Arundel (57 page)

When we put the soldiers by the fire they became as though dead, seeming scarce to breathe for long periods.

Soon Paul himself came out of the dark, carrying two extra muskets and blankets. He reached at once for a piece of raw bear fat; then examined the two exhausted soldiers.

“This is bad business,” Paul said. “Three hundred of these men, maybe three hundred and fifty, went down into the swamps soon after daylight this morning. Ever since then they have followed the bogs and the arms of Maple Leaf Pond and Finger Lake, in and out and in and out, up to their knees in water when not up to their middles. I gave over following them for fear I might be lost myself and never come out.”

We waited for Paul to tell us the tale, knowing that if he had left the army it was for good reason, and not from timidity, for although I have heard Paul talk of his fear of this and that, I have never seen him feared of anything.

“Their guide,” Paul said, when he had spitted a piece of bear meat and hung it before the fire alongside ours, “is a bad one, and in a panic. He has reached a point where he dares not leave the watercourses, no matter which way they run.”

“Then he’ll follow watercourses in that swamp the rest of his life,” said Natanis pleasantly.

Paul cursed the guide in English; then took a huge bite from his bear meat, a bite big enough to feed my sister Cynthia for two whole meals.

“Here is what I did,” he told us. “I don’t know whether I did right, but it was as near right as I could do without going the entire length of the column to reach Colonel Greene and the guide, and being mistaken for a spy.”

He laughed testily. “It may be I could never have caught up with the head of the column. It was in a frenzy to get wherever it was going.” Again he swore in English. “Through those swamps and thickets, the worst traveling ever I saw, they marched not less than fifteen miles. They may have marched twenty!” He made a hissing sound. “Twenty miles! And all of them hungry and weak, and tripping at every step on the roots beneath the bogs!”

He chewed his bear meat. “They stopped for nothing after they’d been in the swamp three hours. If a man fell into a stream, or lagged from sickness, they left him and went on, hurrying, hurrying, fearing to lose their places in the line.”

He got up and looked at the two soldiers again, felt their chests and nodded encouragingly. “We found four men that had fallen out. One had collapsed in a stream. He was dead. Another had sat down to rest. I took him to dry land, but he died. These two”—he pointed to the soldiers—“could go no farther. One of them lay as he lies now. The other would walk a little and fall: walk a little more, then fall again. It seemed to me they might live after they had slept and eaten.”

“I think they can march to-morrow afternoon,” Natanis said, “if not given too much food.”

“When I saw how they would never leave the arms of Finger Lake,” Paul continued, “I came out of the swamp and went to the eastward until I reached this brook, lower down. Then I went back into the swamp and hunted a piece of high land, a sizeable piece. On it I laid sticks for a fire, close under a pine so the flames would set it alight. Also I made lines in the snow, pointing to the trail, and blazed trees with proper trail marks. Toward dusk I lit the fire and went away a little, to watch.

“In a short time I heard shoutings and splashings, after which some men, led by an officer with a large forehead, dragged themselves out of the swamp and up to the fire, all of them glad to be there. The officer was thin, with lips that purse up into a laugh, as if unwillingly.”

“Major Meigs,” I said.

Paul nodded. “I hope these men, finding my fire and seeing my signs, will know enough to trail me. If they do, Natanis can lead them around the eastern end of Finger Lake and down to Megantic before the sun is overhead to-morrow. If not, and if they spend two more days in those swamps, it will be as bad a thing as ever happened.”

He looked up at the sky and sniffed. “To-night will be cold. The swamps will freeze the thickness of my tongue—”

“Thick enough to walk on,” Natanis said.

Paul glowered at him. “Not thick enough for white men to walk on: only for Abenakis with light brains. The swamps will freeze, and if they wade through them for two more days they’ll die, all of them.”

“We’ll get them out of the swamp to-morrow,” Natanis said, “no matter what happens. It may be they’ll come up the brook in the morning, following Paul’s tracks. Paul has done well, and is a credit to the great Abenaki people.”

“Yes,” said Paul, “and I’ll be waiting to-morrow night to hear your jesting and your idle laughter after you’ve cut your shins on swamp ice for half a day.”

We were up at dawn, hoping for sight or sound of Greene’s men. We shook the two soldiers into consciousness and fed them strips of bear meat, small and thin. They fell asleep at once, wretched-looking men, heavily bearded, their clothes and shoes in shreds, and a powerful odor about them.

When we had waited another hour it was plain that the army had not followed Paul’s trail.

“I’ll go into the swamp,” Natanis said, “and see what has become of them.” He left us, traveling with no blanket or pack; and in less than two hours he returned.

“It’s all right,” he said, shouldering his pack and motioning for us to do likewise. “Only one company of men camped at Paul’s fire. The others made fires on unflooded land nearer Finger Lake. Therefore the one company went back and joined the others. The guide is still following the arms of Finger Lake, striving to get around it. I know where they must pass in three hours’ time, or maybe four.”

We waked the two soldiers and fed them once more, telling them to follow when they felt strong enough, and that they’d find more food hanging from a tree at the end of two miles. We gave them their blankets and muskets and went on.

In a short time we came to a brawling stream. “This,” Natanis said, “flows into the easterly end of Finger Lake, and the army must cross it eventually lower down. We’ll cross it here, where it’s small, continue down toward the fording place, and wait there for the army.”

The stream emerged from the rocky spurs of the Height of Land into a hideous flat country, tangled with alders and a hellish growth of shrubbery. Its width may have been four rods. There was ice against both banks, but the water flowed smoothly with nothing fearsome about it.

When we stood at what Natanis said was its first shallow place, and looked toward Finger Lake, which we could not see for the growth of brush, there was a tremendous stretch of swamp at our left. Through this swamp Greene and his men were still wading. On our right were the rough, broken-faced spurs of the Height of Land.

We held a council; and this was what we decided: When the army crossed the stream, it would continue over the rocky ridges beyond, because there was nothing else for it to do. Natanis, therefore, would cross two ridges and lie on the far slope, waiting for Greene and the guide to come up. With him would go Paul Higgins and myself, to lie hidden among the rocks and do what we could in case the guide, who had seen Natanis before, should attempt to shoot him. Hobomok, with the other Abenakis, would remain at the river; and when Jacataqua passed he would go to her and tell her to make her way up to the head of the line to tell Greene she had seen an Indian: one who would guide the army quick and straight to Lake Megantic. When this had been done Natanis would show himself. If for some reason it could not be done, Natanis said, he would speak to Greene at all hazards.

I wonder now, as I look back at it, that we should have troubled ourselves to use such care with men who were lost and starving and weak with the flux; but it may be I have forgotten the wariness that enters into a man when he has been accused of spying, and when scouts have been ordered to kill him, as in the case of Natanis. Nor did we have any faith in the guide Hull, whom we knew to be one of the worst, neither reliable nor inventive; and men of this sort are prone to sudden frights and to the reckless use of firearms.

So we climbed two ridges, bad ridges, rough and rock-strewn, and slippery with snow, and waited on the second, lying where we could look back into the deep depression between the two, a depression at whose bottom the snow had been melted by the wetness of the ground.

“In less than two hours’ time,” Natanis told us, “I can lead these men to the northwest a little, and then to the northeast and then to the southwest, and put them on the path that borders Lake Megantic. There they’ll find the tracks of those who went ahead.”

In time, far in the distance, we heard a faint, thin piping, a reedy chirping such as you may hear in the late summer in Arundel, if you lie in the tall grasses of the sand dunes and listen to insects going about their occasions. This, Paul said, was made by the army passing through the river.

It may be I shall come to be an old, old man; and my memory may slip from me as it does from some when they are ancient; but there are certain things that can never fade out of my mind. One of them is my recollection of the men who crawled slowly over the ridge across from us. It was not so much the leaders, Colonel Greene and the doctor of the army, young Senter, and the guide Isaac Hull, though they, God knows, were slow and fumbling in their movements, looking helplessly about and talking together, striving to see beyond the tangled shrubs and trees that surrounded them. It was the men who came after them that I can never forget: haggard, dirty, ragged men, slipping and tripping where no man should slip or trip, lifting their feet painfully and slowly as if their legs were shackled to the ground, crawling and groping down the rocky slope like helpless insects blinded by a sudden light.

We saw Jacataqua and her yellow-faced dog come over the ridge, sliding and running in the snow, and catch up with Greene. The. guide Hull sat down when she spoke, holding his head in his hands. Greene looked back up the slope, as did all the others. We could hear a murmuring from them, a babbling like the babbling of children.

Natanis came out from his hiding place and went lightly down the hill and up to Greene, who was looking for him to come from the rear. We could see Natanis smile and point; see Greene nod, he and Senter holding together for support; and beside them sat the guide Hull, his face still resting in his hands.

Led by Natanis the ragged column blundered onward. Our eyes clung, with a sort of sickness, to the miserable horde that crept among the boulders on the ridges and in the valley between: to men slowly coming to the top and falling together in a heap as they started to descend: to men standing stock still, wavering on their feet as they stared into the valley before them, as if calculating whether their strength would suffice for the descent, then moving downward, slipping, sliding, pitching head foremost into the snow, their muskets flying from their hands: to men moving to help them and falling on them in turn: to men dragging themselves upward by holding to bushes: to men losing their hold and rolling back to the bottom again, lying there motionless until a little of their strength came back: to men who had no eyes for those who had fallen from the line, but plodded on, stumbling, crawling, limping, their gaze fixed on space, brooding over God knows what: to hatless men: to men whose garments hung on them in rags: to men whose feet were bare and left blood spots on the snow.

Last of all came those who had fallen out, but had summoned another ounce of energy when the stillness of the forest had closed in on them, thin ghosts pitching and weaving along the trampled trail, dragging themselves on hands and knees when they fell, then getting to their feet once more: silent men: horrible men; but men whose faces showed no suffering and no terror; only the resigned detachment that comes, it seems to me, to all those whose marchings and whose fightings exceed the limits of their endurance.