River City (55 page)

He looked over her head when he spoke to her. “You must look like you are the woman of Colweenada. If you do not look like you are the woman of Colweenada, a man will come and make you his woman.”

She was unaccustomed to making herself appear to be any man’s woman, but she did her best, and only after they had departed Fort Ticonderoga did she ride alongside him, and only then did he let her. They carried on along the edge of the lake, northbound now, their supplies replenished. They had traded a pig and the horsemeat after declining offers for the girl, and they received in exchange a variety of foods and new rifles.

“Bandits were in that camp,” she told her guide.

“Colweenada believe this true,” he said.

“Now they know we are here. They know
I
am here.”

“Are you afraid, Sarah Hanson?”

“I have every right to be worried.”

“We ride our horses. We move well. Colweenada not worry about bandits behind. Colweenada worry about bandits not yet seen.”

That seemed wise, so Sarah worried about the bandits up ahead as well.

Sarah Hanson was leading three horses down to a gurgling brook for a drink when an attack commenced. An Indian boy saw the arrow that killed him break through leaves before it surged through his throat and he gurgled, dropping to his knees. Colweenada flinched, and an arrowhead passed through his shoulder. He broke the shaft and pulled it out of his back while running for a boulder’s shelter. He fell upon the ground and, ignoring his pain, pulled out his dagger.

The whoops and battle cries spooked the horses and she lost control of two. Spinning herself up onto Surprise’s back, she bolted off in pursuit of them.

An attacker, the only one among them who possessed a rifle, for these were impoverished bandits, commenced taking potshots at the boulder Colweenada hid behind. The youth hoped they’d soon fight hand to hand. He was determined to be the fiercest fighter in the forest that day, so that his killers might choose to protect his corpse from the appetites of animals.

Colweenada’s immediate problem would be the man with the rifle, who was creeping around, trying to find a clear shot. Unable to shoot back at him, he watched the marauder move towards him with impunity. Colweenada peeked and spotted his attacker sliding along a fallen tree trunk suspended above a creek, so he crept slightly to his right to better shield himself. The move exposed his rump to arrows from that side, where other bandits were skulking through the woods. He would have to frustrate their arrows and bullets and tempt them to charge him with knives and tomahawks.

This was going to be a difficult fight.

Then he heard pounding hooves.

Sarah had gone after the other horses to retrieve the rifles slung across their backs, and, having snared the animals and seized a pair of weapons, was galloping back. While in blazing motion, she took a shot at the bandit who sat fully exposed on a tree trunk, missing, although he nearly toppled over from fright, then Sarah reared her horse to a stop and simultaneously fired again. She felled him.

The bandit, wearing a tall and torn straw hat, collapsed through branches to the exposed rock of the meandering creek bed below. His head split open on a rock. Sarah slid off her animal, leaving Surprise to fend for himself, and the beast, in its panic, galloped off. She ducked in behind the boulders, close to her new friend, and tossed him a rifle, and together they fired upon their attackers, driving them off.

Sarah raised her arms and howled as resolutely as any Iroquois.

Her pal, Colweenada, did not join in her celebration.

“Your friend,” she said, seeing his sorrow. “I’m so sorry.”

“He is my brother.”

She assumed that he meant the term in a familiar manner, that all young Iroquois were brothers and sisters.

“My father will be sad to hear of this day,” the young man reported.

She understood then that he and the other boy were blood brothers.

“My father will thank you for saving the life of his older son.”

“Your father will be welcome,” Sarah said. She smiled despite their grief. He did not thank her himself, for she was only a woman, but anticipated the thanks of his father and passed them along.

She helped Colweenada dig the youth’s grave. They’d take turns clawing in the dirt, and at one point the young Indian lad went sullen and stiff. She took the branch out of his hands and allowed him to rest while she dug, and at that moment the bandits attacked again. Three arrows pierced the chest of Colweenada, and she heard them pop his skin. One clicked on a bone inside him, and another came out his back, the arrowhead covered in a bloody tuft of tissue. The shock had yet to subside when she looked up and saw herself surrounded. She was holding nothing more than the stick. She’d left her rifle too far away. She was as bad as her father, she thought, who had misplaced his ammunition on the morning she’d been taken, and she swore she’d never be so foolish again. Sarah attacked them with her wood, but easily, laughing, they wrestled her into submission and tied her hands and feet.

Now she was a prisoner for the second time, and this time she felt her heart stagger in her chest with a mortal dread—thumping, thumping.

She gazed upon the corpse of Colweenada—poor, unlucky boy—and knew that his father’s grief on this day would be immense.

Sarah had never seen a dead person before, and now she’d seen three, and had killed one of them herself. She longed to be home again. Just the thought of her mother and her house and her brother and the farm caused her to lose all hope, all reason, and she wept and screamed at her accusers and felt out of her mind and cursed them and pulled mightily at her restraints while they only laughed and danced around her and ran their filthy hands over her body and licked her face like dogs. One man tore at her shirt, exposing her left breast, and bit it, causing her to make a rapid series of unearthly sounds. Another man pulled him off her and Sarah, terrified beyond all capacity, raged up at them.

The bandits decided to keep moving. They feared reprisals, discovery. These were unsafe woods. They wanted to sell the girl, but they didn’t want her too crazy. She was worth less to them crazy, more if they were the heroes of her rescue. This was explained to the man who had bitten her nipple, and she watched his eyes to see what he might decide.

She feared death less than all manner of upset as they dragged her across the ground, down through the woods to the lake. Her skin was cut and chafed and bruised, and she cursed them. The attackers, who had also lost a friend on this excursion, kicked her quiet.

At the lake’s edge, they tied her to a floating log and walked on, pulling Sarah Hanson through the water. The trunk of the tree spun, and her belly was in the water and she had to fight to hold her face up high enough to breathe.

If she possessed the will, she knew, she’d breathe water only and die.

But she survived that portion of her journey.

They made camp after dark, these drunken men unaccustomed to travail in the wilderness. Sarah’s log was turned upright, and she was pulled halfway onto the shore and neglected there while the men organized themselves to eat and sleep. They drank whiskey, and the worst of the men who was always pestering her kissed her mouth. His lips tasted of rotted moose flesh, and Sarah Hanson, bound hand and foot, spat at him, and he only laughed as he fondled her vilely. The others told him he had to wait—he had not chosen a straw to
be the first to have her, if anyone would have her, because that had not been decided yet. They argued about these matters in English, for they were from different tribes, and their voices echoed off the rocks and trees. One reminded the others that they didn’t want her crazy. The vile man declared that the girl wasn’t crazy, that she wanted him to touch her, so Sarah Hanson showed how a crazy woman behaves, yelling and gagging and foaming and cursing and kicking—although she could not kick—and the men had to pull the other man off her to settle her down.

Long after the vile man had gone away and stumbled into a stupor, she sensed that she was hearing her own voice, its echo wailing across the desolate waters of Lake Champlain.

But that was the voice of a woman gone crazy.

At dawn, the vilest of the men awoke first and stretched his hands above his head. A tomahawk flew through the air, and Sarah heard the weapon break a thin, dry, dead branch, then crack his skull. The sound was like the snapping of old wood that had a rotted core, and she heard him fall onto his face like the sound of a horse dropping onto its rump with a satisfying sigh. Without a single yell, Iroquois fell upon the three remaining bandits as they slept, and scalped them alive. Two who survived the scalping staggered forth, down to the lake, the tops of their heads sheared off. Blood flowed down their faces. The Indians brayed at them. Strapped to her log, Sarah watched as they stumbled around her and fell into the water as though to conceal their shame and torment, and one rose up again with a yell inhuman in its desolation, a man abandoned even by himself. The other man never turned his face again to the sun, and floated face down in the waterway. The man with the blood in his eyes got to his feet and was pierced by an arrow before he fell upon Sarah Hanson to take the revenge he might have wished, and a second arrow, straight through his mouth, silenced his mournful lament.

Then the Iroquois hacked off the limbs of each corpse and floated the pieces away.

Sarah, strapped to the log, was freed of her restraints by her original band of raiders. She hugged the leader and, weeping, told him that his sons were dead. He nodded, for this calamity was known to him.

Later that morning, as they paddled north, they found the three missing horses, which had located one another and wandered aimlessly together. Surprise did not gallop off as Sarah approached. She asked the band leader who had lost his sons if she might not travel by the overland route again. He wore his hair with the sides of his scalp shaved and feathers hanging downward from a ponytail, and he had blackened his face to show his grief for his sons. He nodded, and gave her another guide for the journey, an older warrior who wore no feathers, but necklaces of beads and stones, who often closed his eyes while riding a horse, as though he could see without looking. He seldom spoke, and only in his own language.

Sarah Hanson carried on to New France on horseback. The day came soon enough when she rode into the village of Oka by the banks of the
rivière des Outaouais,
where the raiding party, having arrived first, waited. The chief greeted her and told her they would wait there for her father to come and set her free.

“I am a free woman now,” she said.

He did not know what she meant, or what beguiled this brave girl to utter such strange words.

Sarah was down by the water when news arrived. A tiny, pleasant girl, seven years old, came running calling her name. The little girl looked as though she might burst.

“Sarah! Your father!”

“My father?” Suddenly she realized that she hadn’t thought of him in months.

“He’s here.”

Looking frail and haggard from the trip, he seemed embarrassed that he had taken so long to find her. He had brought pigs in two carts, and chickens, but no cows or horses. He offered, when negotiations intensified, to leave one of the carts and its two horses behind, an offer amenable to the Iroquois. Sarah was informed of the progress of the negotiations.

When the deed was done, she listened to the details of the transaction. The Iroquois would receive forty-four live chickens plus the fourteen they’d already eaten while the talks had transpired. They’d receive eight sows, which particularly pleased them because half the pigs were pregnant. Two horses and a rickety cart. A goat. Four bolts of fabric suitable for ladies’ wear or curtains. Nineteen blankets. Twelve bags of onions, twenty-two of potatoes. Sixteen bags of carrots. Ninety-six bottles of rum and a solemn vow—this had been a sticking point, but it was understood that if the promise was not kept, the Indians would have the right to burn the man’s house down again—to ship another forty-eight bottles later. Sixteen rifles and twenty large boxes of ammunition. Twelve pistols.

“We will accept this payment,” the chief explained, “for our kindness to rescue your daughter who was lost in the woods.”

“What do I get?” Sarah was told that Jeremy Hanson had asked.

“Your daughter,” the chief replied. He had a man of his village who spoke English very well translate for him.

“You burned my house down.”

“Fire is a terrible thing. I am sorry for this accident to you.” “You burned my house down, you imbecile!”

“I heard your roof burned very quickly. Why did it do that, so fast? My men were near that place when we learned your daughter was lost. They went to find her.”

“I deserve something for my house.”

“What do you want?” the chief asked him.

“Compensation.”

“I don’t have any of those. I will allow you to take back your carrots.” “I lost my house.”

“I lost two sons on the return trip. They were keeping your daughter alive. You get to take your daughter home with you. You can build a new house. Probably you already did that. Why else did you take so long to come here? My two sons cannot come back to me.”

That statement sealed their arrangement. Both men had suffered, and this seemed to satisfy Jeremy Hanson.

Sarah was told the details, and then she said, “I’m not going back.”

“Of course you go back,” an Indian woman responded.

“A deal is a deal,” the chief said. “I keep everything in our deal. I only agreed with your father that he is free to take you back. If you don’t go back, that’s not my problem.”

“I’m not going back.”

Her father would remain in the Indian camp for eleven days but failed to convince his daughter to return. They would walk along the shore of the Ottawa, and he appreciated that this was a sweet land, with low hills and deep woods and the quietly running river. But what life could exist there for her? Sarah did not seem to know. She had arrived when she was fourteen, and now she was fifteen. She wore her black hair long and tied in braids, and she knotted the braids with beads. While they walked, she smoked and passed her father the pipe, but he always declined. In the end, his resolve was frustrated, and Jeremy Hanson returned home almost empty-handed, carrying only a shawl that Sarah had sewn for her mother, a deerskin vest she had made for her brother, and a few bags of carrots the chief really hadn’t wanted anyway.