Arundel (54 page)

“This is the wrong way for the men,” I said. “They’ll be tangled in ponds and swamps if they follow the stream. They ought to go back on the high land.”

Smith blinked. “Who says so?”

“Those that know the country. The Indians say so.”

He seemed to ponder my statement. “Does Arnold know it?”

“Yes, He wants you to go by way of the high land.”

“Did you come from him?”

“Yes. I was with him last night.”

“Didn’t he give you any written orders for us?”

“No. He was in too much of a hurry.”

“Took you kind of a long time to get here, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, “I got lost.”

“Oh, you got lost! How’d you get here?”

“In a canoe.”

“Where is it?”

“Down the stream a piece.”

“Didn’t come alone, did you?”

“No. I came with an Indian.”

“Where is he?”

“Why,” I said, wishing I was a better liar and had never answered any of his questions, “he went back into the woods to get food.”

“It don’t sound reasonable. This ain’t the time to go hunting! How’d he happen to get lost if all the Indians know this country so well?” “I don’t know. Those things happen.”

“If they happen to me,” he said, “somebody finds a dead Indian. Did you see Dearborn?”

“Yes. That is, I know he went down, but I didn’t have a chance to speak to him.”

“Too busy, I suppose. You didn’t happen to see Goodrich, did you?”

“No.”

“He went down a little ahead of us. I suppose that was while you were lost.”

“Look here,” I said, “your men’ll walk into bogs and have a hell of a time! Take my word for it, will you, and get them around by the high land, and get Goodrich and Dearborn back as well?”

Smith took a paper from his coat and unfolded it. “You say there’s ponds between here and Lake Megantic.”

“Yes, and rivers.”

“I suppose you know this army is going by Montresor’s map?”

“Yes, I know it.”

“Well, there’s no ponds or bogs or rivers on Montresor’s map. I’ve got a copy here. This river we’re on runs into Lake Megantic, clear and clean, according to my map.”

“The map’s wrong.”

“It’s been right so far. If Arnold got through this way, I can get through. If you want to know what I think—”

He hesitated, watching me, then pushed his map back into his pocket and buttoned his coat. “Get on!” he shouted to his bateaumen. “We can’t hang around here all day!”

I hurried to Natanis and we went downstream at a trot. “We’ve got to go on,” I said. “We’ve got to look for Goodrich’s company. They’re my people. They’ll listen to me. I wouldn’t like to see them come to any harm if we can prevent it.”

“We’ll find them, Steven.”

“We’d better get to that canoe before Smith’s bateau gets there, too,” I told him. “He saw there was something queer about my story. He might take a notion to have his men pop at us. They don’t miss often.”

“There’s no danger,” Natanis said. “He must follow the curves of the stream. We can go straight.”

There was neither sight nor sound of Smith or his men when we came to the cedar thicket where we had laid up the canoe. We launched it and drove rapidly toward the lake. The sky was overcast and there was a strong smell of snow, so we knew dusk would come early.

“They followed the river,” Natanis said. “I know where to find them, but I’m not eager to be with them. This night will be cold.”

We came to a sluggish stream that ran out of our course at right angles. “Now you see how it is,” said Natanis. “Straight ahead is Megantic, maybe a mile away. This stream that runs out at right angles is a false mouth. Your friends crossed it, I think. We’ll look for their tracks to make sure. Everywhere through here are swamps and bogs. If they crossed the false mouth and waded through the swamps to the lake, they’d turn to the right to go along the shore, and then come to another false mouth, very deep. Thus they’d be in a pocket, unable to go forward, or to the right or to the left: able only to wander in the swamp.”

He drove the canoe into the slow water of the false mouth, skirting the shore. I saw broken branches, mud-swirls in the bog beyond the bank, a wisp of cloth caught on a jagged alder. We went ahead a mile, on a wide curve, then came to another fork, with another sluggish stream turning off to the left nearly at right angles.

“This,” said Natanis, swinging the canoe into it, “is the easterly wall of the pocket. Your friends are trapped here.”

We drifted slowly down this dark and dismal stream. The air was bitter cold. We felt snow-spit on our faces, flecks of chill wetness.

“Can we take them out?” I asked.

“If you think you must; but you know what happens when men climb into a canoe from a bog.”

It was true. Our canoe would split, eventually, and all of us be worse off than before.

“Find them first, then,” I said. “I’ll build a fire on a mound, so they can come to it. You can lie at the edge of the stream in the canoe, sleeping in it so we run no risk of losing it.”

Natanis stopped the canoe and we listened. The swamp seemed lifeless. There was no sound of any bird; no trickle of moving water, only the drip from my paddle, laid across the bow. At last, far away in the bog, a man shouted. Closer at hand a word was spoken: then I heard a slushing, sucking noise that I took to be men walking.

Natanis sought to force the canoe between the trees; but the thickness of the brush obliged
him to stop.
“There’s a mound ahead,” he said. “I can’t reach it. You must get out.”

I put my flint and steel and tinder in my cap, loosened my hatchet in my belt, and swung my pack onto my left shoulder, wriggling my toes regretfully in my dry, warm moccasins.

The water was up to my calves. There was a crispness to the moss that showed it to be needled with ice flakes. I could see the mound dimly, a small one with a few dwarf birches and pines, such as partridges love. When I stepped toward it, the bottom fell out of the marsh and I went in to my armpits. It was cold water: so cold I got my breath with difficulty.

“I’ll He behind the brush on the far bank of the stream,” Natanis said. His canoe rustled against a bush and vanished.

For the most part the swamp ranged from knee-deep to thigh-deep. There were gullies between the alder roots, under water, into which a walker, if careless, would sink to his waist.

It was bad, and a part of my mind turned to Phoebe, wondering how she had passed through this water. The other part was busy timing the movements of my feet to the whir and click of my mother’s spinning wheel; feel, feel, feel for the alder roots; feel, feel, feel; step! feel, feel, feel; step! I had no time to think of the ache in knees and ankles.

When I came to the mound, a patch of land no bigger than our gathering-room in Arundel, I blazed trees, marking the direction of Natanis and the river. Then I laid about with my hatchet, glad of the opportunity to warm myself, until the treelets were cleared and lopped into burnable lengths. This done, I kindled a fire, a high, flaring fire to attract the waders.

It was dark before the first of the company reached the mound. They came out of the water like wooden men.

At their head was a butcher from York with shiny red cheeks that looked dark blue in the firelight. “Where’s the bateau?” he asked huskily.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He stared into the fire as if drugged. The second man stood silent, contemplating a gash on his bare leg.

A third man came out, stiff-legged and grunting a little whenever he put foot to the ground, which I thought was natural since he had no shoes upon his feet. He pushed himself between the first two, who staggered as they shifted to left and right. Noah Cluff came into the firelight, one leg of his breeches flapping open where it had been torn from waist to knee. He looked at me as if we had parted ten minutes before: absent-mindedlike, and casual.

“Bring anything to eat?” he asked.

“No.”

“Where’s the bateau?”

“I don’t know. Haven’t you got anything to eat?”

He shook his head and moved around the others to stand in the warmth of the fire and stare into it.

“Where’s Phoebe?” I asked, seeing that Asa Hutchins had stumbled onto the mound, and remembering James Dunn and Phoebe always marched near these two.

Noah shook his head, seemingly unable to move his eyes from the fire.

Asa Hutchins coughed a racking, tearing cough that pitched him forward on his hands and knees. He crawled to a clear place near me.

“Where the hell did you come from?” he said; and added, without waiting for an answer: “Anything to eat?”

He seemed to need no answer; for when I was silent, he observed: “Figured there wouldn’t be.” He reached into his hat and took out a square of moose hide, an untanned piece. He examined his right shoe. I saw it had broken at the heel, so that with each step the whole lower part of the heel must have slipped from his foot. Shaking his head, he drew out his knife, cut a strip from the moose hide, wrapped it around a stick, and held it close to the fire.

A straggling line of men waded slowly out of the swamp and onto the mound. One of them fell and lay still. The others laughed. The man next to him plucked at his coat, and the fallen man rolled over and sat up, coughing weakly.

“Where’s Phoebe?” I asked Asa.

“Back there a piece,” he said, drawing the moose hide from the fire to sniff at it, and replacing it again. More men came up onto the mound and pushed close to the fire, all of them watching Asa with eyes that glittered in the firelight.

“Back where?” I asked.

There was a long wait before anyone spoke. Finally a musketman who wore no stockings roused himself sufficiently to answer. “Back near where Goodrich started from,” he said, never taking his eyes from Asa.

“Anything wrong with her?”

“Wet!” Asa said. Two or three men tittered dryly. Asa took the mooseskin from the fire and felt it with his teeth. Then he put it on to cook once more. Some of the men began to have paroxysms of shivering, throwing up their heads and shaking like kestrels balancing in a high wind.

“Everybody with hatchets go to chopping,” I said. “We need wood and you need warmth.” I loosened Noah Cluff’s hatchet in his belt and put it into his hands. “Try to remember where you saw Phoebe, will you? I’ll try to find her.”

“Where’s this place we’re in, Stevie?” Noah asked.

“Right on the edge of Megantic. There’s no cause to worry. We’ll all be picked up in the morning.”

“They’ll have to pry me up,” said one of the shiverers.

“What became of the bateau?” asked the butcher from York.

“It must have gone down Seven Mile Stream and across to the other shore of the lake,” I said. “What became of Goodrich?”

Asa sunk his teeth in the crisped mooseskin and tore off a little. “He was looking for a place to get across this river over here”—he pointed to what might have been east: looked bewildered: then swung his hand uncertainly toward the southwest—“and he walked and walked, up to his waist in water, backward and forward, until he got kind of sick.” After prolonged chewing, Asa swallowed with difficulty, and held the mooseskin to the fire once more.

“I never see nothing like it,” said the barefoot man.

“All our flour was in the bateau,” Asa said. “We got five pints apiece to last us to Quebec.”

“We have if we get it,” said the butcher from York.

“How far are we from Quebec, Stevie?” Asa asked. All the men turned their eyes on me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Not far.”

“You’re a liar,” said Asa. “It’s a hundred miles if it’s an inch.”

“Gosh!” Noah said. “We walked pretty near that far in the swamp this afternoon.”

“What became of Goodrich?” I asked again.

“When he couldn’t find a way across the river, so’s we could get out of the swamp,” Asa told me, “he took a file of men and waded out to a clump of bushes in the pond, thinking he could mebbe see somebody with a bateau and get ’em over here for us. Dearborn come along in a canoe and took him off, and I guess the men are still there—Whitten and Burbank and Stone and Nathaniel Lord and Merrill and Walt Adams and some others. He was figuring on coming back with the bateau.”

“Look here,” I said, “try to remember where you saw Phoebe. How’s it happen she stayed out there?”

“Dunn’s sick,” Noah Cluff said. “We waited for him two-three times. She wouldn’t leave him and we had to keep moving.”

“Couldn’t anyone carry him?”

“Some of us tried,” Noah said apologetically. “’Twasn’t no use. I guess we ain’t been getting enough to eat. It’s all we can do to lug our packs and ourselves.”

“Was she near the lake, or near the easterly river, or near the westerly river?”

The men looked helplessly at each other. I reminded the stockingless man that he had seen her near where Goodrich started. “Did you mean where he waded into the lake?”

“Yes,” said the stockingless man, “but I disremember which way that was.” He pointed, with no great certitude, away from the lake. Noah Cluff disagreed with him, pointing to the westward. Others had different ideas. I was glad I had blazed trees to tell me where the lake lay.