Arundel (50 page)

“How far,” I asked Natanis, “to your laid-up canoe?”

“Ten times the flight of a partridge, on the opposite bank.”

This was about a mile. “Quick,” I said, “get across with Greene’s bateau, you and Hobomok, and uncover it! For God’s sake, hurry! This Treeworgy is up to some deviltry! He’s a spy and there’s no two ways about it!”

I recall no particular despair at our situation, despite our lack of food and blankets and the loss of my musket, but only a longing to have Treeworgy at the end of my sights, or my hands on his lying throat. Both Hobomok and Natanis had muskets and carried fishing lines, flints, and steel in their pouches, so that there was no danger of starvation. But Treeworgy’s dash toward the front of the column was something on which I hadn’t counted. There was a feeling in the pit of my stomach that it had something to do with me—something bad.

I ran to Greene when he and Enos came out of the council, followed by the other officers. Enos bawled for Treeworgy; and Bigelow and the rest of Greene’s officers went off toward their bateau without so much as a farewell glance toward Enos’s men.

“My compliments to Colonel Arnold,” said Greene, with a look about his mouth as though he had eaten something hateful. “Tell him my division, reduced to one hundred and seven effective men, will join him with the others.”

“And the council of war?” I asked.

“That’s a message I hate to send,” he said mildly. “Colonel Enos’s officers voted against proceeding, on the ground that their provisions were insufficient and their men unruly. Colonel Enos voted with us to proceed, but yielded to the pleas of his officers and will return at the head of his division.”

We stared at each other. “Is that all, sir?” I asked.

“Yes, I think that’s all,” Colonel Greene sighed. “It’s difficult and painful. He’ll have to stand a court-martial when he gets back, of course.”

“That shouldn’t be hard to stand,” I said, “with Williams and McCobb testifying for him, and no Bigelow or Thayer to distract them.”

Greene nodded and turned away, a fine gentleman, but a little overkindly and obliging, it seemed to me, for an army not officered exclusively by gentlemen, which our army wasn’t, any more than was the British army.

I hid in the pines near the camping ground, watching Enos fuming and fussing in the snow and occasionally whooping for Treeworgy. At the end of an hour Natanis and Hobomok came around the bend, driving a small canoe against the current so that the water curled away from its stem, showing it was well loaded. There was an odd hump in the middle, and over it a blanket. They came up on the far side of the river: then, as I showed myself, cut across. Beside the blanketed hump lay a spare musket.

“What’s all this?” I asked.

“Half a barrel of flour,” said Natanis, “that Mr. Pitt was asked to get.”

I heard Colonel Enos bawling behind me, so climbed in. “Here!” he shouted, as we pushed upstream, “set me down to my camp!”

“Begging the colonel’s pardon,” I said, mindful of Major Bigelow’s military forms, “but the colonel can go to hell.”

He was bawling furiously for Treeworgy when we had our last sight of him, nor did I care if I never had another.

XXIII

I
HAVE
, it seems to me, a fairish eye for beauty, and I have heard it said there is great beauty to the Chain of Ponds that lie against and on the Height of Land, giving rise to this river that had thrown its coils about us and battered us until we were bruised and lame. Yet they seemed hideous to me when we fought our way across them through the gales and snow of late October, so I think there is more to beauty than swelling hills or tumbled rocks or limpid waters; and I wouldn’t give one acre of my ragged sand dunes in Arundel for all the mountain ponds you can show me in a week.

Nor, for good reasons, did I see beauty in any of that tom and crumpled region that lay between us and Canada, one of the reasons being that the snow stung our eyes so that for a part of the time we could see nothing but the trees about us, and another being that we made our way through such a smother of brush and fallen logs that we had to screen our eyes to keep them from being whipped out, and a third being that I long ago learned from Natanis that speed is gained and strength saved, in arduous marching or climbing, if the eye is fastened on the ground that lies before the feet, once the trail be known.

Therefore I saw less of that country than I might have seen had I gone into it to dawdle over the killing of moose or bear, with stout shoes on my feet, and a full belly thrice a day, and fires to drive the ache from muscles and joints. The main shape of it, none the less, I shall always remember; for I often find it in my dreams, when objects are swollen and distorted, unreachable and ungraspable.

What I see is a stupendous stone wall, an overwhelming enlargement of those we build in New England out of the gray rocks that fill our fields. The wall, in my dreams, lies across a bog in which the hoofprints of a million giant cows have frozen and thawed and run together; and from one division of the bog to the other, across this monstrous wall, there runs a long and twisted stalk of woodbine. Along the stalk, in my dreams, I see a throng of little red ants, groping and hesitating, fumbling here and there, straying and struggling, backing and filling, but ever moving onward.

It is like this stone wall that the cruel, stone-toothed Height of Land divides the bogs of the North. To the south are those of the Chain of Ponds, like vast hoofprints in the mud of ages, from which all the waters run to the south. To the north are those of Lake Megantic, forming the Chaudière and other streams that fall into the St. Lawrence. Our trail across it was like the tangled, twisted stalk of woodbine; and we, climbing the trail, were like the ants, creeping feebly, but somehow creeping forward.

Eager as were Natanis and Hobomok and I to overtake Treeworgy, when we left Enos shouting into the whirling snowflakes, we were held back by the snow and the gathering dusk. We passed Greene, and in time came up with Burr riding in a bateau with his friend the chaplain, Reverend Spring, a jovial young man from Princeton College, who was cursed with chilblains, an ailment he was encouraged to conceal because of his heartening effect on the men, and his failure to hear and see matters better unheard and unseen by a chaplain.

“Here,” I said, as we drew alongside him, “Enos has gone back with his entire division, and here’s some flour for you.”

Burr broke into a flow of profanity at Enos that could have been achieved only by someone familiar with the Bible.

“Amen,” said the Reverend Spring, feeling cautiously of his toes.

“Anyway,” said Burr, after he had spoken freely about Enos, “I’m glad to see Mr. Pitt did his duty. We give you our hearty thanks, Mr. Pitt.” He lifted his hat to Natanis, who grinned amiably. “How did they do it?” he asked me.

Natanis spoke rapidly in Abenaki.

“Well,” I said, “I’d been content not to know, fearing there might have been some chicanery about it, but it seems to have been the merest chance. Mr. Pitt happened to be near some of Enos’s men when a fearful screaming broke out in the forest, a horrible screaming such as had never been heard before. The men’s attention was so caught by it that they must have dropped the flour, as well as a musket and three blankets that we sorely needed.”

“Oh,” said Burr profoundly, “that explains everything!”

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” said the Reverend Spring, huddling his feet carefully in his blanket.

We were off at dawn the following morning; and though the driving snow had ceased, we were hindered and blocked at the carries by the bateaumen of Meigs’s division, who clambered with difficulty through the slush. Not until noon did we come to the first of the Chain of Ponds, all of them bordered by mountains that seemed to me to blanket us with chill and darkness. I couldn’t breathe easily or deeply among them, as I can among the sweet salt marshes and the silvery, curving beaches of Arundel.

Up these we went, crossing round ponds and oval ponds and ponds with points like fingers stretching out to catch at us, and ponds shaped like hourglasses strung together on a thread of a river that twisted and dwindled and hid in bogs and leaped out at us over ledges again: small ponds, medium ponds, large ponds, until we were sick of ponds—a sickness that has stayed with me to this day. I have but one good thing to say of them, and that is this: if a man have a fondness for ponds and cannot find one to suit him among them, he must be hard indeed to please.

We found Morgan’s men groping around the shores of one that they insisted had no inlet at all—until Natanis showed it to them. They followed along behind us, and Natanis guided us from pond to hidden pond as surely as a Falmouth man passes from his home to the wharves. At nightfall on the last Thursday in October, and again I remember the day because the next day fell on a Friday, we came to the last of the Chain of Ponds, the last and greatest, and crossed it with the granite, tree-clad wall of the Height of Land looming dark before us.

While Natanis and Hobomok cooked trouts, I went to those of Morgan’s men who had landed near us and learned that Treeworgy, with an Indian, had passed them at mid-afternoon.

“Did they tell you about Enos?” I asked.

“Nay,” said a drawling Virginian, busy patching his breeches with a squirrel skin, “he went past us like a pig after a snake. What about Enos?”

I told them the tale, while all these tall men came around me and listened, chewing silently on sumach leaves or willow bark, even forbearing to spit until I had finished.

“Well,” said one of them, “I hope he rots away, a little at a time, starting now, or dies plenty painful.” He embellished his speech with frills and trimmings that made Burr’s attempts, which I had so much admired, seem lady-like. There was a general chorus of deep, passionate cursing from the rest of the Virginians, until there was nothing about Colonel Enos or his ancestors left uncursed.

I have heard it said that cursing is not what it was in my grandfather’s day, when it was considered, both by the damner and the damned, a serious business to damn a man for a fault or a sin; whereas it is now the fashion to damn anything and everything, whether it deserves damning or not; so that a man will damn a twig that slaps his cheek or a bird that twitters overloudly when he is desirous of sleeping. This may all be so; but I could ask to hear no more polished and intricate cursing than Colonel Enos received. If there was no efficacy in it, then there never will be efficacy in any sort of curse anywhere.

At dawn of Friday, the last Friday in October, we set off to cross the Height of Land; and while I had held Morgan’s riflemen in high esteem as soldiers, the thing they did that day has set them, in my mind, above all others. Whenever, since then, I hear them bragging somewhat concerning their powers, which they are prone to do, I feel that they have earned the right to brag.

The supplies of all divisions were sadly shrunk, the provisions near gone and much of the ammunition spoiled by the leaking of rain and river water into the powder kegs. Therefore Colonel Arnold, to ease the crossing of the terrible five-mile wall of the Height of Land by his half-starved army, had sent back word that each company need carry only one bateau for medicines and a few essentials. The others could be abandoned at the last of the Chain of Ponds.

Yet Morgan’s riflemen, angered by Enos’s desertion and determined to make rapid progress when they reached Canada, as well as to save the few military stores they had so jealously guarded, said they would carry all seven of their bateaux across the mountains on their backs. This they did, and in doing it they wore the skin from their shoulders, so that the bones showed through.

When we passed those men, creeping slowly up the trail, dragging at the bateaux like ants tugging at something infinitely vaster than themselves, I thought to myself that Roger Enos’s excuse for leaving us might prove satisfactory to all the world, but could never be anything more than the whimpering of a frightened puppy to those who had gone on.

Knowing that the trail which Morgan’s men were following had been made by Lieutenant Steele, Lieutenant Church, Cap Huff and the twenty axemen, I feared to follow it too far lest someone recognize Natanis and so make trouble for him, and also lest I be ambushed by Treeworgy, who couldn’t be far ahead. Therefore Natanis led us off the trail and into a winding trace, like a deer path. Along this we struggled as well as though we were on the snagged trail, though this, God knows, is not said in high praise.