Arundel (35 page)

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.

XVI

N
ATAWAMMET
and I left Paul at dawn, followed the winding sixteen-mile course of Cobosseecontee Stream and came out into the Kennebec at Gardinerstown, six miles below Fort Western.

On the Kennebec we found rafts of lumber moving down river toward Reuben Colburn’s shipyard, which was in a turmoil of shouting and pounding. The shore was covered with bateaux, acres of them, knee deep in shavings and smelling of fresh-worked pine. The place was alive with carpenters, swinging adzes and nailing pine boards to white oak ribs and bawling at each other to keep out of the way and pass the nails.

Of all rowing boats I know, I hold the Kennebec bateau in the lowest esteem, because of its weight and clumsiness. In Arundel we use a boat called a dory: a high flat-sided affair with a narrow bottom, clumsy-looking, but easy to row because of the small resistance to the water, and almost impossible to overturn, even by standing on the gunwale. The Kennebec bateau, which had its origin with the lumbermen of the lower Kennebec, is double the size of our dories, and somewhat the same shape, the bow pointed and overhanging, the stern flattened and less overhanging than the bow, but the sides built of overlapping boards, whereas the sides of a dory are smooth, the boards fitted tight together. To my mind, this overlapping of boards is a defect if there is to be rough going among shoals and reefs, since the boards catch easily against rocks, and there is more likelihood of leaks. It may be a good boat for lumbermen to use on the lower Kennebec, where tides are swift and rocks few; but on the upper Kennebec, where smooth water is unknown and quick movement essential to safety, I would as soon travel in a pine coffin.

Colburn was a chunky, quick man; intelligent, but overdesirous, I thought, of doing everything himself to make sure it was done properly. I had known others of a like temper, and it had seemed to me they courted trouble by thinking the things they could not do themselves would of necessity be done badly. Expecting bad results, they would select their agents carelessly; consequently their fears were frequently justified.

I was prepared to mislike Colburn as being responsible for Washington’s and Arnold’s fondness for bateaux; but I had wronged him.

When I said mildly that these craft were overly heavy, he kicked contemptuously at one of them.

“Green!” he said. “All green boards! Heavy as wet paper! No seasoned lumber this side of Falmouth!”

He added that time was too short to bring seasoned planks from Falmouth by schooner. “If there’s delay,” he said, as we walked toward his house, “let it be at the other end! Two hundred bateaux they ordered, and two hundred there’ll be when Arnold gets here.”

I said it seemed to me there might be worse delay if the green boards opened up in quick water.

“Mister,” he said, tapping my chest, “they want bateaux, and the only way we can give ’em bateaux is to build ’em out of green boards. What you got to say to that?”

I said he might give them canoes as well.

“Hah!” he said. “They want bateaux and I give ’em canoes! Then what happens if things go wrong? God ain’t to blame! The weather ain’t to blame! Reuben Colburn’s to blame! Just building boats is bad enough, mister. Will I get my money for ’em? God knows! I won’t if we don’t whip England! Sylvester Gardiner’s got more brains than I’ve got, and he’s sticking with England. Well, I believe in Washington and Arnold, mister, but I ain’t going to try to make ’em take things they don’t ask for!”

“What got them so excited over bateaux?”

He led me into the hall of his house, a spacious dwelling on a rise at the bend in the river. “Mister,” he said, “I wish I knew; but Washington and Arnold, they keep their own counsels.” He rummaged in a desk and produced a letter from Colonel Arnold.

S
IR
[it started off]: His excellency General Washington desires you will inform yourself how soon there can be procured or built at Kennebec two hundred light bateaux capable of carrying six or seven men each, with their provisions and baggage.

“You see,” Colburn said, “they had the idea already.”

I nodded, and noted, farther down in the letter, the order:

You will also get particular information from those people who have been at Quebec, of the difficulty attending an expedition that way, in particular the number and length of the carrying places, whether dry land, hills or swamp. Also the depth of water in the river at this season, whether an easy stream or rapid.

“Did you get the particular information?” I asked.

“I sent four men from above Fort Western. Conkey and Slike and two of their friends, with an Indian.”

“To go to Quebec?”

“No. To go to the Chaudière and back, and see the state of things. They ought to be back now.”

There was a receipt in his desk, signed Patrick Conkey, acknowledging

115 pound salt Pork, 106 pound Shipp Brad,
½
a Bushshall of Com, 6 Gallons Rum for Journey toward Quebec.

“Good men?” I asked.

“Good as any hereabouts,” he said indifferently.

“As good as Abenakis?” I asked in surprise.

“Well,” Colburn said, “they talk English better than Abenakis. Me, I like Abenakis, but you know how General Washington feels about Indians. We got to remember that if people ain’t accustomed to red men, they feel safer if their scouting’s done by white folks, even if it ain’t done so well.”

“I saw Paul Higgins,” I said. “He and his men say they won’t go with the army.”

Colburn nodded gravely. “What’s done’s done. I got eight rounded up to go along and paddle and carry messages.”

“This Conkey?” I asked. “How far can he travel on a gallon of rum?”

Colburn laughed. “These people up here have to have rum. They’ll go without corn and they’ll go without bread, if their money’s low; but you can’t make the price of rum too high for ’em.”

“Well,” I said, “they’re not much different down my way. What I’m wondering is how much Patrick Conkey and his friends could see or hear when they were loaded with rum.”

“There’ll be no trouble,” Colburn said reassuringly. “It’s a plain trail, sticking to streams and ponds all the way. An army wouldn’t scarcely need a guide.”

“Have you been over it recently?”

“No,” Colburn admitted. “I haven’t ever been over it, but I know about it from hearing people talk.”

“Did you ever talk to anyone that had crossed the Height of Land?”

“Come to think of it, I don’t know as I ever did.”

“No, nor I,” I told him, “only to one man when I was a boy. There’s no streams or ponds to follow on the Height of Land. Nobody goes near it unless he must. I’ll bet you a sable skin to a jack knife that Conkey sits down with his rum on this side of the Height of Land and never crosses it at all.”

Colburn shook his head. “You can’t get anything done nowadays unless you do it yourself. I’ve got to provide bateaux, and setting-poles for ’em, and buy sixty barrels of salt beef, and all the pork and flour on the river, and ride down to Falmouth to get the commissary that’s coming from headquarters to look after supplies, and God knows what all. There’s times when it seems as if they expected me to fight the whole damned war alone.”

“When are they expected?” I asked, thinking of Natanis, and in a turmoil inside for fear something might go wrong to keep me, at this late day, from reaching Mary. “If there’s time I might try the trip myself, with Natawammet, to see how it looks.”

“You can’t do it! They’ll be here any time—in three days, four days—a week anyway.”

Determined to have word of Natanis, Natawammet and I filled ourselves with cider and dumplings at Smith’s Tavern, above the shipyard, and set off upstream for Patrick Conkey’s cabin, ten miles beyond Fort Western.

By good fortune I found Conkey, dirty, unkempt, and newly returned from his scouting trip, seated on the ground outside his cabin, comfortably wriggling his bare toes in the afternoon sun and engaged in a spitting contest with his brother Michael and one of his scouting companions. In front of them, removed from the line of spitting, stood a gray stone jug. I gave them good-day and offered them my letter from Colonel Arnold. Conkey took it, looked at both sides with half-closed eyes and returned it without comment.

I asked if there had been changes in recent years on Dead River. Conkey asked who I might be. I said I was Steven Nason, as he had read in the letter. Conkey said, “I thought it was a map.”

After some meditation he said he had heard of me. He spat carefully, protecting his chin by a quick outward and upward motion of his lower lip, and his companions followed his example. Conkey out-spat them. I asked if he had crossed the Height of Land on this trip. He shook his head, tersely remarking, “Dangerous!”

From Conkey’s thick and fragmentary conversation I gathered he and his companions had carried from the Kennebec to Dead River and there encountered Natanis, who traveled with them for one day but would go no farther, though they offered him a dollar a day. Their suspicions were aroused by his refusal of such riches. The only explanation that could reach their rum-fuddled brains was that somebody had paid him more money to remain where he was. Since there could be no one but the English who would pay money for any such service, Conkey had accused him of being in the pay of the English. Conkey declared Natanis had confessed this to be true, and had threatened to carry word to the English if they attempted to force him to go farther. Because of this, he mumbled, they had proceeded a little along Dead River, then returned to the Kennebec and come home.