Arundel (40 page)

On the next day, Wednesday, the third division went on its way, Captain Dearborn’s company, Captain Ward’s company, Captain Hanchet’s company, and Captain Goodrich’s company, all of them led by Major Meigs, whose first name was Return, so that he was scurrilously known as Back-up by the men of his division, and it was the fashion among the other divisions to shout, “Whoa! Whoa!” at them. His own men, indeed, were given to shouting, “Whoa! Whoa!” at each other. Immediately on doing so they would pole their bateaux vigorously, being men from Maine and Northern New England, skillful with setting-poles.

The river looked to be filled with the bateaux of this division, sixty-four of them, each one loaded more heavily than Morgan’s or Greene’s. My heart misgave me as I watched James Dunn and Phoebe marching off abreast of the bateau poled by Jethro Fish and Asa Hutchins, Asa bawling, “Whoa! Whoa!” at the top of his lungs. Phoebe looked sadly small, marching thin and straight in her buckskin jerkin and blue handkerchief behind the hulking James, an extra pair of moccasins dangling at her waist. She turned and waved to me, then vanished under the flaming leaves of a giant maple. I wondered what in God’s name I could say to my mother if I had to come home without her.

And so we knuckled to the getting up of Colonel Enos’s division, the fourth and last, heaviest laden of them all, since the carrying places would be cleared for them, and huts built, and camping places selected. All that day we worked like slaves, and the next morning, bringing bateaux and tents and kegs of nails and pitch; barrels of bread and pork and peas; bags of flints and salt and meal, and a whole kit and boiling of material. Still there were bateaux unfinished and supplies unassembled; and Enos was puttering about at Colburn’s like an old woman or a British general.

Thursday passed, with Arnold sending messenger after messenger to Enos, his face black and lumpy, as though walnuts had been pushed under his skin, and gnawing at his nails until they were chewed straight across the ends of his fingers. He was pleasant enough to the rest of us, holding his turmoil within himself. When he told me to go down and tell them for God’s sake to hurry, he said it pleasantly and calmly, with only a little twitching at the corners of his mouth to show his eagerness to be off.

Even on the next morning, a damnable Friday again, though I have no sympathy with folk who attach an evil influence to this day, there were only two of Enos’s companies up—Captain McCobb’s and Captain Scott’s—while Enos and the commissary and Captain Williams’s company and Reuben Colburn’s company of carpenters were still down at the shipyard gathering up their odds and ends. At ten o’clock Arnold’s adjutant, Captain Oswald, came jumping down the path from Captain Howard’s house and ordered McCobb and Scott to send off their companies. “Let Enos and the rest follow when he can,” I heard him say.

He turned to me, grinning like a boy who has heard good news. “Get your canoe! We’re leaving for Quebec in an hour!”

Hobomok brought me up to Howard’s with our packs, our meal tied into bladders, so no water could hurt it, and over our packs a bearskin. Arnold’s long canoe was there, loaded, with Indians to paddle, and places for Arnold and Oswald. I asked Hobomok who the Indians might be.

“Eneas and Sabatis,” Hobomok said.

I only half heard him, for Arnold came plunging down the bank, a yellow hunting shirt over his uniform. He turned a cartwheel on one hand, so that there was no military pomp about him.

“Keep close behind,” he called to me. “I’m using you to carry dispatches.”

In a moment the canoe was off, bouncing across the quick water toward the converging walls of red maples as though shooting into a funnel of flame.

XIX

T
O 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.