XIX

TO MY mind there is a serpentine beauty to the Kennebec: dappled with ledges and islands; twining gracefully among rolling meadows, towering forests, and rock-strewn mountains; slipping smoothly across levels; plunging headlong over falls; coiling quietly in pools. There is something about it, I have often thought, that captivates those who gaze upon it: something that brings them back to stare in fascination; to dare its perils; to listen at night to the dry rustlings, the chucklings, the intermittent rattlings with which it flows along its rocky bed. Sturgeons and salmon return to it each year in greater numbers than to any of our other rivers. Even wild fowl, struggle as they may to leave its glittering folds, seem drawn to it from distant places, too often falling victims to their infatuation.

Yet one must have a care; for there is a snaky chill about it all the year; and in the fall and winter this becomes a bite that tortures flesh and sinks into the bone.

Being busy with my thoughts as we went up the stream, I neither saw the beauty of the river nor felt the sharpness of waning September. It had come to me that I had first heard the names of Arnold’s Indians years before, from Natanis. They were the ones who, punctured by my father’s arrows, had been left by Guerlac at the Chain of Ponds when he was running for safety ahead of us.

How this coincidence had befallen was the thing that puzzled me; for Hobomok declared that Sabatis and Eneas lived far from each other, Eneas near the Height of Land still, but Sabatis in Pittston, close to Colburn’s, for whom he trapped beavers and otters and so lived in comfort. My brain was in a muddle over the affair. I misliked revealing myself, as I would if I questioned them properly. God only knows what an Indian will do when he considers himself wronged; and if they learned I had been a party to the attack on them when they had been Guerlac’s men, their love of vengeance might lead them to do me a hurt, and even to include my friends in their hatreds—Natanis or Cap Huff or Phoebe or Hobomok. So I said to Hobomok we must bide our time until we found Natanis. He would either know the truth or discover it for us.

Colonel Arnold signaled us to go ashore at the settlement of Vassalborough. He climbed from the canoe with water dripping from the seat of his breeches and asked in scathing tones what would have become of the army if it had used canoes.

“This thing’s a basket,” he said, “good for a minnow-trap, but bad for sitting! Let me have no more bark cockleshells! Get me something to keep out the water!”

He would have none of our canoe when I offered it, though it was as dry as a puffball; so Captain Oswald and I hunted through the settlement until we found a high-sided wooden canoe, a peraqua or pirogue, carved thin out of a pine log without knots, a log that must have been five feet in diameter when it was standing. In this the colonel went on more slowly.

We passed up through the bateaux of the fourth division before dusk and camped that night near old deserted Fort Halifax, whose usefulness, together with that of all the other Kennebec forts, had vanished when James Wolfe took Quebec from the French. By midmorning of the next day we had passed the fort and found many bateaux waiting at the first carrying place, though the most of them had already been carried the third of a mile around Ticonic Falls. Here there was a tumult. The water was quick and broken so that the men were in and out of it perpetually, holding their bateaux in place and nursing them into line, slipping on the rounded stones and filling their mouths in the middle of a curse, and coughing and swearing and shouting.

I thanked God I was handling a canoe, for each bateau must be unloaded, piece by piece, and the load placed on the bank, after which the bateau was hoisted out and balanced on two carrying poles. Its crew staggered off with it, slithering in the mud, stumbling on roots and stones, and so carried it for the entire third of a mile; then returned and shouldered the load, kegs and barrels and sacks and tents and muskets, carried them the third of a mile to the bateau, stowed them in place and set off into the stream again.

Far worse were the Five Mile Ripples, just above Ticonic Falls. They come down at such a slant, and with such a turbulence of foam and leaping spray, that one who has never passed over them thinks, on looking at them, that they cannot be mounted in any craft whatever.

Knowing they must be conquered, the bateaumen belittled the prospect, one declaring that fish went up, and that no fish was better than he; others shouting, “Whoa! Whoa!” and all plunging at it without delay, each bateau carrying four men instead of two.

Two of the men wielded poles, shoving rapidly and violently. If the head of the bateau fell away with the swiftness of the water, the other two would leap over the side and struggle to hold her bow upstream. Often they couldn’t, so that the bateau would whirl downstream to bring up with a crack against a boulder. Thereupon her half-drowned crew would straighten her out and go at it again.

There were five miles of these ripples, long miles; and though all the bateaux got up eventually, they took a prodigious thumping from rocks and a power of wrenching from the current. Every last one of them sprung leaks—not one leak, either, but many. Most of the bateaumen stood calf-deep in water when they had surmounted the ripples; and if there was a dry load among them I heard nothing of it.

The dusk came down bitter, with a white mist rising from the river, a mist that stiffened arms and legs; and when we saw a line of fires we went ashore. The fires belonged to Meigs and his men. We found them inclined to be thoughtful and silent; for the result of all their laboring and wallowing and straining had been a gain of seven miles between dawn and dark.

We unpacked a tent for Arnold and lay in the woods. It was that night that the coughing started; and there was never a night after that, for months, that the sounds of the river or the forest were not broken by coughs. We fell asleep to a chorus of coughs, and we woke to more coughs. There was no end to the coughing, so that it seemed there could be no place in the world free from it.

A barrel of salted beef had been opened that night, but when we came to eat it, it was summer-killed and sour. There was noisy argument among the men, some calling it beef; others declaring it was horse or porpoise, or maybe seal; and most of them pitching the meat into the river without more ado.

I found Phoebe tending James Dunn, who sat regally before a hot fire, occasionally shaking with a chill that collapsed him like a pricked bladder. All of them were wet, Jethro and Asa and Noah and poor Nathaniel Lord, and even Phoebe; and the night was one of those cruel nights that occurs toward the end of September, when the water freezes along the edges of brooks and puddles, and the unaccustomed coldness seems to bite deeper into the marrow than the real cold of later winter.

I told them to stuff their pulpy shoes and moccasins with leaves, tight, if they wanted another week’s use out of them.

“How is it up ahead?” Noah asked, careless-like.

I hated to answer. “Well,” I said at length, “it ain’t so good, but it might be worse.”

They pondered over this. “Well,” Phoebe said, “to-day might have been worse. We might have had to come through a tidal wave.”

“What I think we ought to do,” Asa said, “is bore holes in the bottom of our bateau, so’s the water can run out as well as in.”

A man bawled at us from the adjoining fire. “We got a better scheme over here! We’re going to cut holes in the bow and stern. Then we can stand in the holes and walk along the bottom and hold the bateau up around us like it was our skirts.”

“How’s James doing?” I asked Phoebe.

“If it ain’t any worse than to-day,” James said, “I can keep going forever.”

“It looks as if that’s about the length of time you’ll have to keep going,” Noah Cluff told him sourly.

Seeing they were in good spirits in spite of their wet clothes and bad food, I went back to our camp and found Captain Oswald perturbed over desertions, which had begun to be noticed toward the end of the Five Mile Ripples. One bateau crew from Meigs’s division, he said, had deserted in a body, vanishing into the forests with their muskets.

“What does Arnold say about it?” I asked.

“He says we’re better off without ’em. He says they wouldn’t fight anyway.”

“That’s about right, isn’t it?”

“Maybe, but it gets worse farther on, they tell me.”

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” I assured him.

“What if they all quit, then?”

“The way you and the colonel are going to quit?”

“My God!” he said, “there’s nothing that’ll make us quit.”

“Well,” I said, “don’t forget others feel the same way.”

Oswald nodded. “That’s right. I guess the salted beef got me gloomy.”

That was a bad night. The wet clothes froze on the men, a distressful feeling; and no man was wishful to lie abed beyond dawn. Since it was only the first of October, we told ourselves, there must be warmer weather in store for us; and since we were still in settled regions, not yet swallowed in the trackless wilderness, the traveling must improve. So we thought, but not for long.

We pushed out into quick water; and because all the bateaux passed it safely, we tried not to notice how they were racked by the passing, and how frequently their crews went ashore to bail with bark scoops.

But in time we approached Skowhegan Falls, made by the devil for the torturing of racked bateaux. Half a mile short of the falls was a right angle in the river and below it a triple whirlpool because of the force with which the water shot around the bend from the narrow channel above. Here the bateaux were strained and slammed against the rocks. How they came through the whirlpool and the narrow chute I cannot tell to this day, though I watched them passing through, the bateaumen swinging their poles from one side to the other like flails, poking and clawing and scrambling like cats. Above the chute between the ledges was a half-mile run of hellish current, quick and white; and though the crews scrambled along the shore, dragging their bateaux with ropes, there was no way to keep the clumsy craft from bumping and thumping against the sheer rocks, and sopping up water like salt bags. At the end of the half-mile run, there were the high Skowhegan Falls on each side of a craggy island in midstream. The face of the island is six times the height of a man; and in the middle of it is a cleft, which the Abenakis say was made by the tomahawk of the great lord Glooskap. The cleft is the route for carrying canoes over the falls. One man must drag, clinging with his toes and fingernails to the rock; and another must push, pressing himself against the rock sides like a snail. If either slip, then both are cruelly scraped and bruised, fortunate indeed if not hurled to the bottom of the cleft, all skin torn from them, and their canoe smashed into the bargain.

When, therefore, the bateaumen went to carrying their bateaux up through this cleft, after the barrels and packs and stores had been unloaded, there were times when it seemed men would burst like eggs between the bateaux and the rocks, and other times when apparently a bateau couldn’t move another inch unless knocked to pieces with axes. Yet every bateau went up, and men lay exhausted on the point of the island above the carry, shoulders torn from their hunting shirts, knees ripped from their breeches, and crimson bandages to show where bateaux had crushed them against the ledges.

Everywhere, on both sides of the river and on the islands, men calked their bateaux as best they could; for being of green wood, and not too well made, they opened up under the pounding and wrenching as though built from driftwood. I thought it was true, what Phoebe had said to me, that she would as lief essay this journey in the ancient skiff in which she had learned to sail as a child, made out of a sunken boat patched with pitch and rotten canvas, as in one of these terrible craft.

Arnold didn’t like it. “I still think they’re better than canoes,” he told me, “but get forward to Morgan and have him stop everyone at Norridgewock for overhauling all boats. If we don’t, half of ’em’ll burst in midstream and we’ll lose our supplies.”

Hobomok and I went up past Greene’s men, struggling through the roaring water of Bombazee Rips; and by nightfall we reached the point of land my father and I had known as Norridgewock. Now it was nothing, its cabins having been leveled to make place for the farms of two settlers. We came up to Morgan at the foot of Norridgewock Falls, where the riflemen were unloading their bateaux and preparing for the carry around.

Morgan was furious. He was a strange figure, having grown a bristly beard and being clad in nothing but leggins, moccasins, and belt cloth, in the Indian fashion. Across his bare back were the crisscrossed scars of a whipping received from British officers in his younger days—a whipping that caused him to hate the English with a bitter hatred, and that cost them dear before Daniel Morgan had done with them.

“By God!” he roared, and his voice reverberated above the rumble of the falls, “it’s high time! Look at this!” He seized one of his bateaux by the thwart and heaved it on its side, so that its load of barrels and tents and bags and litter of tackle slid out in a dripping heap. Then he banged the side with his fist, sinking one of the boards below the other, slipping his fingers into the opening, and with a jerk of his arms loosened the upper part of the side from the lower as easily as the backbone of a broiled mackerel is lifted from the meat.

“A puking baby could build better boats out of blocks!” he shouted, pounding the boards back into place with two mighty blows. “Show me the perfumed dressmaker that basted these for men to risk their lives in, and I’ll calk a boat with his skin!” He named the carpenters violent names; foul names from dark recesses of his mind; so that I was filled with amazement to know so much profanity had been hidden from me.

Nor were his riflemen milder in their anger. Their supplies were soaked; and they themselves had been drenched by day and frozen by night since they had left Fort Western seven days before, so that illnesses were breaking out among them, dysenteries and throat distempers, and rheumatisms that swelled their joints.

Some of them told me in all seriousness that they thought of waiting until the carpenters should come up, and then binding them and carrying them to the top of the falls and sending them over it in the worst of their bateaux.

“No,” I said, “the fault lies farther back. The one to blame is the man who persuaded General Washington and Colonel Arnold that the Kennebec could be navigated in these boats.”

“And who’s that?” asked a tall Virginian, his wrists so swollen with rheumatism that he held his hands before him as if seeking approbation.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but some day I’ll find out.”

“When you do,” he said, “we’ll skin him for you, unless you’d rather have him covered with clay and baked in a hole in the ground.”

These men wouldn’t rest, saying they must cut the roads for the others because they were better woodsmen than our little weaklings from Connecticut and Maine, which I think they were, though Maine woodsmen are by no means useless. At dawn the next day a part of them carried their baggage up the steep rocky hill of Norridgewock—a hill a mile in length, as rough and cruel as the ledges of Arundel. The rest went to calking and pitching their bateaux. As soon as a bateau was finished, four men would hoist it to their shoulders and stumble off up the carry. By the time Arnold reached us that night the entire first division had gone over.

The other divisions came up slowly, in worse condition, I thought, than the first. They were more heavily laden, and the men less powerful, man for man, than the riflemen, so their bateaux had been less skillfully handled and were almost wrecks.

Never did I see a greater mess than these bateaux. Some carried dried codfish as provisions, stuffed loosely around casks and barrels. The fish, soaked for days, had disintegrated. Water had leaked into the barrels containing dry bread, so that the bread had swollen and burst the barrels. There were casks of dried peas, poorly coopered. The peas had swollen and forced the staves apart; and the bottoms of the bateaux were filled with a soup of fish, bread and peas, trampled together and smeared over the rest of the baggage.

Now Norridgewock was less than a third of the distance to Quebec; and beyond Norridgewock, until we should reach the French settlements far down the Chaudière, there was no house, no road, only unbroken forests to which axes had never been laid since the beginning of the world. Therefore I misliked this wrecking of our food supply. It left us with nothing except flour and pork, and not too much of that; and I had seen no disposition on the part of any of our soldiers to be sparing with their rations, nor did I look to see them so while there was any left; for their independence was such that if told to eat less food, they ate more out of cussedness.

Yet Colonel Arnold stayed cheerful, nor did I ever see him in an evil mood so long as he could go forward. At a delay he was in a frenzy of anxiety and querulousness; but while he could move toward his goal there seemed to be no blow great enough to lower his spirits.

“Now,” he said, when I reported to him the bursting of all but two of the bread barrels in the third division, “now they’ll travel faster; for they’ll travel lighter and be more eager to come to food.” Nor could I quarrel with his determination to press on, for I had long ago made up my mind that I would press on to hunt for Mary, even though every man in the army turned back and left me to go alone.

Knowing what I knew about our food, I tried to send Phoebe back. I found her perched beside James Dunn in the warmth of a roaring fire, like a half-drowned mouse sitting beside a sleepy dog. She was roasting strips of pork on the end of a stick, wrapping them in cakes made of flour and water, and pushing them into James’s mouth. There was mud on her face, and a welt across her throat where a briar had slashed her. From her breast to her moccasins she was black with water and muck, and her extra moccasins had been fastened at her neck, where they hung under her ears like pendulous lobes.

“Where are your cat’s eyes?” I asked.

She popped a piece of pork into her own mouth and went on feeding James, pausing only long enough to show me a lump tied into the toe of one of her extra moccasins.

“Phoebe,” I said, “take James and go on home before food runs short. There’s no houses beyond here.”

James Dunn regarded me calmly. “When are you leaving?” he asked.

“That’s my James!” Phoebe said thickly, her mouth full of pork.

“Why,” I said, surprised at this unexpected burst from the silent James, “I’m not leaving, but I don’t want to see you two get into trouble.”

“Of course you don’t, Steven,” Phoebe said. “None of us would have dreamed of coming with this army if we’d known there’d be trouble.”

“I’m used to trouble,” James said.

“We wouldn’t know what to do if we couldn’t be in trouble,” Phoebe said.

“You know what I mean,” I told them.

“From the way you talk about us going back,” James remarked, “you must think we’re a couple of rats from the Fourth Division.”

“No,” I said, taken aback by James’s newly found independence and willingness to use his tongue. “No, no! No, no, no!”

“I’ve got the flux,” James said. “My stomach’s ached me for two days, but even so I can march better than most of these soldiers. There ain’t none of ’em passed me. I’m as good as any of ’em. There ain’t any of ’em that’ll do better, not while I stay alive.”

“Good!” I said, wishing I’d never touched the subject, and earnestly desiring to speak of other things, but unable to think of anything.

“If there ain’t food,” said James with an air of thoughtful meditation that made his face almost beautiful, “I can eat dandelions, or pine cones, maybe; maybe leaves.”

Phoebe slipped another slice of pork into James’s mouth, jeering at me with her eyes; so I left them hurriedly, swearing I would interest myself no more in the affairs of so unaccountable a female as Phoebe Dunn.

The colonel stayed at Norridgewock for seven days—seven dreary days of rain and cold; of whistling winds and brown leaves that whirled out of a leaden sky, smelling of sadness and the dying year—seven days of driving each division at top speed in the repairing of its bateaux; in the sorting and repacking of its diminished provisions; in the dreadful mile-long carry up the rocky sides of Norridgewock Falls.

Not until late on the seventh of October did Colonel Enos’s division get the last of its baggage across the carry. All his men were grumbling bitterly because they were more heavily burdened than the other divisions. I looked for Treeworgy and found him carrying loads as weighty as any man; albeit with a face so gray and dolorous that if I had been forced to see it often by my side I would have sickened with sympathetic misery.

I have often wondered what evil of Nature is the most unsupportable. There are times when I think heat is the worst; times when I’m sure there is nothing so bad as bitter cold. But oftenest I have been led to feel that long-continued rain is the foulest of all, with its gloom and discomfort, the trees and rocks and houses weeping and weeping until every man’s spirits are lowered in fellow feeling: the earth a morass that plucks at the feet; the bodies of men and animals steaming and reeking with the chilly damp from which there’s no escape.

It rained hard the day we wished to leave Norridgewock, which was the eighth of October. We could get no foothold in the mud of the steep carry, and feared to burst our canoes and supplies by falling with them. We waited until the ninth, hoping for a let-up; but there was more rain, so the colonel decided we must have a shot at it. This we did, coming through safely, and so set off after the army.

If all our journey could have been through country as rich as that between Norridgewock and Carritunk Falls, and over water no more violent, we might have made a picnicking party of it, regardless of the rain. The stream was full of trouts, which we caught by thousands. There were grassy islands in the river; and the banks were fertile and sloping, cut with the indentations called logans on the Kennebec. Above the logans were stands of oak and maple, elm, beech and ash, as well as pines and hemlocks; so the army struck up on the slope to avoid the logans and marched through this unspoiled forest, free of rocks and tangled undergrowth.

We camped on a high island covered, like all this section of the Kennebec, with a blue joint grass that grows six feet tall. Out of this we made soft beds. We caught trouts and dried ourselves by driftwood fires, saying to ourselves that marching through the wilderness wasn’t bad, once we were hardened to it.

We have days, on the coast of New England, that are beautiful and cloudless, with scarce enough wind to flutter a poplar leaf. Folk of small experience are ravished by them; but those whose daily habits are governed by the weather know they’re weather-breeders, forerunners of storms, though we find difficulty in explaining how a weather-breeder can be distinguished from a fine day, and usually do so by saying it’s too good. If from Arundel we can see the White Hills, eighty miles away, it’s a weather-breeder.

When we woke to a bitter dawn, stumbled around Carritunk Falls and embarked on a river shallower and more rock-strewn than any portion we had yet found, it came to us that the easy journeying of the preceding day had been a weather-breeder: a period of unnatural calm before a tempest.

We found ourselves among mountains capped with snow, overbearing country, with cold gray clouds pressed tight against the hilltops. The water was so shoal that bateaumen dragged their clumsy craft, which is hard on the stomach muscles. It is equally hard on bateaux; for after one of those poorly built things is banged on a rock a hundred times, and wrenched across ledges, and jerked a dozen miles over the gravel beds of the upper Kennebec, it becomes as porous as my mother’s nutmeg grater. Not even canoes could be driven through the shoalest spots; so we were perpetually in and out of the icy water, the colonel and Oswald included. By dusk we kindled our fires with no further remarks concerning the pleasurable features of wilderness travel.

I know that I, for one, took a deal of joy in the sight of Sugar Loaf Mountain dead ahead the next morning, after we had fought the current less than three hours; for the Sugar Loaf is the landmark of the Great Carrying Place.

All along the westerly side of the river were the bateaux of the first three divisions, piled in tiers and sticking out of the brush, and their baggage and provisions, and fires for the cooking of the trouts that hung by forked twigs from trees and bushes, so that a hungry man needed only to help himself. It was noisy, what with the unloading of bateaux and the shouts of those whose craft had been crowded into undesirable positions by new arrivals, and the curses of those who found their provisions spoiled by the water.

Colonel Greene and Captain Morgan came down to the shore and beckoned the colonel to a landing place. Behind them stood Lieutenant Church, gloomy and morose, waiting to submit his report. I looked for Cap Huff, knowing he had accompanied Church, but I could see nothing for the arm-waving of a gaunt, bearded man who stood beside the lieutenant, both hands full of trouts. When this tall, pale man bawled at me in evident irritation, I looked at him more carefully. It was Cap Huff, wasted away almost to a shadow, though to a person who had never seen him before he would still look as large as two ordinary men.

“Come ashore!” he bawled, wiping trout from his beard. “There’s some beautiful walks around here!”