The Hollow Tree (9 page)

The bear looked up and saw her. It stopped scratching and ambled towards her. She backed away. Not George. George ran right up to the bear and rubbed himself against its legs.

“No, George! Oh no!” Phoebe cried. She closed her eyes. She couldn’t rescue him, she couldn’t run. She waited for his agonized scream. It didn’t come. Slowly she opened her eyes. The bear was standing still, and George was rolling around at its feet, ecstatically. Realization hit. “You’re not another bear,” she said. “I know you. We spent all that time in the tree together.” It occurred to her, then, that because this was the same bear and because it was young was no reason to ignore the fact that it was a bear, a bear that could be dangerous. Cautiously she began to back away again.

“Come on, George,” she whispered, “Come on,” but she didn’t wait for him. She turned around and began walking, very slowly at first, then faster and faster until she was almost
running. She heard grunting close behind her. She knew it was the bear. She stopped and turned. The bear stopped.

“Go away!” she gasped. She pointed back towards the pine tree with a shaking hand. The bear did not move.

“Please go away,” Phoebe pleaded. Still the bear did not move. He looked at her expectantly.

“Please. I don’t want you here. George,” Phoebe begged, “will you please tell the bear to go away?” Suddenly it occurred to her that she was asking a cat to talk to a bear because the bear wouldn’t pay any attention to her. Forgetting her fright and the need to be quiet and cautious in the forest, she laughed right out loud. It was the first time she had laughed, she realized, in a very long while.

At last she caught her breath. What did it matter if the bear wanted to follow along for a while. He did not seem to mean her harm and he was clearly company — if odd company — for George. Maybe he would scare off other big animals — and dangerous people, too. She decided, since they would be travelling together, she would have to give him a name. Because he made her think of an old woman in Orland Village, she called him Bartlett. “Mistress Bartlett always looks hopeful like you,” she told him, “and she’s bottom-heavy, too.”

And so the long, difficult journey was
resumed. Phoebe grew braver with every passing day. She no longer jumped with terror every time she heard the whirring of owls’ wings overhead or a partridge suddenly flew up in front of her. She walked carefully but briskly. There didn’t seem to be much point in being especially quiet, not with a blundering young bear at her side and a complaining cat at her heels. And George did complain. He demanded to be carried when he got tired and he yowled when they would not stop for him to drink, or to stalk prey.

They spent one day scrambling up the side of a mountain, then sliding down its steep, rocky slope on the other side, other days slogging through swamps in the rain. They crossed streams and they crossed meadows. The snow that had been on the ground when Phoebe had left Orland Village had melted in a few warm days, but it was growing colder again and she could see snow on the higher hills. The days were shorter. There was ice edging the ponds and streams. The fish swam deeper and were harder to catch. There were fewer and fewer ducks and geese flying south, and almost no leaves on the elm, oak, and maple trees. Only the golden tamaracks still brightened the pine and cedar swamps and forests. Sometimes, Phoebe walked all day with Katsi’tsiénhawe’s blanket around her against the wind and snow. And how glad
she was of it at night. So were George and Bartlett. They curled up beside her, near the fire, and would not be budged. Bartlett stank. Phoebe tried to keep a space between them, but every time she pushed him away, he rolled over to be beside her again. Wherever they slept — by streams, protected from the wind by rocks or little hills, in mountainside caves — they slept in a tight ball of warmth, until Phoebe got so used to Bartlett’s rough fur and rank bear smell she no longer minded either one.

Phoebe — and Bartlett — ate fish and what few huckleberries, blackberries, or raspberries could be found on bushes; they ate butternuts, hazelnuts, and hickory nuts from the ground under the trees, and whatever purslane, peppermint, chicory, or other edible plants had survived the frost in warm, sheltered places. George did his own hunting.

They saw no one. They followed the route Peter Sauk had laid out, keeping to the White River, then branching off to the southwest along the old trails by the brooks and smaller rivers through the deep valleys between the mountain ranges. Phoebe’s heart was full of gratitude to Peter for his careful map. She knew she could never, ever, have made her way through the dense forests and around these great mountains without it. Finally she reached the military road, a rough road but wide enough, not only for
marching soldiers but for wagons and carts. Carrying George much of the way, with Bartlett grunting and snuffling nervously beside her, Phoebe skirted the road and the settlements of Rutland, Pittsford, and Brandon but nearly went into Shoreham just because she so longed for the sight of another human being.

One cold evening spitting with the kind of thick, slushy rain that is almost snow, Phoebe camped early. For once she was planning to have a real supper. She had found a blackberry bush, hidden between a sumac and a blackthorn, amazingly untouched by birds or bears. She had gathered the berries quickly before Bartlett could eat them all, had held them in her tunic while she’d made a small leaf basket, then carried them in that.

Soon afterwards they had crossed a little stream. Phoebe had taken her vine and her hook and, at first try, caught a trout that was almost eight inches long. Holding it — and the berries — high over her head with one hand so that neither the cat nor the bear could get them, she was attempting to gather sticks for a fire with the other hand when Bartlett began to growl. She growled back at him. She had discovered that it always stopped him when she did that. She went on with her work. Then she heard voices approaching. She dropped the sticks. She dropped the fish. She dropped the berries.
She grabbed George and swung up in the nearest tree. Bartlett was right behind her.

Within minutes two men came into view. They had muskets over their shoulders and they were dressed in the fringed cloth shirts and deerskin leggings of rough woodsmen. Paralysed with fear, Phoebe peered down through the bare branches of the tree to watch them. They stopped directly below her. One of them took the pack from his back, and reached into it to bring out a dead duck. The other one bent over and picked up Phoebe’s fish. He grunted. “Looks like someone’s been here, Abel.”

“Yup. And they ain’t stayed long. What’s more, they left us a trout. You git the fire a-goin’, Jake, ’n’ I’ll pluck the duck. This ’n’ that fish’ll be a mighty-fine extry. I got a hunger on me says I could eat a whole hog.” He hunkered down and started plucking the feathers from the duck.

His companion was not as easy in his mind. He prowled around, nosing behind bushes, walking a few feet this way, a few feet that. Once he looked up, but not straight up, and by some miracle the shadows of the surrounding trees, and the sleety rain, which had begun again, obscured the dark shapes of Bartlett, Phoebe, and George.

“I smell bear, Abel, I swear I do,” he insisted.

“Wal, it wan’t no bear what piled them sticks, ‘n’, what’s more, no bear I ever heard tell
of woulda left his fish a-lyin’ around fer us to pick up. Come on, Jake, git the fire a-goin’ afore these sticks is too wet to burn.”

Up in the tree, George sniffed. Phoebe grabbed him and he bit her arm. She jumped. He wriggled free, fell, and landed on Bartlett. With a roar of terror, Bartlett fell off his branch and landed on the man called Jake.

With one powerful heave, Jake threw the bear from his back and took off. Swearing a long string of oaths, Abel grabbed his gun and tore after him. Bartlett huddled at the foot of the tree, whimpering. Phoebe scrambled down the tree trunk.

She ran and ran until her terror abated enough for her to stop to catch her breath and to think what to do. She knew only that she had gone in the direction opposite to the one those men had taken, but she had no idea what direction it was. George and Bartlett were nowhere in sight, the rain had definitely turned to snow and the night was very dark. She was lost. She tugged her blanket up over her head. She was afraid to move lest she head in the wrong direction, but she was so sure the two men were only over the next hill, ready to jump out at her, that she was afraid to stay where she was. So she set out, praying that an angel of God would protect her, lead her aright, and keep Bartlett and George safe.

The last part of her prayer was answered just before dawn. It had stopped snowing and she had sat down in the lee of a low hill to rest and fallen asleep. She woke when Bartlett rolled over to lie almost on top of her. She pulled herself up and looked around her. The sky was clear and pink with the dawning of a bright day, but, glad as she was to see her two companions, she was hungry, tired, footsore, and miserable. It was the first morning of the whole journey that she didn’t bother to splash her face with cold water or rebraid her hair. She wished, with all her heart, that she had gone home to Orland Village with Peter Sauk and his mother and sister.

Bartlett found butternuts under the trees for himself. Phoebe had to settle for a bit of watercress from the edge of the stream. She drank a lot of water to keep from feeling the hunger too keenly. She resented Bartlett and George, too, for the nuts and for the unmistakable odour of fish they bore. “I expect you ate the duck, too,” she said crossly.

She plodded along without offering a word to either animal, stopping only to check the trees for direction signs, then pushing one foot in front of the other up hill, down hill, over a stream, two streams, maybe three, until, bone-weary and discouraged, she slumped down with her back against a huge boulder on a hill that
sloped down to a wide river. She put her head back and closed her eyes. She listened to the high-pitched
scree-scree
of the gulls, barely starting at the shotgun slap of a beaver’s tail. The cat came and rubbed against her.

“Don’t vex me, George. Go find yourself a fish in that river. I can smell the fish from here.” She opened her eyes. Gulls! She was listening to gulls by a river. The river! After you leave the White River, there are only brooks and small streams until you reach the lake … Hadn’t Peter said, Be careful — down where Lake Champlain narrows, it looks like a river — you may not know it at once for the lake?

Her heart began to pound. Under the afternoon sun, water gleamed through the branches of the hardwood trees. “Let it be the lake. Dear Father in heaven, let it be the lake,” she whispered. Slowly she walked towards it through the trees, hardly noticing the bushes and saplings she pushed aside in her path. She came to the edge of the water. There, across its shining surface, high on a cliff, where Peter had said it would be, she could see the ramparts of a fort.

Below the cliff was a boat landing, but she could see no boats either there or on the water. Everything looked deserted. She looked around, feeling that, somehow, some means of getting across to the fort would present itself. And it did. Not three feet from where she stood, a
rowboat, half buried by leaves and small tree boughs, was anchored to a willow sapling that hung over the water. Phoebe gazed down at it in wonder. She leaned over, lifted the boughs, and swept away the leaves. She touched one of the oarlocks.

“An angel is surely guarding over me,” she breathed. “Gideon, I
will
get your message to your general at Fort Ticonderoga.”

There’s Nobody There

“H
ere!” Phoebe heard a hoarse shout. “What’re you doin’ with our boat?” A man came barrelling down the slope at her. She turned to run but he was too quick for her. He grabbed her by the arm and she would have fallen if he hadn’t had such a tight hold.

“Oh, please!” Desperately she tried to pull free. “I only meant to borrow the boat. I have to get across the lake to the fort. Please! I’ll bring it back.” She forced herself to look up at him, then the frantic beating of her heart slowed as she realized that her captor was a boy, probably not much older than she was. He was tall, as tall as a man, he had a man’s deep voice, but he had a boy’s angular thinness, and the face glaring down at her from under a coonskin cap was beardless.

The boy tightened his hold on her arm. She
winced. “I don’t aim t’let go of you until I know what you’re doin’ here,” he said. “Why d’you want to git to the fort? It ain’t gonna do you no good on accounta there ain’t a body over there.”

Phoebe was stunned. “What do you mean there’s nobody there? Where is General Powell? Where are the British soldiers? Oh, there must be someone there!”

At the mention of General Powell and the British soldiers, the boy loosened his grip. “Well, there ain’t,” he said, “not a livin’ soul. They’ve gone, every man jack of ’em. How we’re gonna lick the goddam rebels with General Burgoyne and the like in charge is a thing I sure can’t figure. Our Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne’s gone and pulled Powell and his soldiers out of Fort Ti with the same kind of good sense he had when he lost us them battles at Freeman’s Farm and Bemis Heights over on the Hudson River; same as when he lost us the ones here at Bennington and Hubbardton. He just up and left you thievin’, murderin’ rebels to do whatever you dang well please.”