Follow the River (11 page)

They will make proper little savages out of them all too soon, I fear, Mary thought. And I doubt there’s much I can do to prevent it.

Every day the Indians brought in more game, which they killed easily in the vicinity of the salt lick, and every meal was a feast of roasted meat, made more savory with salt. Mary ate it and loved it, and felt her strength returning. But eventually so much of even this succulent flesh grew monotonous, and she began to have yearnings for bread. One evening she obtained a bag of flour and some cornmeal from the booty the Indians had taken at Draper’s Meadows, and made a dough with salt and water. She shaped thin wafers from the unleavened mass and baked them on stones. The Indians welcomed this food, whose preparation obviously was the province of their women and thus rare on the trail. Bettie nearly foundered herself on it, muttering around mouthfuls something about “the staff of life,” and apparently did not mind this time that Mary had done something that pleased the savages.

They left the salt spring on the seventeenth day and continued northward on the right bank. The river ran broad and smooth now, curving less tortuously around the steep mountainsides. There were wooded islands in the river, and sometimes
the party could travel an hour at a time along narrow bottomlands without having to climb into the hills.

Bettie’s horse had been employed to carry some of the meat and salt produced at the salt lick, and so she and Tommy were afoot. Georgie was put on Mary’s horse, to ride behind her as she carried the baby girl in her arms.

Mary wished she herself had been permitted to walk—not because she really wanted to, but because of the resentment this new arrangement was aggravating in Bettie. She plodded and stumbled through the brush and cane a few feet in front of Mary’s horse, leading Tommy with her good hand, her dark hair and her slim figure in its torn dress and her splinted right arm right in Mary’s view as a reminder of the inequality of their treatment. Bettie would look back over her shoulder now and then, her face unhappy and her stare full of accusation. Then she would face forward again, and for a while would seem to stumble more often and more heavily, lurch more violently, crash more clumsily into bushes, moan and mince more pathetically at the pain of gravel underfoot, as if to increase Mary’s guilt at being the Indians’ favorite. At least, so it seemed to Mary, and she was bothered by it.

“Bet,” she began calling every so often, “Bet, I can walk, Would y’ like to ride a spell?” Bettie would respond by not looking back. And Mary hurt inside, and was confused. But she suspected that the Indians would not have let them change places anyway. They had made a point of assigning the horse to her.

By evening Bettie would be sulking and silent, giving in only reluctantly to let Mary dress her arm. “Bet, darlin’, don’t y’ see it?” Mary hissed to her one evening, believing she understood it now. “They
want
to divide us up. They
want
us to resent each other. Why … why … see how they’ve kept poor Henry off by himself. See how they’ve mollycoddled my boys, and lured ’em off from me with games …” It seemed so obvious now, now that she had seen it. It made sense to her. “Now, Bettie,” she said in a confidential tone, “we must all stay one in heart, like the family we truly are. No suspicion, please, hon? We’re us, and they’re our enemy, I know
that as sure as you. I’m sure Henry would agree with me, that’s what they’re a-doin’.”

They were given no opportunity to discuss it with Henry Lenard, though. He was kept always at a far side of the camp or at the other end of the column. But from a distance, he watched Mary’s special treatment and Bettie’s discontent, and in his eyes, too, Mary thought she saw accusation.

It was distressing. Through no conscious fault of her own, she felt herself being isolated from her dear ones.

On the morning of the nineteenth day. Mary refused to mount her horse. She held the baby in her right arm and took Georgie’s hand, turned away from the brave who was prepared to help her up with the children and started walking forward along the column. She walked up to Bettie and said, “That horse is free. I want you to ride it. I sh’d rather walk a hundred leagues than have y’ look at me the way y’ do. Come, Tommylad. Will y’ walk wi’ me?” Tommy glanced at his aunt, then fell in behind his mother.

The Shawnee chieftain watched Mary Ingles coming forward with her lips compressed and her head held high. He shrugged. Then he rode back and told the brave to help Bettie onto the horse.

All day they went that way. For Mary it was a great effort to walk and carry the baby and lead her two sons. She had to shift the infant from one arm to the other at increasingly frequent intervals. She panted and was drenched with sweat. Her shoes were falling apart. The soles flapped loose and threatened to trip her, and her toes and feet were bruised over and over by rocks and roots. But she walked, and would not look back at Bettie on the horse.

For the greater part of that day Mary was too preoccupied with what she was doing, and its possible effects on Bettie, to notice that the Indians once again were acting eager and excited.

In the late afternoon they were moving over the gentlest terrain they had yet encountered. The mountains were less
steep and less high, and the bottomland was more than a mile wide. There were vast areas of cane and meadow.

The sun was almost on the western bluff, and Mary was automatically dragging one sore foot up before the other, her eyes on the spongy ground, when the Indians began calling:

“Spay-lay-wi-theepi!”

“O-he-oh! O-he-oh!”

Mary looked up and saw before her the widest stretch of water she had ever viewed. Far to her left, the river they had been following widened through the broad lowland and curved away between its bluffs to empty into a great blue-green, slow-flowing stream that appeared to be a mile wide.

She thrilled. This surely was the great Ho-he-o, or O-y-o, into which her husband believed the New River flowed. Dear Heaven, she thought, we’re likely the first white folk ever to have come this way! Somehow, for a moment, that grand notion rose above everything else in her soul: the discomfort, the jeopardy, the remorse.

And it meant that, if ever there should be a chance of escape, she really could, as she had speculated over and over and over on the trail, find her way back to Draper’s Meadows by staying on the river. Her happiness rose like a song in her breast.

Never had she seen such a beautiful or mighty river. It was so wide its far bluffs looked blue in the distance. They were flat-topped and covered with dense, dark forest and brilliant blue-green meadow grass.

They made camp that evening in a parklike stand of timber free of undergrowth, on the point where the two rivers converged. From the center of the camp they could see the surfaces of both streams glittering under the sinking sun. A gentle and soothing river breeze hushed over the point. The sense of spaciousness was heartening after the two weeks of struggle and confinement between the steep walls of the river gorge. Mary felt the same expansiveness of spirit she had always enjoyed on the rolling heights of Draper’s Meadows.

The day on horseback, perhaps, and the pleasing site of their present camp, seemed also to have dispelled Bettie’s resentments. She was her old self now. As they knelt by their
cooking fire in the twilight, Mary told her what she had been thinking about the way back. Bettie listened, her eyes glittering now with excitement, now with fear. The prospect of such a trek to freedom through the wilderness they had already traversed seemed joyous but impossible. They whispered back and forth about it late into the night.

“But that river, Mary,” Bettie exclaimed, nodding toward the O-y-o. “If they take us across it, how could we
ever
return?”

Mary looked toward the broad, black expanse of darkness where the river flowed.

“I only know this, Bet. If there be a way to go somewhere, there must likewise be a way to return.”

Her fatigue from her first full day afoot was so great that she managed to bring herself only half-awake during the night to feed and tend to the baby girl. And when she awoke at daylight, the rest of the camp was up and about; the horses were being loaded.

The short, slight warrior who had first helped make the comfrey medicine came to Mary as soon as he saw her awaken. He held an oblong basket about as long as his forearm, made of hickory and hide and thongs, with straps of rawhide attached. The Indian pointed to it and then to the baby, then made a motion of slinging it onto his back with his arms through the straps. Mary understood then that it was a device for carrying the baby on her back. The baby would be slipped down inside, its head outside, so that the mother could carry it while keeping both hands free. It was an ingenious
device, its only drawback being that it would restrain the infant from any free movement. It even had a forehead strap to hold the baby’s head and keep it from wobbling.

Mary nursed the baby and cleaned her, then slipped her, naked, into the basket, which was soft inside, being lined with the hair side of a doeskin. Its hickory-strip frame appeared to have been made in the same manner as the boys’ target hoop, but then forced into an oblong shape, bound and covered. It was a clever piece of work, very strong and lightweight, and, with an eye for the utility she had come to appreciate as a woman of the frontier, she carefully noted its construction.

When she stood up, she almost fainted from the pain in her bruised and swollen feet and the tautness in her leg muscles. It was worse when the Indian loaded the baby onto her back. Oh, how I should love to ride today, she thought. But the Indians seemed to have redistributed the loads among the pack animals, leaving no place for anyone to ride now. Apparently she had forfeited her mount once and for all by choosing to walk the day before. One of the warriors lifted Georgie onto the top of a load of hides and he sat up there looking half-proud, half-scared, without an adult to hold on to.

“Don’ ’ee fall off, Georgie,” Tommy warned him gravely. “If ’ee do,
I
sh’ll ride.”

Georgie clutched his little fists desperately around a strap as the column started and the horse lumbered forward. Mary grimaced against the agony of each step. But within a hundred yards the exertion of walking had benumbed her pains to a throbbing ache that was much more bearable.

They traveled less than a mile, down into a place of thickets and swamp, busy with mosquitoes, where the Indians opened a stack of dry brush to reveal two hidden canoes. They hoisted the loads down from the horses’ backs and loaded two packs at a time into each canoe, paddled the loads across and deposited them on the far shore of the New River, then came back for more. So, they were not going to cross the broad O-y-o here. The canoes apparently were kept here only for crossings of the tributary.

After the cargoes had been ferried over, the captives were put in one canoe with two paddlers and taken across. Then
the canoe was sent back to bring over three braves at a time, while the other canoe was employed in the tricky business of leading the unladen horses to swim across the stream. Finally, both canoes were secreted in a creek mouth on the west side of the river, the loads were strapped onto the horses’ backs as before and the column now moved up the left bank toward the mouth. The whole process had been executed with such efficiency and economy of motion that it had cost less than an hour.

The way was easier here in the valley of the O-y-o River. The bluffs were low and rolling, easy to cross when they had to be crossed, and most of the route was through the rich bottomlands, through soft-floored forests and sunny cane-brakes along the base of the bluffs.

They went straight south along the bank of the wide river for a day, covering what Mary estimated to be about twenty miles, and she plodded in a trance of exhaustion, starting, now and then, to catch her balance or waking to the whimpering of the baby on her back, or to the voices of the Indians when they would scare up bears or elk or deer along their route and send them scurrying for cover. Game birds would sometimes burst from cover like brown explosions, their wingbeats whirring and thundering, throwing the horses into panic. Georgie was nearly thrown at one such time, and cried for so long afterward that Mary grew alarmed lest the Indians grow annoyed and silence him.

The sun was low and reddening when they came to a vast, sweeping bend in the O-y-o. From here the river seemed to flow westward in almost a straight line, as far as the eye could see, between the opposing bluffs. The far reaches of the river faded into an iridescent mist below the sun, whose ruddy, blazing disk was mirrored on the shimmering river. Flocks of birds, clouds and arrows of them, wheeled and soared and dipped in the brilliant, pearly light, twittering and mewing their various calls far and near along the great valley. The grandeur of the scene stunned Mary, even through her fatigue. The column stopped here, and the Indians stood with their faces to the west, their skin and ornaments gilded by the evening light, their expressions serene and thoughtful.

Mary felt she was being watched. She turned her head quickly and saw the chieftain standing a few feet away gazing at her, his face and his lithe, long-muscled physique burnished by sunlight.

When her eyes fell on his, his gaze seemed to intensify momentarily, to flash darkly, and he continued to stare at her until she dropped her eyes and looked back over the river. She shivered. She adjusted the shoulder straps of the baby carrier, gently to avoid waking the baby, and wondered why this warrior watched her as he did. This time it had not been the same tenderness she had thought she had seen in his eyes at the earlier camp, but rather some kind of thoughtful study. She glanced back at him through the corner of her eye to find that he was still looking. Again she dropped her eyes.

She wondered about this man’s special attention to her. He was, she knew, responsible for the lenient treatment she had been receiving for so long on the trail, but she felt she had earned that by her forbearance and cooperation. It did not explain why he studied her so.