Follow the River (55 page)

It was something inside himself, maybe. It had been shaming him, that recollection he had had of running away when the Indians had her. And it was that humility he had felt, that sinking-down inside, while he heard about where she had been and what she had done, and about those six weeks of coming back to him.

He lay in the bed now feeling her arm-bones across his chest and thought about the cold and the hunger and the rocks and rivers and mountains she had seen that nobody else had ever seen, and he realized that he could not have done what she had done.

That seemed to be it. Along with the other things, that was what was the matter.

Mary was having premonitions again. She was getting so spooked she would cry out in her sleep every night. And Will, who wanted desperately to assure her some peace of mind until she could become whole again, proposed to take her to a bigger stronghold, called Vass’ Fort, about seven leagues
father east. There the settlers from the Roanoke River headwaters had gathered. Among them were Will Ingles’ two younger brothers, John, a bachelor, and Matthew, who had a wife and child. There was a small militia detachment at Vass’ Fort, and Will believed there would be more security there for Mary, whose emotions were in a fragile condition. The iron will that had brought her through her ordeal seemed about to crumble now that the trial was past, and every night she had nightmares about being recaptured by Indians.

Mrs. Stumf had been accepted by the German Dunkards, who were in the process of healing her and fattening her up, with the intention of taking her back up to Pennsylvania when her health and the weather would permit. Her name, they had explained to Mary, was Gretel. It was her back-of-the-throat “r” that had made it sound like “Ghetel,” and they had a hearty laugh over that business.

Mary made her good-byes to the little group of people at Dunkard’s Bottom who had cared for her so tenderly. She lingered several minutes with Adam Harmon and his sons, holding their hands and trying to express her inexpressible gratitude to them. “Just thank the Heavenly Father,” Adam said, his eyes brimming with love and religious faith. “ ’Twas His miracle that brought ye where we was.”

Then she sat by the bed where Gretel lay, and held her hand for a long time. Tears kept puddling in the old woman’s sunken hazel eyes, and her chin trembled, and Mary knew she wanted to be forgiven for her assaults. But Mary simply squeezed her hand to try to reassure her nothing needed to be said about it. Out there in the dark, cold valley, they had been ruled by the law of survival, not the law of men, and now that both had survived, the episode could be forgotten more easily than any breach of the laws of men could be.

Still, Gretel had to allude to it before they parted. She said, just above a whisper:

“Ven you vas across the river from me, O my heart vas more emptier than my stomach.”

“Aye. Mine too. Well, Gretel. No two souls was ever closer than you’n me.” She pressed her cheek against the scabby, scaled, gnarled hand that had once in a different world tried
to kill her for food, and she thought of that: there are no two souls closer than predator and prey are, in their moment, she understood. But she did not think it in words.

The chieftain, Captain Wildcat, raised his eyes from the creek valley below to the afternoon sun above, grimaced, then looked back at the valley, running his eagle-eyes far up the game trace that ran along the creek bank. The six Shawnee braves squatting at their posts along the bluff-top looked to him now and then and resumed their scrutiny of the valley.

Captain Wildcat knew the Virginia country better than any other Kispokotha Shawnee chieftain, and his braves had much faith in him. On a raid the previous summer he had taken much booty and several scalps and prisoners from a settlement near the Chi-no-da-ce-pe, not far from this very place where they now lay in ambush. Wildcat had become guardian of the two young sons of one of the white women he had captured. The younger of the two boys had become sick and died, but the other was becoming a good Shawnee child. It was said that a baby girl child of that same woman had been adopted by the squaw of one of the French traders, but Wildcat and his warriors had been on the war path for many weeks and had not been to Shawnee Town to learn whether that was true.

Lying in ambush here now, Wildcat thought often about the boy, and he thought often about the boy’s mother, who was a brave and dignified woman and very handsome but had been too stupid to want to became a Shawnee chieftain’s wife. He could still remember the summer day at the trading post when she had put his hand off of her. She should have come to live with Wildcat. If she had, she would be alive now and living a pleasant life. Instead, she had gone to the salt lick of the big bones with those greedy French fools and had got lost in the wilderness and had never been found.

But such were the ways of white people: very much trouble and never wise. Wildcat would never again be so foolish as to want a white woman. He was a warrior chieftain, and a warrior chieftain could not afford to be confused; to want a
white woman was to be confused. Now he must put that white woman out of his thoughts and pay attention to this ambush, because it was the most important thing he had ever done.

They had been here a long time manning this ambush, almost a full day. The famous American militia colonel named Washington and two of his officers were supposed to have come down this trace this morning on their way to inspect the place called Vass’ Fort, which stood a league down the creek. They should have been here by now: they were on good, fresh horses, with no extra baggage, and it did not make sense that they should take this long to come through the valley.

Captain Wildcat keenly desired the reddish scalp of the young colonel. He had heard Red Hawk, second chief of the Shawnee town on the Scioto-cepe, tell in council about his futile attempts to shoot the Virginia colonel in the great battle near Fort Duquesne. To kill an officer whom Red Hawk had been unable to kill would be a great coup. But it would require skill and watchfulness and thoughtful action.

Now the chieftain realized that though he had been lying here a long time dreaming of that glory, it might yet slip out of his hands.

He rose from the place where he had been crouched, and went to his first warrior. I must be sure the Virginia colonel has not already passed to the fort, he told him. I am going to go up over the ridge and down the other side to see if he has gone down that branch instead. The warrior nodded. You have heard, said Wildcat, that this officer is very hard to kill, and so he must be caught by complete surprise, before he has time to draw over him the cloak of the Great Spirit. Again the warrior nodded. Therefore, said the chieftain, no one of you must make a sound or fire a gun until I have looked at the other trail and returned. Tell them that. The warrior nodded and went and told them that, and Wildcat went over the mountain.

While he was gone, Colonel George Washington, Major Andrew Lewis and Captain William Preston of the Virginia militia rode down the creekbed toward Vass’ Fort. Captain Preston was a nephew of the late Colonel Patton, who had been killed the previous summer in the massacre at Draper’s
Meadows, and Preston was relating to Colonel Washington that he himself had been spared the same fate only by blind chance, having been sent down Sinking Creek to fetch a neighbor to help at the harvest. The young colonel nodded, allowing that even the best of soldiers often survive or die according to sheer luck, or God’s will in the disguise of sheer luck.

This is what Colonel Washington and his aides were discussing as they rode under the guns of the six Shawnees hidden along the bluff above them. The warriors were squirming with agitation, and kept their gunsights on the white officers for a good five minutes as they passed below. But they had been ordered not to fire their weapons under any circumstances until their chieftain returned. And as Shawnee soldiers, they were, above all, disciplined.

And by the time the chieftain returned from the other side of the mountain and learned of the escape of his prey, Colonel Washington and the other officers were safe within sight of Vass’ Fort.

Captain Preston opened the door to the room in which Colonel Washington was conferring with the leaders of Vass’ Fort. There was a jug of rum on the table and an oil lantern hanging on a chain from a ceiling joist. Preston was smiling. “Colonel, sir, if I may interrupt: I find an old neighbor of mine is here, by a miracle, and she has a wondrous tale to tell.”

Washington stood as the little, white-haired wraith of a woman limped into the room, supported by a sturdy, bearded young man he vaguely remembered. “This is William Ingles and his wife, Mary,” Preston said. A chair was vacated for her, and the colonel sat down with hands folded on the table, looking across at her. The half-wild eyes in the gaunt young face arrested him. In recent years he had learned to recognize the peculiar look of people who had survived every kind of extremity and horror, and he felt a profound pity and respect for them.

“These gentlemen here have already spoken of you,” he said. “Is it true that the New River leads straight through the
mountains to the Ohio?” He was a man uncommonly interested in land.

“Not straight, sir, no, not straight by no means. But it does go there, sir. I reckon it’s some two hundred mile by water to th’ O-y-o. But it’s no route y’d take if y’ could find any easier one, sir.”

He listened with keen interest as she described such things as the salt spring and the burning spring and the river of coal. She told him about the Shawnee town on the Scioto-cepe, and about the prisoners from Fort Duquesne who had been there, about the other salt lick where the big bones were. He was leaning far over the table on his elbows by now, enraptured. “And how far is that?” he said.

“I reckoned five hundred mile by water. I came a good bit farther, havin’ many a walk-around.”

“Pray, ma’am,” he pursued with his surveyor’s yearning for creditable measurement, “how did you make these estimates?” He suspected they might be far wrong, wild guesses exaggerated in her mind by the enormity of her suffering.

She placed a rope of yarn on the table, a strange, limp, greasy, frayed strand tied in knots from one end to the other. And she began to explain. “These thirty knots show a day each on th’ way down, in captivity. To th’ Shawnee town. Some fifteen mile a day, with a few days at the salt spring. These forty-four knots each show a day o’ walkin’ back a free woman from th’ big bone lick.”

Colonel Washington looked up from the yarn into her eyes, and his scalp crawled. One of his most vivid memories among the harrowing experiences of the last three years was his own five-hundred mile winter ride to Fort LeBoeuf in the winter of 1753, whose accomplishment had made him famous throughout the Colonies. He had done it mostly on horseback, with a guide, interpreter and armed escort, yet it had nearly killed him. And now here before him sat this little woman of his own age with her haunted eyes who, without provisions or weapons, had made a far more awesome passage, through utterly uncharted territory. The young colonel was not a man often overtaken by humility, but for this moment he felt humble. He cleared his throat.

“Madame, as I was saying to Captain Preston only today: Some of us seem to have God’s eye on us, and his hand ready to intervene for us.” He stood up to his towering height, then bowed. “Thank you, Mrs. Ingles. I am honored.”

William Ingles stood with his brother Matthew at the gate of Vass’ Fort in the early morning light. Matthew wore his long, woolen hunting shirt and his chest was crisscrossed with straps supporting his powder horn and bullet bag and a game bag. He was setting out for a day’s hunting, to supplement the monotonous diet of corncake and milk that prevailed in the fort. He grinned at Will’s rueful expression. Will was a little embarrassed. He felt that his Mary was making him look something of a fool with her fears and premonitions. Now she had been having strong presentiments that Vass’ Fort itself was about to be attacked, and had been urging its inhabitants to vacate it and cross over the Blue Ridge to safer places. She had started up that refrain right after Colonel Washington’s departure, and finally Will had agreed to take her across the ridge to a still larger fort near the Peaks of Otter.

“Well, Matt,” Will said, “by spring, maybe, she’ll have it all out of ’er system, an’ then we’ll come back over and finish buildin’ at the Ferry. I, uhm …”

Matthew put his hand on Will’s shoulder. “Y’ don’t have t’ say more. If I’s her, I’d be scared too, an’ prob’ly would be, till I was back in County Donegal. So, Godspeed, ol’ feller, an’ I’ll be a-seeing you come spring, I reckon.”

Will and Mary said their good-byes a little later to Matthew’s wife and to John and to the other twoscore inhabitants of the fort, and rode southeastward toward the pass over the Blue Ridge, saying little to each other. They were still somewhat like strangers to each other; they had talked and talked about their travels and about Tommy and Georgie and Bettie and Henry, but there were still some things they had not talked about. There were a few patches of wet snow still lying in northerly hollows, but most of the ground was brown and bare and hard.

* * *

That afternoon Matthew Ingles was returning to Vass’ Fort with a hare in his pouch and a wild turkey hen slung head down over his shoulder when he heard gunfire. He broke into a trot, the dead bird banging heavily against his flank. He thought for a moment of his sister-in-law’s premonitions.

Blue gunsmoke was billowing over the stockade of the fort and from the woods around it. The quavering cries of Indians wove through the rattle of gunshots. Matthew’s heart rose into his throat and he thought of his wife and child inside. Crouching and staying in the thickest brush, he ran zigzagging toward the stockade. There was nothing for it but to get inside. He ran. His moccasins thudded on the frozen ground and the turkey bumped heavily against him. He threw it off and sprinted toward the fort, which was now but a hundred yards away.

Then there were Indians between him and the fort, a small group of them running across his path from one defilade to another. Painted faces turned and saw him coming.