Arundel (42 page)

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!”

XX

A
T ITS
upper end the Kennebec holds to the Northern wilderness by two tails, one a short, false tail bearing off to the northeast and losing itself in Moosehead Lake; the other a healthy, main tail branching off to the west, contorting itself among cold hills and mountains with its tip pressed tight into the great rock barrier of the Height of Land. This tip is a chain of ponds: irregular, close-packed ponds, strung on the nethermost end of the coiled, undulating river like the rattles on Manitou Kinnibec.

Some, who know the river well, speak of this true tail as the West Branch, and of the shorter one as the East Branch. Others, because its appearance differs from the rest of the Kennebec, as the tail of a serpent grows darker and loses its markings, have given it a name of its own. They call it Dead River because of the slowness of its current. This name has stuck to the West Branch, and so I shall call it, though it is truly the Kennebec.

For a river supposed to be dead, this west branch behaves perversely. It wriggles along smoothly until another sixteen miles of wriggling would bring it into its companion stream; then it rears backward, twisting as though in agony. After twenty miles of tumbling northward over ledges, no more dead than a bobcat after a rabbit, it swings to the east for another twenty miles, and is thenceforth known as the Kennebec.

Always, since there have been red men or white to follow these highways of the wilderness, travelers to and from the trail over the Height of Land have shunned the northwestward leap of Dead River, and carried their canoes straight across the Great Carrying Place from the Kennebec to the point where Dead River turns to the north. In the carrying they are helped by three ponds that lie between the two streams; so that those who travel light, with small packs and bark canoes readily borne by one man, moving softly and taking fish and game for food, find little to discommode them.

Yet there was something about the looks of Cap Huff that spoke ill for the carry, which Church’s party had been surveying, nor did his appearance improve on closer examination. His hunting shirt was ripped, his breeches torn, and his moccasins roughly bound with strips of moose hide. He led me to a fire, where he skewered a trout and set it to broil. He stared at me out of round goggle eyes and passed the back of his hand across his brow, ejaculating, “Whew!”

“What’s the trouble?”

“Everything!”

“Do you mean there’s something wrong with Church? Or was
it
the traveling that was bad? Or the food?”

“Food!” Cap said hoarsely, snatching his trout from the fire and biting at it, but replacing it when he found it still raw. “Food! There wasn’t any! Not enough to call food, that is. Just a little here and a little there.”

“Didn’t
anybody
have food?”

“Of course not,” Cap said. “If anyone had, I’d ’a’ got it.”

“What became of it? You had plenty when you left.”

“We
thought
we did,” Cap said, “but it disappeared like smoke. And the damned beef was sour. The bread got wet, too.” He looked at me suspiciously. “Have you been getting rain?”

“All there was.”

He nodded, relieved. “We got so much I was afraid there wouldn’t be any left for the rest of you. It got into our bread and bust the barrel.” He sampled his trout again; then looked up at the wisps of gray cloud caught on the hilltops across the river. “It’s about rained out, ain’t it? It’s got to stop, ain’t it?”

I said I didn’t know: the summer had been dry, and nobody could tell what might happen in the way of weather in this Northern country. Although the scar on my forehead throbbed each day, I couldn’t tell whether the throbbing was a sign of worse weather to come, or the result of wet clothes and persistent labors.

“Did you see Natanis?” I asked.

“We didn’t see nobody! We didn’t hear nuthin! There hadn’t never been no-one where we went, and we went everywhere. We clumb up on every rock and smelled it, and we jumped into every bog to see how deep it was, and we paddled around every lake and into every brook and tasted it; and if we’d had a couple more days we’d have dumb every tree small enough to get our arms or legs around, or hang onto with our teeth. Between times we’d walk five miles and measure everything. I tell you, Stevie, this man Church is terrible! If Arnold told him to survey the Atlantic Ocean he’d swim over every inch; and if I was with him he’d make me dive down and walk around the bottom like a damned ousel!”

“Didn’t you hear anything of Natanis?” I asked.

“Listen, Stevie,” he said, gnawing his trout as one eats an ear of corn, “who do you think would tell us about Natanis? The squirrels? Maybe Steele’s men found out something. They had orders to kill him.”

“Kill? Orders to kill Natanis?” My brain turned porridge-like. “Why, you’re crazy!”

Cap eyed me coldly. “I s’pose so! I s’pose we’re all crazy but you! Listen: it was Steele told me about Natanis. Steele said the colonel told him Natanis was a spy—a dangerous one—and gave orders to shoot him on sight.”

Cap tossed the cleaned backbone of his trout on the fire and skewered another. “What I want to do now,” he said, while I wondered helplessly where Arnold had got his information, “what I want to do now is get away from this man Church and pick up a nice easy job lugging a bateau.”

Cap’s desires had no interest for me. I forgot him, and tried to think what to do about Natanis.

Lieutenant Church came to stand dejectedly beside our fire. He stared gloomily at Cap. “Getting rested up?”

“Hell,” Cap said, “it’s going to take me the rest of my life to get rested up and et up.”

Church winked at me sadly. “Good traveler, Cap is. Couldn’t lose him in the woods.”

“Good reason,” Cap said bitterly. “If you’d lost me, I’d never et again.”

“Now, now!” the lieutenant said, “you’d been all right if you hadn’t found that salt codfish.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“Why,” Church said, “Cap came across a salt codfish lying around in one of the canoes, along about two o’clock one morning. Not wanting to annoy any of the rest of us at that late hour by trying to find out who owned it, he et it all.”

“I saved the rest of you a lot of grief,” Cap said.

“Yes,” Church admitted. “We happened to be on Middle Carry Pond that night, the water all mud and bugs and smell. After Cap et the fish he near drank the pond dry. It kind of weakened him.”

“It kind of ruined me,” Cap said.

“Well,” the lieutenant said, “we’re starting for Dead River right now, Cap, so leave that trout for Nason and come ahead.”

Cap immediately handed it to me, tightened his belt, rubbed his face with his hands, which had become almost bony, and set off after Church without a word.

When I went back to the colonel’s tent, pitched on the rising ground north of the brook that runs in at the start of the Great Carrying Place, I found him busy writing dispatches, keeping an eye meanwhile on the activities of the army, and sending messengers running to his captains with orders or information.

Never have I seen such a man, at one moment occupying himself with the smallest detail having to do with the least of his men, and at another moment disregarding all details and bidding everyone else do the same for the sake of getting on. I’ve seen him, after a day of forcing his way through bogs and underbrush, when all of us were drenched with perspiration and weary enough to fall asleep with our mouths full of food—at such times I’ve seen him sit for two hours over his dispatch case, writing letter after letter as though fresh from a restful evening at an inn.

“Go over the carry,” he said, smiling that queer smile of his that lengthened and lightened his round swarthy face. “You’ll have to make two trips to get your own load over. Maybe more. I’ll camp to-night on the far side of the first pond, but you go right ahead and wait for me at the brook that runs into Dead River.” He picked up a paper.

“Here: Church says the trail to the first pond is three miles and a quarter, a bad road; then half a mile to the second pond, a rough road; then near a mile and a half to the third pond, terrible going; and finally three miles to Bog Brook, the last mile of the three a devil, muck halfway up your legs.”

He waved his pen at me and went back to his writing. Hobomok and I unloaded our canoe, made the load into packs, stored a part with the baggage dump of Captain Goodrich’s company, shouldered all we could handle, and fell into line with those who were crossing the carry.

Because of the difficulty of the route, each man took as much on his back as he could manage and toted it to the first pond, returning until all the stores for which he was responsible had been transported. Then the bateaux were carried to the first pond, loaded and rowed across, and unloaded again; and once more the men shouldered their clumsy freights. At first it seemed to me that the worst of all burdens was a barrel of salt pork, because of its shape, or a barrel of flour; but in the end all loads came to seem the same. Before we were through with the Great Carrying Place, the backs of all of us were bent from the weights we had borne, and some swore they’d never be straight again unless hung up by the hands for a week, with a bag of bullets tied to each foot.

For all of Cap Huff’s complaints about his journey with Lieutenant Church, I doubt that either of them had properly appreciated the true nature of the road over which our bateaumen passed. Church had traveled light, before the axemen of the first division had widened the path by felling trees and leaving multitudes of three-foot stumps. If he had traveled as the army did, he would never have been content to call these roads merely bad, or very bad. Yet, if he had described them properly, he would have been court-martialed for using language.

Four hundred pounds, a bateau weighed—a grievous burden for the stoutest shoulders. The first carry was along a mountainside for three and a quarter miles. If we had been cumbered with nothing more than muskets and a few ducks, the three miles would have seemed long. Laden as we were, they seemed endless. Most of us stripped off our shirts and coats, rolling them into pads and placing them on our shoulders so the weight would fall on them. Nor was it the weight alone that bothered us. The rains had made the footing insecure, and there were spots where a man plunged his leg knee-deep in a mud hole. He’d fall; the bateau would slip, smashing against one of the countless stumps. Sooner or later every man in every bateau crew drove his shin against a stump and fell, the bateau clattered down on him, and the other three carriers went down in the crash.

By the grace of God we ate well on this carry. The first pond was alive with salmon trout, pink-fleshed and delicious, so eager for food that they came into shallow water to take a hook, four and five at a time struggling for the bait.