Paskagankee (2 page)

As he admired the baby—or at least the top of her head—the remainder of the close-knit band of traveling missionaries appeared, stepping out from behind trees, bushes and rocks and surrounding Stephen and the Native girl. He watched tensely as she turned a full three hundred sixty degrees, looking from face to face in terror, understanding instantly she had been tricked, that this late-night meeting was not going to go as planned.

Stephen hated having to ambush the frightened Native girl like this, but he could think of no other way to wrest his baby away from clutches of the Abnaki savages. After meeting the girl in this isolated location last night—a good two miles from her village and at least another mile from the missionaries' camp—and discovering that he was a father, he had requested council with the rest of the group.

The men had been unanimously shocked by Stephen Ames's admission of having lain with the savage two years ago, but they quickly agreed that action must be taken to remove the innocent child from the heathens, that she be provided the opportunity to grow to adulthood in civilized society. In a strategy session lasting deep into the night, a plan had been hastily devised. Stephen would meet the Native girl as agreed, and the remainder of the missionaries would show themselves upon her arrival. The resulting show of force, they reasoned, should be sufficient to intimidate the frightened girl into handing over the baby.

After that meeting had broken up, however, Stephen had learned from his closest friend that the missionary leaders convened a second session, one to which Stephen Ames had not been invited. They suspected separating the child from her mother might not be so easy and knew they might require a second, more forceful plan, to be utilized in the event the young savage resisted. That was all the information Stephen had been able to pry out of his associate but was more than enough to cause him grave concern.

Now, as Stephen watched with his heart in his throat, the young girl turned on her heel and began hurrying as quickly as she was able with a sleeping baby on her back down the narrow hunting path. She found her passage blocked almost immediately by two of the missionaries. They approached her with their hands held out, palms up, in identical gestures of supplication, speaking to her calmly, telling her she had nothing to fear. Stephen knew she did not understand and could see things were spiraling quickly out of control.

He rushed up from behind, hoping to avert disaster, but as he did the rest of the group closed in on her as well and now she had nowhere to go, nowhere to run. The young mother tried to shoulder her way past the man nearest her as Stephen reached for her elbow and missed. The missionary shoved her roughly, and she tumbled into the forest ringing the path. Stephen shouted and the man grabbed for the baby and that was when all hell broke loose.

***

ABNAKI WAR CRIES PIERCED the air as savages seemingly materialized out of nowhere, rushing to protect their tribal member. They moved quickly and within seconds had fully surrounded the missionaries. One warrior struck the man who had pushed the girl, hitting him in the face with his fist. Blood spurted and bone cracked and the man fell to the ground with an anguished cry.

This seemed to panic the missionaries, and one of them pulled a strange-looking silver cylindrical device from the pocket of his long overcoat, pointing it at the Abnaki warrior who had rushed to the girl's defense. Fire erupted from the end of the cylinder and a frighteningly loud boom shook the woods as the side of the warrior's face disappeared in a pink and grey stew of blood, bone and tissue. The warrior dropped to the ground and lay still.

Immediately bows were drawn and arrows launched by the Abnaki tribal members and knives and hatchets appeared. More silver cylinders were drawn out of more missionary pockets, belching more fire; the awful booming noises crashed through the forest and men on both sides of the conflict fell.

***

STEPHEN SCREAMED AND TUMBLED to the ground as he was struck in the shoulder by a hatchet thrown from he knew not where. He had known the missionary group would be armed; they always carried weapons when dealing with savages, but they had never before been forced to use them against this particular tribe.

His left arm felt numb and his hand tingled violently; he knew he was badly injured. Blood covered his shoulder and ran down his chest in a great wave. He looked for the Native girl, the mother of his child, but could not find her. Smoke from the missionaries' guns hung thickly in the air, obscuring the moonlight and casting the scene in an eerie nightmarish hue. Screams rent the night, whether from missionaries or tribesmen Stephen could not tell.

His vision began to narrow; he found himself peering down a long tunnel and soon the black edges of that tunnel began squeezing his vision into a steadily shrinking circle. The screaming and the cries of anguish now seemed to originate from a point much farther away than they had previously, although Stephen knew that was not possible. He was lying in the middle of the battle zone. He guessed he was dying and wished he could hold his baby daughter just once.

Then nothing.

***

STEPHEN AMES OPENED HIS eyes. He was still lying on the frozen ground of New England in November. He felt incredibly, bone-chillingly cold, colder than he ever had in his entire life. He was surprised he was not dead and wondered how long he had been lying in the forest unconscious. He attempted to stand up and only then realized he could not move. Stephen knew that unless someone helped him, and soon, he was going to die. He was surprised to discover the prospect didn't frighten him.

Moving his head, which seemed to be the only part of his body he could convince to work properly, Stephen scanned as much of the area as he could see. Bodies littered the forest, some of them Abnaki tribal warriors and some of them missionaries; men Stephen had lived and worked with for the past three years. A few of them were moaning softly, but most lay unspeaking and unmoving. Stephen suspected the majority of them were dead. Blood was everywhere, congealing on every surface, more blood than Stephen would ever have imagined possible.

His most pressing thought—his only clear thought, really—was for his baby. Was she still near? He didn't think so. None of the bodies he could see on the ground appeared to be those of women; although he knew he could not see all of the dead. He hoped fervently that the Native girl and his child had somehow escaped the carnage, as unlikely as that seemed.

Motion in his peripheral vision caused Stephen to peer down the hunting path. The smoke from the gunfire had by now cleared, and the moon shone brightly in the frigid November sky. Struggling up the path was an elderly Abnaki tribesman. Stephen had never before seen the man and that was strange; until now he thought he had met everyone in the small tribal village at least once. The man looked older than anyone Stephen had ever seen—ancient even. Lines etched his face which was haggard and drawn. Tears rolled down his cheeks. He took slow, measured steps and remained utterly silent as he reached the scene of the bloody conflict.

The old tribesman's arms were laden with strange-looking items like roots and cloth sacks filled with what Stephen could not imagine. At last the man reached a point roughly in the center of the carnage and set all his accoutrements on the ground in a neat pile. He still had not said a word as far as Stephen could tell.

Stephen thought briefly about crying out and alerting the ancient Native to his presence. He knew that by doing so, he would probably seal his fate. The man would certainly kill him after what had been done to his fellow Abnaki tribal members. But Stephen didn't care if the man killed him; he decided he would welcome death after this tragic night had gone so horribly wrong, but he was curious as to what the old man was doing all by himself in the middle of the night in this place that reeked of treachery and death and destruction.

He remained quiet and watched the scene unfold. The elderly Abnaki sat cross-legged on the cold, hard ground, arranging his materials in a tight semicircle. It appeared to Stephen that the man was chanting under his breath—his lips were moving but Stephen could hear nothing.

Stephen knew enough about the customs of the Abnaki and about Natives in general to know the elderly man was performing some sacred ritual. He was a tribal medicine man, an individual possessed of incredible power and mysticism. His voice was now intelligible to Stephen, strengthening in volume as he continued to chant. He mixed ingredients into a great bowl placed on the ground in front of him. The man added water to the mixture and stirred slowly for a long time, staring into the distance and chanting. Tendrils of steam rose lazily from the bowl, clearly apparent in the bright moonlight, despite the fact there was no fire beneath it.

Eventually the elderly Native stood, moving ever so slowly, and walked among the bodies littering the forest floor. He stopped at each of the Abnaki dead, smearing some of the mixture on the foreheads of the men and ignoring the missionary dead.

Stephen's vision began to waver and he knew he would soon be joining his fellow missionaries in whatever afterlife awaited them in the wake of this disaster. He hoped God understood he had not planned this slaughter and prayed he would still be permitted entrance into heaven. He prayed also that his daughter, the baby he had met just once, was alive; although he knew that was unlikely in the extreme.

As the ancient Abnaki medicine man padded silently among the Native bodies, performing his mysterious ritual, Stephen Ames slipped into unconsciousness for the last time. The freezing cold vanished and the world went black, and Stephen was grateful there was no pain.

1

Present Day

GEORGE HOOPER WAS LOST. He was also hungry and wet, thus completing what he had come to think of as his own personal trifecta of misery. A steady drizzle fell silently from the slate-grey skies, making George shiver and long for the warmth and comfort of his living room. He tried to take his mind off the chill by picturing himself sitting in front of a roaring fire, three fingers of bourbon warming his insides as he sat in a rocking chair doing nothing in particular, maybe watching the Yankees on TV or reading a good book.

George didn't own a rocking chair, nor did he have a fireplace in the living room of his small house in Teaneck, New Jersey, didn't even like to read all that much. But he figured,
what the hell, it's my daydream, I might as well enjoy it.
He knew he should not have come hunting alone in the dank, desolate woods of Northern Maine in late November, but none of his buddies could make it this weekend, and George was damned if he was going to let his five-day break from the job at the paper mill pass by without getting out and enjoying some fresh air and solitude.

Going off by himself in the woods was a piss-poor idea, George knew that—common sense dictated that you always take at least one person with you as well as let someone else know exactly where you will be when you're traveling into thousands of square miles of mostly uninhabited forest—but he had hiked and hunted his entire life in some of the most remote and rugged areas this country had to offer, so it wasn't like he had no outdoor experience. Besides, with his trusty hand-held GPS, how bad could things get?

Pretty bad indeed, George now decided. The goddamned GPS had crapped out on him two days ago for no particular reason that George could determine. It simply made the decision, somewhere inside its freakin' soulless solid-state electronic guts, to take a break from operating, maybe a permanent break; George didn't know. What he did know, though, was that without a working GPS and after his map book had been washed away during a river crossing, he was more or less totally screwed.

George unzipped the right front pocket of his insulated hunting jacket and pulled out his cell phone for what he guessed might be about the two hundredth time in the last two days, knowing what he would see when he powered it up but doing so anyway. The device clicked and whirred, eventually awakening from its slumber and informing George that, so sorry, there was still no cell coverage in this part of the God-forsaken northern Maine woods, and furthermore, its battery was getting dangerously low, so if he wished to make a call, this might be a good goddamned time to do it. He cursed under his breath. The damn thing was about as useful to him as the broken GPS. Two electronic paperweights.

His hands were shaking as he shoved the cell phone back into his pocket and re-zipped it. He had only removed his gloves for a couple of minutes, and his fingers were already stiffening and losing feeling. Dammit, it was cold!

George stopped in a small clearing and tried to get his bearings, knowing it was pointless but not having the faintest clue what else to do. The lowering sky was a dark grey, almost black; the sun a distant memory even though it was the middle of the day. Orienting himself direction-wise was a no go. The drizzle which had fallen pretty much constantly since, incredibly, just about the exact moment his GPS had given up the ghost was now increasing in intensity from a soft mist to a steady, slanting rain. The temperature was falling, too, and George knew he needed to find shelter and hole up until the weather cleared.

He had been walking nonstop for almost two days now and exhaustion hung on him like a cloak. Conventional outdoor wisdom dictated that when someone got lost they should stay in one place and wait for help, but George knew while that was good advice for a twelve-year-old who had become disoriented during a Boy Scout hike, it would do nothing to help him in his present situation. No one knew he had even come here, and as far as George could remember from his map book before it decided to go for a swim and never return, there was only one small town within twenty miles in any direction, so the chances of some random hiker or hunter stumbling upon him and helping him out of this mess were pretty slim. Almost nonexistent, when it came right down to brass tacks.