The Deserter (19 page)

Had he remained in England, he might have spent decades to get this far. All day as they had walked together along the trail, he had marvelled at this wife — someone he could truly love who in her blood carried thousands of years of this land and its nature. If he could divine her feelings at all, she did love him back, too. He knew the next few days would bring a raft of changes, a plethora of problems. But somehow, he felt optimistic that they would conquer them all.

Leaving their sacks behind them, they walked over to the cabin. As she was about to step in, he stopped her. “An English custom, madame!” She frowned, and looked at him.

He swept her off her feet in a grand gesture, surprised at how light her body was in his arms. “Trust me.” He stepped up onto the flattened log he’d put down as a door stoop and carried her into her new home.

He put her down. She smiled, and then turned to look into the gloom, as her pupils adjusted to the interior. “Do you like it?” he asked, after a bit.

She nodded tentatively. Then she stepped out to circle the logs, inspecting the four ends, and checking the moss he had stogged in the cracks. She pointed to the roof. “I will stitch this birchbark. My first job.”

She came in again. He hadn’t moved. She went to the back wall, checked under the eaves, saw a mouse nest and pointed. He smiled. In the walls of the cabin, he had drilled holes and placed pegs, whittled from cedar. Then she knelt by the hearth he had laid for their indoor fires and smoothed her hand over the brook stones, flat stones, red and earthen grey, stones that had been washed by a thousand springs and frozen by a thousand winters. Then she sat back, thinking.

Thomas went to sit in the open doorway, looking out. She joined him on the stoop. He absorbed each detail of the forest in the approaching dusk. The moss on the trunks of the maple trees, the bare bushes, the tall pillars of birch, some in bud, across the brook. The sound of the brook surrounded them, as it would as long as they lived here. Such a comfort he thought. After a time of silence, he felt her touch.

“Food,” she said. “We must eat. Can you start a fire?”

“Oh yes.
Welàgewei.
”

“Supper,” she echoed, and smiled. Their first meal in their new home.

Impulsively she hugged him, and then they kissed, a deep long kiss of happiness and peace.

They ate their supper silently, Thomas savouring every bite in a glow of intense happiness. He kept studying Little Birch’s face as she ate shyly, looking into the fire. Was she thinking of the night that was fast dropping upon them? Was she wondering how it might all go? Had she not heard stories among the women, of their nuptial bed and what it might be like? Might she be afraid?

He studied her face, so archetypal, all the planes and features in tune. Her black hair fell in waves (he had asked her to let it down), a frame for the perfection below. Her lanky body, in an almost angular frame, still seemed so intrinsically feminine. To possess such a creature was beyond all comprehending — unbearably exciting, considering what was fast approaching.

She looked up. “Home.” She nodded slightly. “Different.”

“Yours, now,” he replied. “And my heart too. All yours.” She looked down. Not used to such demonstrations of affection, he imagined, she didn’t know how to take it. He’d have to be more careful.

She gathered the wooden dishes and mugs together, took them outside to clean in the brook water. He stayed in and set about preparing a better bed for their first night in each other’s arms. He cut fresh cedar boughs, which scented the cabin with a delicious evergreen smell. Next came moss, and then the bearskin to cover it all. A rabbit-skin blanket would be all they’d need over them tonight, he thought, with the door shut, and no wind.

Dusk began to settle and it was getting cold, but Little Birch was adamant that they make safe their only store of meat, the portion of moose the band had given them. She took him up the brook, and selected a fine poplar from which to stretch a line across to another. In the centre she hung the stash, to prevent animals getting to it.

“Why so far away?”

“Animals, they always smell this, they always come, we don’t want them around our cabin. This for us, that for them.”

“Fine by me, Magwés.”

He climbed down and saw that she stood, rather uncertainly, waiting. He went across and took her hand in his and put it to his mouth. He pressed his lips against her fingers, trying to say with his eyes: it will be wonderful.

Then, with her hand still in his, he led her into the cabin and closed the door.

***

The low flame of a tallow wick on the floor softened all reality, creating the mood he wanted. Avoiding any swift motion, as though she were a doe, easily frightened, he removed his jacket, and then his woollen shirt, and finally his undershirt. Unbuckling his belt, he let his leather chaps fall to the floor.

Keeping her eyes on the floor, she made no move. Thomas stepped forward, began gently to unlace her bodice. She shook her head and then, promptly and efficiently, got out of her clothes and folded them neatly aside. At last, she looked up at him. Naked, they stood facing each other.

His eyes began to rove her exquisite body, every feature so perfect, when to avoid that, she stepped close, and pressed her body against his. Almost at once a crazed passion seemed to envelope them both, and his arms went round her.

He began kissing her cheeks, her neck, smoothing her wild black locks, as she began to explore him too, her tiny fingers moving down onto his manhood, caressing it, as she kept pressing her lips against his. They melted onto the bearskin and inexperienced though they were, began to make the finest love, Thomas was sure, ever seen or felt anywhere on earth.

When the moment came to enter her, his body begged for completion but he restrained himself, becoming tender and gentle, moving all the while as she accepted him into herself with building ecstasy. As the two became one, he felt he was embracing the embodiment of all natural things, all creatures born that inhabited this wilderness world, she was for him every brook and shimmering wave and churning rapid, the brilliant stars and shafts of sunlight, as the two of them moved in great waves on the bearskin covering. She was the happiness bird, the wolves and caribou, big game and small game, all the landscape of this wide sprawling New World, and for her part, she accepted him as her new partner, explorer and adventurer, a mystical embrace, man coming from the sunrise and woman facing sunrise, in a song of the earth, a union that bore so much promise.

Two mornings later, Thomas got up at dawn, making as always the most of every daylight hour. The May air was crisp but not too cold. He let Little Birch take her own time getting up and began to saunter back to the trail, after he had relieved himself. Why not check on their store of meat, he thought, guided by some premonition. The snow had all but departed now; this was his second year in the New World. How much he’d learned, he said to himself, when suddenly, he heard what sounded like the scrape of claws.

The hairs rose on his neck. He drew the knife from its sheath which now, like a Micmac, he always carried. Blood pumping, he stood listening. Then he inched forward, placing his feet like a member of the tribe, one after another carefully over the branch strewn ground. Then he saw it — up the tree where his moose hung, a tawny colour.

Could that be a lion? Not here for sure. But the body, he estimated, must be at least four feet in length. He crept closer. A cougar? Maybe, but they lived back in the interior, like the one that killed the Micmac hunter and his son. Inching up, he saw it was playing with the rope above the dried moose. Ferociously hungry, poor thing, Thomas surmised. What to do? Yell and frighten it off?

Run back for his gun?

Then behind him, he heard a distinct mewing. Kittens? He turned. Her litter. Three cougar kittens feeling sorry for themselves, now that Mum was not around, and complaining loudly. Oh-oh, he had placed himself between her and her kittens. Not good!

He drew back, and as he turned to run, the kittens saw him and mewed louder and started spitting. Go fast! He tore past the kittens, who shrank back. He caught a glimpse of the cougar hitting the ground under the tree and bounding after him.

He turned to face her, and thrust his arms out, stiff, the knife clutched dead ahead. He let out a wild war-hoop as the leaping cougar flew through the air. His knife caught her in the neck.

The yowl gurgled in her throat as her claws tore at his arms and neck. Her blood mingled with his, as she jackknifed away to snarl and spit at this foreign object stuck in her throat. He managed to roll aside, but then she came at him again, blood streaming from her neck.

Weakly he braced for her next onslaught. But the knife had done its job. She was done for.

But so am I, he realized. Dazed, he tried to staunch the flow of blood spurting from his right arm where her claws had shredded it, and from his neck and side.

The kittens ran off into the bushes, frightened by the thrashing death throes of their mother. Those kittens... He almost felt like kneeling in prayer by her writhing body, but she was snarling, blood gurgling out of her throat as she tumbled over and over. He lifted his eyes to Niskam. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry...” Finally, she lay twitching on the pine-needled moss. He became aware of the warm liquid running down his left side. He felt his neck with his hand, and then saw from his arm his blood pulsing out in spurts.

“Thomas! Are you all right?” Little Birch came running up, calling his name. She stopped dead, aghast.

“Thomas!” she screamed, and ran to him.

“My arm.”

“Yes yes, I can see.” She knelt quickly, pressed her thumb next to the slash to stop the flow. “And your neck. Press there.” She put his hand on the flap of skin where more blood was issuing. He pressed, though he now was feeling faint.

“Try to walk. We must get back to the cabin. I have my things...”

Thomas nodded and tried to get up, holding his neck, while she clasped his arm. They staggered down the path, her holding him up with surprising strength. He made his feet cover the ground as fast as he could. “It’s stopped a bit,” she encouraged.

“But for how long?” What a fine mess, he thought, bleeding to death just when everything was perfect. Ironic! This day of all days, the start of his married life. He was losing consciousness. Hurry, he said, and let the hand drop from his neck.

Awkwardly they made it to the cabin when he started to black out. She helped him down onto some leaves. “Do not let go.” She placed his hand on the neck again.

“Hold your arm here, with hand. Press. Press hard. I get pack.”

Alone for a moment, he could see that no matter how good it was to make life, it was still so easy to lose it. It had taken him a full year to get this far, and in a few seconds, that mother cougar might well end it all.

Little Birch came to crouch beside him. She set to work with a strip of moose hide and a stick to tie a tourniquet round his arm above the wound. She placed a pad under the strip over the artery, which effectively shut off the bleeding for the time being.

She wiped the blood off his other cuts as best she could, and then settled herself with a precious bone needle and fine tendon. “I will stitch this.” She set to work on the flap of skin that had opened on his neck and from which more blood ran. But first, she took from her bag some tiny dried leaves. “Chew these.” A soporific?

Thomas stuffed them in his mouth and chewed hard.

The pain did lessen.

Thomas succeeded in stifling what would have normally been cries of pain as the needle thrust somewhat roughly into his tender neck flesh. He looked down at the cut on his arm. In spite of the tourniquet, it kept leaking blood.

When she had finished stitching his neck, she tied a bandage round it and inspected his arm.
“Gesipemgewei,”
she mumbled to herself. But Thomas heard, and knew what it meant: very sick indeed.

The prognosis was not good. Damn, who’d have believed it? He sank back, and left himself in the hands of the Good Lord, and of course hers. His thoughts spun round and he felt weak. Was he delirious? He thought of the kittens, who would now surely starve. Maybe they should go find them? If only... If only he got through this. Alive. “Your neck is better, I think. Most bleeding stopped. But blood still runs down your arm, when we loosen the tourniquet.” She sat back, clearly worried. She had reached an impasse.

“Cauterize,” Thomas murmured weakly.

“What is that?”

“Burn the cut.”

“Burn? How?”

“My knife. It’s steel. Make it red hot. In the fire. Then put on cut. Stops blood.” “Oh. I have heard, yes.”

Quickly, she put kindling on the fire, and rose. “I come back.” She took off fast up the brook.

No idea, Thomas thought in a haze, that she was such a good healer. So much to learn about her. If I live to find out.

She came back from the dead cougar in what seemed a flash with his knife, which she thrust into the building flames.

He turned his head, saw his knife in the fire, and tried to get his brain around what was about to happen. He’d seen surgeons on naval ships cauterize wounds in battle. He’d heard the screams. How would he stand the pain? Not so much the pain, he worried how he’d stop himself from screaming over and over, when that red hot knife pressed into his open wound. Indians did not cry out. Stoic, they bore all sorts of pain without complaint.

What would she think of him? His screaming would be involuntary, something he just could not control. And would burning the wound actually staunch the blood, save his life? What if it did not work?

Fainting, he called, “Magwés.” Again a bit louder, “Magwés.”

She turned. Thomas gestured. She came and knelt. “I am afraid,” he whispered. “I know I will scream. I won’t be able to stop.”

She looked at him, in pain herself, but her mind worked fast.

“I am not an Indian, Magwés, I will cry like a baby.” In spite of himself, tears came into his eyes. “You will lose respect.”

Little Birch rose. “I must go. Find plant. And Thomas, you are never coward. You killed moose. All the band knows this. They respect you.” “But Magwés...”

She spoke the words which he longed to hear and which soothed his rattled brain: “Whatever happens, I will never, never leave you.”

Thomas watched her go off. What herb was she looking for, what native medicine, and what could it do? He turned his head back, and watched the tops of the leafy trees above him. Curious moment in his life, he thought: this could be the end. He might live no more. Did those plants above know what he was about to go through? Would these branches continue to wave for a month, for years, for generations, here in this leafy spot? Would other generations of young men like himself, come across the Atlantic to make a new life for themselves? Would many things be invented — how recently had they discovered the power loom, the cotton gin, even a steam locomotive for a railway. What might the future bring to them both. But a future he might never see. And in such a way, he forced his mind from his plight and onto more prescient thoughts, waiting for the worst to happen. But she would be searing his flesh for his own good, to keep him going, keep him strong and well. Quite an initiation.

He prayed out loud: “Dear God, help me through this.

Be near me at my hour of need. Protect me from cowardice. Give me strength to be a man, to be an Indian, for they are the strongest, help me be like them. Help me, Lord.”

With a piece of hide, Little Birch covered the handle of the knife whose blade glowed red, and came forward. She gave Thomas another type of leaf, and motioned for him to stuff it in his mouth, with chewing motions. He did so, chewing vigorously.

She then gave him some leather, and said, “Open your mouth, hold in your teeth, and bite hard.”

Oh Lord, thought Thomas, hold this tight with my teeth? Before he could think, he popped the evil-tasting ball of hide into his mouth, and at that moment, he was stricken with the most unimaginable electrifying pain shooting through his whole body as the glowing knife pressed into the open wound. He stiffened as though struck by a jolt of lightning and opened his mouth, but thanks to some godlike intervention, no sound came out as he writhed in torment and then the pain pierced his very existence so that he blacked out.

***

The next morning lying under their rabbit skins together in his cabin, Thomas awoke. He was conscious of his neck being stiff, which he attributed to his spasms of pain last night more than to his arm that hurt, yes, but not unbearably.

The morning chorus of birds surrounded the camp, as though they were all so pleased to be here on the Gaspé Coast, the bright New World which Thomas had taken on as his personal challenge. Each one seemed to be rejoicing in the rise of the sun. He imagined the Micmac camp: a few of them would be up and about, the women going for water down at the river, little boys sleepily stretching, the Elders coming out for a smoke on the two logs while awaiting food. A great happy family no doubt, quite unlike the hustle and bustle of the manor house, where everyone moved obediently at their appointed tasks under the watchful eyes of layers of authority. So yes, he realized, he had become very accepting of his tribe, however primitive they had at first appeared to his Old World eyes.

Even the happiness bird he could hear this morning, calling out to him: happiness, happiness, happiness — and he
was
happy, knowing that the major pain had passed, the bleeding was stopped, and he would recover. She stirred beside him, and her eyes flew open. “You all right?”

“Yes, Magwés,more than all right.” She leaned over and kissed him tenderly. “You saved my life. Again.”

She rose to a sitting position. “You will get better now.” “But Magwés,” he mumbled, “how did you stop the blood from that gash on my back?”

“I shut the little pipe.”

“You mean, the artery?”

“Yes, I took tendon from leg of moose,” she reached in her medicine pouch to show him, “you must first grind tendon, there is a little covering—” “A sheath, sort of?”

She shrugged. “Well, you grind, and it comes very fine, for sewing.”

“You did?”

“My grandmother did this, but she showed me. You tie it around little tube. It stops blood.”

“You mean I’ll wander around with a chunk of moose tendon in me?”

She giggled. “No, Thomas, the body, it makes the tendon,” she gestured, “part of body, your body, like new, it goes away.”

“The tendon gets absorbed?” Thomas could hardly believe his ears. If only the surgeons on ships knew about that, they wouldn’t have to use the thread that sailors found often irritated them long after the wounds had healed. She was clamping an artery shut better than any ship’s surgeon. Amazing how these “bloody savages” could devise their own healing methods, far from any so-called civilization. “Magwés, you’re a miracle.”

She smiled. “Maybe. But I learn so much from you, from watching you, seeing what you plan here to build for us.”

Later, they discussed this mysterious appearance of the cougar, so rarely seen this close to the actual coast. The tribe’s shaman would claim the spirit of Burn had come back in this form. She smiled when she said it. Tough young lady, thought Thomas. He preferred to think that the mother cat had been hungry this spring and was after their store of moose. Then, afraid for her three kittens, she had attacked him. Oh yes, those kittens:
“Gajueijíj,”
Thomas asked, “kittens” in Micmac, “What about her litter?”

“Very tender,” she said, a word of approbation he had used after their better winter meals. “We will have one for lunch today.”

What a thought! Hard to take. But then, this was a hard land, you had to be tough to make it; no place for sentimentality. Kittens could be loved in the Old Country, where people had carved out a living for millennia. But here (no pets save for the odd dog) survival came first — just hard work, hard caring for each other. He felt confident that, with this tough new partner, they would make it together, against all odds.