Drums Along the Mohawk (60 page)

Skenandoa still looked crafty. His men were very young. Maybe the colonel could send two officers to show them how to act.

Colonel Van Schaick thought for a moment. Very well, he had two. When would the Oneidas want to start?

In a week.

Very well, it would be seen to. The great Lieutenant McClellan and the Ensign Hardenberg would go. He called in the two young officers and introduced them and ordered them to report to Skenandoa in the Oneida camp on the seventeenth, equipped for a three weeks’ march. The Indians grunted and ceremoniously departed.

“Sorry,” said the colonel to the two young officers. “We’ve got to get them out of here before they get the wind up about
the expedition. I’m telling you in confidence, we’re to wipe out the Onondagas. If they knew it, the Oneidas might give it away.”

Blue Back, passing through the parade, saw his three white acquaintances emerge from the mess. “How?” he said to Martin, and “How?” to each of the others.

Joe said, “You’re looking fine, Blue Back.”

“I fine,” said Blue Back, grinning. “How?” He beamed.

“We’re fine.”

“Fine,” said Blue Back.

“Come and have a drink.”

Blue Back hesitated. His fat face was sorrowful.

“Neah,” he said. “No drink. Go home. Go make expedition.” That was a new word. Sadly he went out through the gate after his companions.

When Blue Back got home to his new house in Oneida Castle, he lay down on his skins on the floor. His wife found him there when she came in bearing a heavy faggot of firewood. His wife was still pretty and young-looking, though she was big with an expected addition to the family, which now, to old Blue Back’s continuing amazement, already amounted to two children. The eldest he had driven out to play with the other neighboring children. The youngest, still on her board, he had hung on the peg
beside the door. So when his wife returned, she knew at once that Blue Back was engrossed either in sorrow or in deep thought.

She immediately brought up the fire and put on a dish of stew. And then she did what he always adored—stripped him and began picking him over for bugs.

Old Blue Back liked to feel her hard cool fingers going over his stout body. He liked the way her braids fell over her shoulders and tickled along the temple of his upstanding belly. She was infinitely proud of him and proud too of the way he was proving fertile. She even boasted about him to the women. Where was another man of her husband’s age that could get two children like that? And now another coming ten months after the second! She knew young warriors from their first successful warpath that didn’t produce as masterfully as that. It must be his belly, they said. Other old men lost their bellies, or they became round and hard like a walnut with shriveled meat, and rattled continually; but Blue Back had a stomach like Ganadadele, the steep hill. Truly, thought his wife, it was a wonderful thing, and her pride and duty to keep it so. She left him for the moment to fetch the meat, wishing that it might be autumn so that she could fill him with new beans.

When the two officers appeared in the Indian town, they brought a keg of rum, which restored some of Blue Back’s confidence and made the other sachems feel quite sure that what the officers said was true. Apparently, the new troops under Colonel Willett were to take over the fort, but for the time being both armies were remaining in garrison. The weather had turned cold, said the officers, and there was no point in marching back down the valley in cold weather. One could even see snowflakes falling beyond the door of the house. It was so.

However, being active men, they themselves were eager to join their Oneida brothers on a warpath. And the next morning, since the sun shone again, the sachems called up the young men. There were sixty of them, painted for war. Dressed in their best beadings, they made an imposing array among the small houses and lodges, and they set up a great yelling as they marched off into the woods, with the Indian wives following at the proper distance.

Inside the first woods, the men all took off their best clothes, leaving them in bundles for the women to take back. They painted a couple of trees, and set out. Blue Back left his red coat and put on his greasy old hunting shirt. He did not feel much like marching through the dripping April countryside; he felt vaguely uneasy. As he sobered, it occurred to him that Colonel Van Schaick was an artful man. Suddenly he did not believe anything of all the things that had been said. He decided that he would drop off by himself and see whether the troops were actually remaining in garrison.

He came out on the vale in which Fort Stanwix stood on the evening of the eighteenth, and beheld a sight that confirmed his suspicions.

Large squashy flakes of snow, falling steadily, made it hard for him to see what the soldiers were hauling west from the fort into the woods. Blue Back scouted round through the tamaracks and lay down beside the road St. Leger had constructed two years ago. One of the wagons came groaning by close enough for him to see that it carried two bateaux. After it had passed, he followed it all the way to the shore of Wood Creek.

There he found thirty soldiers encamped as guards for a great number of boats tied up to trees. He listened to the men’s
conversation, but they made so much noise that he could understand little of it. Mostly it seemed to have to do with women and the new rum, which they did not think highly of.

After a while, Blue Back withdrew into the woods and built himself a bark shed and lit a small fire. He stayed there all that night. In the morning he went back to the fort and saw the troops marshaling outside the glacis, and a couple of wagons hauling food towards Wood Creek.

Blue Back’s round face grew rounder with thought. If the army were really going to travel, they would normally have been glad of Indian guides. If they had elaborately sent off the Indians towards Oswegatchie and paid rum in advance, it meant that they did not wish Indians. If they did not wish Indians, it was because they did not wish Indians to know what they were going to do. Even Blue Back knew enough to realize that there was just one objective against which such an army would move—the Onondaga towns.

Though the Onondagas had claimed to be neutrals, Blue Back was aware that the Americans thought the Onondagas had done some raiding of their own. He knew himself that they had taken Caldwell down against Little Stone Arabia. Skenandoa had remonstrated with them about it. They had refused to take warning. They were having all the fun of raiding with little risk of retaliation. Now they were going to be raided by the Continentals.

Blue Back didn’t care about that; but what he did care about was the indubitable fact that the Onondagas would claim that the Oneidas had told on them, and would therefore still more indubitably bring the hostile western nations down on the Oneidas. He decided that there was just one thing for him to do, and without wasting another minute he started jogging west towards Wood Creek.

His belly bounced a little at first, but gradually he got the wind out of himself and by the time he reached the shore of the creek he was making good time.

He circled the landing, taking note that no bateaux had yet started, and set off along the bank. He was relieved to see how full of drift the creek was. Bateaux drew so much water that the men would take a full day getting them down to the lake. By that time he himself should have found a canoe and got far across the lake.

He found a small canoe well hidden in a growth of young balsam, turned it over, and found two paddles in it. He picked it up easily and carried it to the water. He sighed with satisfaction when he got in and picked up a paddle and shot off with the roily current.

He looked enormous in the canoe, like some kind of brown frog, corpulent with May flies. But his arms were strong and the canoe handled like a leaf under his earnest paddling. The sweat came out on his brown face, and he took his hat off, showing his braided lock held in shape with a red, lady’s shoelace. Before midafternoon he came out into Oneida Lake to meet a rising west wind, and he skirted the southern shore. He paddled all afternoon and evening, making heavy weather of it, and having to land every hour or so to drain the canoe.

Along towards midnight, however, having been compelled to go ashore for the second time in an hour, he decided that he had enough of a lead on the army, and he lay down under his canoe and slept. The snow formed a white backbone on his canoe and dripped off on either side of him as he lay, but neither the cold nor the wet disturbed him.

He was awakened at dawn by the screaming of gulls. The wind was still in the west, but lighter; and the waves had a brittle slap along the sand. It was a clear day with a mild sun that only intermittently could be felt through the wind. The lake was a
cool dark blue, and the sky, still shadowed in the west, had a rim of brightness all round the horizon. It looked to Blue Back like a regular rain-making day. He turned his attention to the gulls, which were streaming past him in groups of two and three, great white birds, with the sunlight golden on their underwings. Off to the east a flock of them had collected and were wheeling and rising and swooping like enormous snowflakes.

For some time Blue Back studied them. He stood on the beach, the wind flapping the edges of his hunting shirt, his hat tilted back on his head and his belly feeling as empty as the windy sky. Slowly an expression of the purest surprise came over his brown face. He put his hand to his mouth, then took it away and plodded back up the shore for his canoe. It was sodden and heavy with snow, but he swung it over his head in his haste as if it were a brand-new one. His bowlegs trotted under it; he gave a grunt and heaved it off his shoulders and tossed it into the water, sprang in, and made two strokes standing—still looking back towards the east. Then he sat down and paddled, striking out across the bay called Prosser’s, and heading straight into the wind for the Onondaga landing.

He could scarcely believe what he had seen, though he knew his eyes were good. They were unmistakably bateaux, about thirty of them, he thought. They would be carrying about five hundred men. Even at that distance he had been able to make out the blue coats in some of them. And the boats were all close together, though they must have rowed all night to have come so far. Who had ever heard of an army of that size traveling so quickly?

Blue Back felt a little quiver far under his fat at the root of his backbone. Those soldiers weren’t going to do anything to the Oneidas, but it made him uneasy to think that they could move about the country with that speed. He kept the bow of his canoe straight in the wind and paddled hard, hoping that he had not
been seen. He knew that he could paddle away from them. But he had figured on having a day or two to break the news.

A couple of gulls started following him and squalling, but luckily the main flock were too interested in the flotilla to be attracted to him, and little by little the canoe drew ahead until it was safely out of sight.

Blue Back did not land at the landing, but a half mile to the east of it. He hid his canoe a good hundred yards up the shore, before starting his stout trot for the Onondaga Castle.

He reached it, fairly tired out, before dark, and helped himself to a good meal before he delivered his news. The largest part of the Onondaga fighting force was in the west, supposedly to meet Colonel John Butler somewhere beyond the Genesee. There were only a few men left in any of the villages, he was informed, and they were mostly older men, or boys. When he told the men that there were five hundred soldiers coming against them, they decided that they must move at once, and started sending out runners to the surrounding villages. They planned to move in the morning. They appeared to feel perfectly friendly towards Blue Back and offered him a bed in one of the best houses.

He was glad to accept, and slept heavily all night; but next day his uneasiness recurred to him. The approaching invasion had nothing directly to do with him; it was rather the sight of all these people starting out into the west that troubled his mind. They were very quiet. Even the multitudinous dogs did not bark. The main town, in which he was, boasted fourteen horses, and these were all loaded to the limit of their capacity until their half-starved, beaten bodies were almost lost to view. The women carried their babies, their seeds, and bundles of their finery, as much as they could manage. Even the little girls
were given each a bundle or basket. And nobody said good-bye to Blue Back. They moved off in single file into the southwest to strike the Iroquois trail, a hundred souls of them, without a house to go to.

When he started looking into the empty houses, it made him sad to see how much they had been forced to leave. Green pelts, the larger household dishes—unexpectedly his probing finger found a pouch of wampum beads. His face looked singularly thoughtful as he transferred the pouch from its hiding place to his belt. But there were so many things left. In the council houses were a lot of oldish muskets which Blue Back carefully went over to see whether there was one better than his.

It was well on in the morning before he gave up his investigation of the deserted town and wandered off into the woods. He stopped for an instant to look back on the empty silent houses, most of them with bark roofs, some beautifully rounded in the old Iroquois fashion that the fathers used to know, all scattered any which way in the woods, with the long council house standing alone.

In that council house had burned once the council fire that made the Six Nations a great and undivided race. “Onenh wakalighwakayonne. Now it has become old; now there is nothing but wilderness. You are in your graves; you who established it.” The words entered Blue Back’s mind, the beginning of the great hymn. He had not thought of them for a long time. They went through his brain like a lost bird crossing the sky. He lifted his eyes and beheld rain clouds driving down from the northwest.

The old Indian, in his dirty shirt and his dirty moccasins and his limp, leaf-stained hat, shuffled indolently into the underbrush. A patch of bloodroot bloomed like the whitest snow, and among them his feet made no sound.