Follow the River (24 page)

Ghetel seemed to understand now, and perhaps was relieved that the animal had escaped her clutches. “But I do like breakfast,” she growled as they moved out of the thicket to the river bank, their blankets draped over their shoulders like capes.

They eventually did find a breakfast. Veering straight north inland to save distance at a place where the river elbowed, they found not only a good fall of hickory nuts, but a pair of paw-paw trees, small but heavily laden. They shook down all the firm yellow-green fruits they could dislodge, and bound them up in a blanket to bring along. On the ground under the trees they found a dozen that had fallen and turned brown with ripeness and gave up a heavy, sweet smell. They opened these eagerly and dredged out the soft, sweet yellow pulp with their fingers, moaning with pleasure as they worked it over their tongues and sucked it off the big brown seeds and swallowed it. In a few minutes they were full and sticky, and permeated with the cloying odor of the stuff. They washed their hands and faces at a cold brook and struck out to regain the bank of the O-y-o, bringing the paw-paw aroma with them.

The day was overcast and the ground remained soft from
the night’s rain. Mary looked over her shoulder constantly as they moved along. Even though she was certain the rain had destroyed their traces near the camp, she knew they were leaving a spoor that would be easy to follow if the Indians had chanced onto it this morning.

They rested on a stone ledge at the riverside early in the afternoon, breaking and munching hickory nuts. Mary’s breasts ached for the baby’s lips, and to keep from thinking about it, she talked optimistically about their progress, and about their wisdom in leaving the salt camp. “We’d not ha’ got away from the Shawnee town,” she mused aloud. “All those people. And dogs. No dogs at the salt camp, thanks be t’ God.

“But the best on’t is, we’re on th’ right side o’ the river. I don’t know how ever we’d ha’ crossed it, short of stealin’ a canoe. And I f’r one deem the heathens handier at stealin’ than bein’ stole from.”

Late that afternoon as they labored eastward along the bank of the O-y-o, Mary recognized on the opposite shore the mouth of the river that Goulart had called … she searched her memory for the French word, but remembered only that it mean “the stony river” and that the Indians called it the Miami-zuh. She recalled that they had passed it in the afternoon of their last day coming down, and thus reckoned that she and Ghetel had walked some fifteen or twenty miles up the O-y-o valley in this first full day of their liberation. Fifteen or twenty miles, she thought. It sounded good; they had done well indeed. But then she remembered all the days of coming down on horseback from Draper’s Meadows—the
month
of days—when they had made perhaps fifteen or twenty miles a day mounted, and then the four swift days by canoe from the Shawnee Town to the salt creek; and suddenly the distance they had struggled today seemed but a tiny first step on the long way home. Why, they would have to walk this far every day for a month and a half or two months to get home! And this O-y-o valley, strenuous though it was, was gentle by comparison with the terrain they would meet along the New River through the Alleghenies.

But come now, she told herself. Y’ll do no good thinkin’
discouragements o’ this sort! A day is a day, and y’ll take each as it comes. If’t requires two months o’ days, that’s little enough t’ trade f’r a lifetime back among y’r own!

They were famished by nightfall, and ate three more of the paw-paws apiece. Their blankets had dried during the day, and the evening was mild, so they did not have to huddle together for warmth. Each rolled up in her own blanket—redolent of paw-paw now, almost sickeningly so—and lay in her private hopes and fears in the creaking, hushing, owl-hooting darkness above the murmuring river, letting the burning aches in her legs and back subside into an aching torpor of the flesh, then into numbness, and slid off into a sleep haunted by space and uncertainty.

They foraged for almost an hour the next morning, staying within sight of the river, but found nothing they recognized as edible. They had several pounds of paw-paws left, but by now their senses were so permeated by their over-sweet odor that the thought of eating one was nauseating. Ghetel wanted to range further inland, up the slopes into high ground where nut trees might be found, and Mary had to persuade her that their primary purpose was to cover distance upriver. Ghetel came along, a bit grimly; evidently she had meant it when she said she appreciated breakfast.

They slogged along through brushy bottomlands, wading small creeks and marshes, climbing slopes on all fours, struggling through brambles that ripped their tattered skirts and drew blood from their legs; by early afternoon they were gasping for breath and slapping at huge brown flies whose bites were fierce as bee-stings, and were so famished that the paw-paws were delectable again.

And suddenly, after perhaps twelve miles, they emerged from a densely wooded downslope to find their way blocked by the mouth of a river that flowed into the O-y-o. Mary remembered this one. The word for buffalo. This was the river Goulart had pointed out to her as the Buffalo River. It was far too wide and apparently too deep to try to cross here. Ghetel’s face drooped in dismay and she sat down abruptly on
the ground in a slumping posture of defeat, sweat dripping off the end of her shapeless nose. Mary looked at her and knew how she felt. But she had, of course, already considered such detours as this. “Eh, well,” she said with a wan and unconvincing smile, and pointed up the bank of the tributary with her tomahawk, “let’s us jus’ stroll up this side a stretch till we find a fordin’ place.” Mrs. Stumf just sat and gazed, slowly shaking her head. Mary feared that if she sat there musing on it too long, she might consider turning back to the relative comfort and security of the salt camp. So she grabbed her hand and, with false gaiety, tugged at her until the old woman sighed and got to her feet. Mary sang softly as they went along:

But they spent the rest of that evening and all the next day going up the shore of the tributary, farther and farther from their guideway the O-y-o. It was depressing in the extreme to be struggling five, ten, maybe twenty miles, for all they knew, only for the purpose of returning to a point a stone’s throw away from where they had stood. It was almost as disheartening as going backwards. But there was nothing for it but to do this; neither of them could swim.

They were exhausted, hungry, scratched and bruised when, late on their fourth day out of the salt camp, they came to a riffle that indicated a shallows. The branches of trees almost met over the river here, producing such a deep green gloom that they were unwilling to try a crossing before the next morning—especially in their spent condition. They piled leaves between two parallel fallen logs and spread their blankets. They went down to the river’s edge and forced themselves to eat the rest of their paw-paws, which by now were so ripe and familiar as to be almost revolting. And the steady diet of paw-paws and more paw-paws and nothing else had given them both a severe flux. Ghetel got up and stepped a few feet away, squatted with the hem of her skirt drawn up around her waist and discharged her bowels into the leaves
with a loud gushing, spurting noise and came back with a distasteful expression on her face. A few minutes later Mary felt the call and went away to do the same. She did not like this. It was her experience that the flux had a weakening effect, and they would need all the strength they could maintain.

Something with heavy footsteps and deep wet breathing snuffled and grunted around them for almost an hour after midnight, waking them and then leaving them in such a state of fright that they did not sleep again until almost dawn. They were sure it was a bear, and sat up, back to back, Mary gripping the tomahawk, ready to defend themselves blindly in the darkness. When Mary heard Ghetel snore, she at last gave in to her own weariness and they both dozed sitting up until they were awakened by the shrilling of some woodland bird and glimpsed a pearly-coral dawn showing through the trees on the other side of the river.

They wanted some strength for their attempt to ford the river, and so occupied themselves with searching for food until the light strengthened, pausing often to spew the scalding, fluid contents of their bowels onto the ground. The memory of their helpless fright during the long night caused Mary to think she should try to fashion some sort of weapons for them. Appreciating the properties of hickory, she found two arrow-straight saplings, about two inches in diameter at their bases, cut them down with the tomahawk, shaved off the bark, cut them to lengths of about seven feet and then whittled their heavy ends to spear sharpness. This arming somehow heartened them for the crossing of the river.

Mary led the way into the cold, swift water, feeling the slick, rounded stones with her bare feet, probing ahead for depth and bracing herself against the current with the blunt end of her hickory spear, while the old woman clung desperately to the back of her dress and grasped and mumbled, prayers probably, in her language. With every additional inch of depth they reached, her toes’ traction on the slippery stones became more tenuous, and the certainty that they would be simply carried off their feet and swept into the
relentless stream to drown became more definite, more dizzying. The river, which she had estimated at fifty feet wide, now seemed as broad as the O-y-o. The flow was generally only thigh-deep, but when she would step into a muck-and-pebble depression and feel the current tugging at her hips and waist, the end of the whole ordeal would seem to lie inches away in the watery void at her left.

She seemed to have been looking at the same exposed roots on the far bank for hours when they suddenly were there in her hand and then she was scrambling up the bank with river water dribbling out of her skirt. “Ahhhhh HEEE!” Ghetel roared with joyous relief. Unseen animals went rustling away across the leafy floor of the woods. They had made it. They were exhausted, trembling violently, but exultant. They hugged, pounding each other on the back and laughing almost hysterically in their triumph. They subsided eventually, and paused to wring out their skirts and the ends of their blankets, sighing and shuddering. Mary took note of her belt then, and decided she should keep a calendar of the days of their return, as she had of her descent. She counted back. This was the fifth day since their flight from the salt camp, so she tied a triple knot to mark the beginning of their trek and then four more single knots. Ghetel, meanwhile, was expressing her familiar concern:

“Hungry,” she said. “I need a breakfat.”

So they made a brief excursion up the slopes to look for food, being careful to keep the river in view. Mary was anxious to get back down the east bank of this river and rejoin the O-y-o. She was worried about being out of sight of it.

High on the slope, where an old burn-over was covered with scrub and second-growth timber, they found a profusion of wild grape vines clinging to the small trees as if trying to haul them down and strangle them. The grapes were small, hardly bigger than peas, but were in such dense bunches that it was only a few minutes’ work to fill a blanket with them and tie up its corners. Then they picked more and sat on the ground nibbling the powerfully bittersweet grapes off their stems. They chewed up the seeds too, finding the grapes more filling this way. Thus filled, but left strangely half-satisfied for lack of bread or meat, they scrambled back down
the slope to the river bottom and followed it northward toward the O-y-o.

At midday, the weather close and overcast, when they were perhaps a fourth of the way back down the shore of the tributary, they were dismayed to find still another obstacle before them: a deep, wide creek flowing across their path into the river. Mary sighed. They would have to make a detour from their detour. This was worse even than she had suspected. They had been fugitive for five days now and, though they probably had walked sixty or seventy miles, they had progressed no more than thirty miles toward home, because of these necessary digressions from their route.

In truth, she thought, because of these damnable side-trips, we’re probably further from home now then when we escaped!

But no. Looking at it that way will only drive you mad.

This unexpected creek had added five or six miles to their trek by the time they had made their way up its south bank, crossed it on a fallen ash tree that had bridged it and then hiked and crawled back down its north shore to rejoin the Buffalo River. And thus by nightfall they still had not raised sight of the O-y-o. It was mid-morning of their sixth day of freedom before they stood, weary and weakened by their flux, on the banks of the O-y-o again, now above the mouth of the Buffalo river.

These last two and a half days, Mary thought, have brought us a hundred yards closer to home.

It was so grimly absurd it was almost like a joke. But it was a joke she decided not to tell Ghetel. The old woman was having enough trouble keeping heart as it was.

“Eh, now!” Mary exclaimed with a dreadful false jollity. “That wee diversion’s done with. Now we’ve an easy road ahead f’r a good spell!”

Along a ridge crest deep in the Tennessee country, four horses picked their way over a stony game trail among dark pine trees.

On the lead horse was the half-breed guide, Gander Jack, who now was dressed in the Indian mode. Gander Jack spoke English and Cherokee and frequently in his forty-one years had passed between Roanoke and the Cherokee towns south of the Cumberland. He was one of the few men who knew the way to the towns of the Southern Nations, and so had been hired as a guide at considerable expense by Will Ingles, who rode on the horse immediately behind him. Johnny Draper was on the third horse, leading a pack horse that carried their provisions and several pounds of mirrors, glass beads, combs and small tools to be used as gifts and ransom. Gander Jack had suggested they bring rum, but Will had been opposed to it—first because he suspected it was prompted by Jack’s own considerable thirst, and second because he did not believe that rum was conducive to levelheaded dealings with Indians. At length, though, Will had conceded and brought a few gallons of whiskey, which he guarded closely.