.”

Higgins nodded.

“Soon it will be time to begin your autumn hunting.”

Again he nodded.

“Where shall you hunt?”

He waved his hand to the northward. “Throughout the Abenaki country,” he said, “wherever our parties know there are deer and bear and beaver.”

“Carrabassett?” I asked. “Moosehead? Carritunk?”

He nodded.

“Dead River?”

“Some,” he agreed.

“Paul,” I said, “go beyond Dead River and hunt on the Height of Land. Go soon, saying nothing to any man, and stick to the Height of Land. When this army crosses the Height of Land it will either need you badly or need nobody’s help. If it needs nobody’s help, you have hunted on good hunting grounds. If it needs help, you will be there to give it. I ask this in the name of friendship.”

“It will need help,” Higgins said.

There was a murmur of assent from the other braves.

“I think,” Higgins said, “I’m willing to hunt on the Height of Land.”

A brave on the opposite side of the fire howled furiously, rounding off the howl with shrill yips. “I will hunt on the Height of Land,” he announced. With that there was a general howling, significant of pleasure and approval, following which the fire was replenished and a Bragging Dance was held, with Swashan bragging louder than any three of the Assagunticooks put together.