THE OSPREY’S LITTLE BOAT HAD to make three trips to ferry their party and its supplies to the north shore of the bay the natives called Massaquoit. Rufus, Sinclair, and the crew seemed forlorn to see their new friends leave. Rufus leaned closer to whisper in Duncan’s ear.
“Yes, Rufus,” Duncan replied, trying to match the solemnity of the request, “if the beast of Champlain ever approaches you, you may assure it you are a friend of mine.” He hesitated, then added, “But never again call him the beast. Call him the keeper of the lake.” Rufus pumped his head and nodded energetically.
“I’d gladly take such a maelstrom to hear ye play the pipes, McCallum,” the mate from Caithness declared with a wide grin. “I’ll be hearing those echoes for months.” Sinclair extended his hand. “Fare thee well, lad. Try to keep a step ahead of the king’s rope.”
They ran hard, at the woodsman’s pace, letting Noah lead them along moose trails at the edge of the great bog, sometimes taking turns carrying Will on their backs. The sun had set, the light of day nearly extinguished before they finally collapsed in a grove of hemlocks. As Duncan sat against a thick trunk, sapped of energy, he marveled at the energy of the two old tribesman as they collected wood and lit a fire. Noah and Conawago had grown much closer since Ticonderoga, and sometimes it seemed to him that they shared great secrets, like two old wizards who watched the world from afar. His admiration for them, however, was marred by an increasing sense that both men had begun to devalue their long, rich lives, that they were becoming resigned to finishing their days without fulfilling their lives. He saw Woolford studying them as well and realized that his friend shared the same worry. They had both seen it happen to too many tribal elders, had seen the light gradually fade from their eyes. A pain rose in his chest to think of it. For reasons he knew he could not put into words, he suspected that of all the people he had ever known, these two lives might be the most valuable of all. He despaired over it, not just because he felt powerless to change the fate of the old tribesmen, but also because in this, the most vulnerable of times, he had dragged them into the treachery that had stalked him from Boston.
They ate their meal of corn mush and ham with little conversation, for everyone in their party was exhausted, and they had to wake Will, who had collapsed onto Molly, to force him to eat. Munro insisted on keeping watch, and Duncan volunteered to relieve him in two hours.
He woke abruptly, jabbed by some inner alarm. Sitting upright in the darkness, he surveyed their camp. The fire had ebbed to glowing embers. Will and Molly lay curled up together beside it, with Hayes lying an arm’s length away. There was no sound but that of the water in the nearby creek and the chatter of night insects. Duncan could smell tobacco mixed with the sharp, sweet scent of spicebush and sassafras. It was a mixture Conawago used at council fires.
Duncan followed the scent to a ledge that opened onto a long view of rolling hills glowing under a brilliant moon. The two old tribesmen were on the ledge, nursing long-stemmed clay pipes. As Duncan approached, they made room for him, forming a small half circle, in the center of which more tobacco smoldered, stacked over coals brought from the campfire. The spiraling smoke was an invitation to the spirits.
As was the custom in councils, Duncan would not speak until he was asked to do so. He watched the silvery thread rise to the stars. A barred owl called in the distance, answered by one in the trees below them. Noah began a rhythmic chant, so low that Duncan could not understand the words, if indeed there were words. Conawago did not join in, only watched the Abenaki with what seemed a worried curiosity; then he finally nodded and shifted his gaze to the immense sweep of country before them, puffing on his pipe.
Gradually Duncan comprehended that Noah was speaking to the gods of his people. He was an Abenaki medicine man, a sachem, and he wanted them to know that he was returning from his long self-exile, if they would permit it. How long had it been, Duncan wondered. Twenty years? Thirty? Even more? Would his tribe welcome him? Would they shun him? Would any still know him?
Stars had shifted in the sky before Noah finally stopped. He renewed the tobacco in his pipe, relit it, and handed it to Duncan. The Abenaki elder waited for Duncan to take several puffs before he spoke. “You do not know the place you seek, McCallum.”
Duncan was not sure how to answer. “All I know is a map in a Bible,” he offered, and saw the slight uplift of Noah’s lips.
“The St. Francis I knew was like an oasis,” Noah recalled. “A sanctuary town where the living came easy. Always fish in the river, always venison in the forest. But that was a long time ago. Now many have moved away to the far western country, more going every few months, I hear. It’s different, has been different for many years because of the wars. It’s a place divided—between those who yearn for the peaceful days and those who stand with the war chiefs, with the Jesuits in between.”
“Did you leave as a boy?” Duncan asked.
Noah looked out over the landscape for several breaths before answering. “I was the son of a great chieftain who wore the feathered robe of our ancestors and kept our people proud to be Abenaki, not because we were feared warriors, but because we were a noble tribe. I was young and strong, and my parents had accepted that I should be a war chief in my early years, as a way of learning the responsibilities of the feathered robe. I was on a raid in the eastern lands that you call Maine. One day the sun suddenly went black. It lasted only minutes, but we were terrified. The Jesuit with us explained that it was an eclipse. No one was interested except me, the others just said the spirits were telling the English to go home, but the priest used round stones to show me what had happened with the earth and the moon. I thought he must be the wisest man in all the world, and after that I studied in his classroom whenever I could. The priests sent me to Quebec to study, though I returned every few months to St. Francis.
“After two years they insisted that I go to France, even Rome, to learn more. I was so intoxicated with the learning that of course I went. Two years became four years, then seven. By the time I sailed back up the St. Lawrence, all of my family had died of fever. My teachers consoled me by putting the black robe of a monk on me and sending me to the western lands, where we built missions, even traveling down to the Mississippi River settlements of the Acadians who had been evicted from Nova Scotia. But I kept asking myself why I was helping other people when the tribesmen of the north needed so much help. And I began to perceive the intolerance of the priests, who thought that gods spoke only to Christians. One day I went to get firewood, and I never went back. I just walked. For over a year I walked.” The old Abenaki’s voice faded away, and he seemed to have drifted into memories of those long-ago years. “Eventually I found an aged woman of the tribes who was living alone in a cave, one of the wise ones who knew the old ways. I stayed with her for a few years, until she died, and then I found Reverend Wheelock and Occom. They gave me a place where I could still learn about the spirits but keep my own counsel.”
Duncan looked at Conawago, who nursed his pipe and watched the horizon. The tale perhaps too painfully reflected Conawago’s own life.
Noah looked up and spread his arms. “Here is Totokanay!” he shouted to the stars.
A chill ran down Duncan’s spine. The man he had known as Noah had called in the spirits and was revealing himself after so many years of wearing another face. It was a solemn moment, a moment when hard and terrible truths might be revealed. The Abenaki elder would likely not want Duncan to use his tribal name, but he had decided to share this deep, vital secret.
Totokanay turned so that he faced Conawago and Duncan across the little smoldering pile. “There is death ahead,” he declared.
“There is a reckoning ahead,” Duncan replied.
“You don’t understand the place you go to.”
“I don’t understand the place I have been.”
“St. Francis is a place of old hatreds, old faiths, old hunts.”
Duncan hesitated over the Abenaki’s choice of words. “Old hunts?”
“Warriors who hate all English, who once would bring back captives so women and children could kill them slowly with sharp sticks and hot coals. And another kind of warrior, who hates the French king. St. Francis is as much a Jesuit town as an Abenaki one. A Jesuit hermitage, in a way. When the French King Louis outlawed them, several more came to evade his long arm. Montreal and St. Francis have become havens for broken priests.”
“The Jesuits,” Duncan repeated. “You said Jesuits were with you on that raid in Maine many years ago. Why?”
“The raids were their idea. My people were growing weary of war, but some—not all—of the Jesuits kept the bloodlust alive.”
Duncan weighed the words in silence. “Tell me something. Did the Jesuits befriend Major Rogers?”
“They were sworn enemies in the last war, but today—” The Abenaki shrugged. “Call them allies. There was too much bad blood between the militant Jesuits and Rogers for them to reconcile, but there is another Jesuit at St. Francis whom Rogers has known for years.”
“You mean Father LaBrosse?”
It did not seem that Totokanay had heard him. The Abenaki watched the glowing twists of smoke that connected them to the spirits. “They are all beginning to understand something in St. Francis. It makes them very dangerous.”
“Understand what, exactly?” Duncan asked.
The old Abenaki looked at Conawago before replying. His voice cracked when he finally spoke. “There are no clear words for it. How does an animal feel when it is caught in a trap and bleeding to death, knowing it can do nothing to change its fate? They have all seen that they are in their ending times.”
The words lingered in the silence. A spark of light shot across the sky and died. The owl called but had no answer.
This was the world the two old men lived in, a world in which their bloodlines and their rich, centuries-old tribal cultures were being extinguished. What made it acutely painful for Conawago and Totokanay, Duncan realized, was that they now understood that, having been taken away by Europeans for education and conversion, they had become unintended agents of the forces that crushed their people. They had thought to help their tribes with their knowledge, becoming bridges between cultures, but all their training had done was make them more aware of the slow, grinding annihilation of all they held dear. For decades they had borne witness to the inexorable destruction of all they and their forebears had been, knowing they could not change it.
Duncan felt small, inadequate, like an intruder at the death of someone else’s loved one. “They will be desperate there,” he said at last.
“You understand nothing,” came Conawago’s voice, surprisingly impatient. “You do not understand your part, Duncan, because, like so many others, you do not grasp the stage you perform on.” For a moment, apology lingered in the old man’s eyes. It wasn’t like him to speak so harshly to Duncan. He dropped more of his fragrant tobacco onto the smoldering mound. “Jiyathontek,” he whispered to the heavens before turning back to Duncan. “We are lost if we don’t recognize that everyone in this drama is in their ending times. All of us here. You try to convince yourself that you are different from us, but you are not. The life of your Highland tribe is gone, as is that of the Nipmuc and the Abenaki, and soon the Iroquois. But it doesn’t stop there. The Jesuits have glimpsed their ending. They may be desperate, but they have more power than people think.”
“Only the kings survive,” Duncan said after listening to the owl again.
“No. You are wrong,” his old friend replied. “There is an ending time for them too. King George has America. King Louis thinks he can get much of it back. But they don’t know the people who have taken root here. Those people are beginning to grasp the truth that the tribes have always known. Nothing important in life has ever been granted by a king.”
Conawago shifted his gaze back over the silver-gilded mountains. Minutes passed before he spoke again, in a slow, reverent voice. “There is no land like this land,” declared the old Nipmuc, who had seen more of the world than anyone Duncan knew. “There is no freedom like this freedom.”