Thieving Forest (32 page)

“My grandfather’s grandfather did not have the word
trade
,” Koman told him. “His people went up north to exchange gifts, bringing tools they no longer needed and receiving beaver robes that the northern tribe no longer had use for. Each gift was already used, that was how it was. You gave what you didn’t need anymore knowing it would be useful to another, and they did the same. That was how it was.”

“Not so different from trading,” Seth said. But after thinking about it, he wonders now if maybe Koman’s grandfather’s way is more honest. No underlying hope of getting more than you will give. Just looking to get something you can use. A gift. Koman has brought with him copper and crystals and shells from the Atlantic, all with some ritual significance. When Seth asks Koman what they mean, Koman says, “Telling won’t tell story.”

The trees close up into a leafy ceiling and the blueflies fly off the calumet. Seth can see a long horde of mosquitoes on the bank hovering in a throbbing, vertiginous line. He fancies they are looking for him. He paddles harder.

The next day he and Koman come upon a group of Miami paddling up in the opposite direction. The lead canoe also carries a white calumet, as well as three young pigs in a willow-branch cage. Twelve or fifteen men and women are traveling in six canoes, and each canoe carries a cage of pigs. The two parties land their boats on the riverbank, and Koman talks to the eldest Miami for several minutes. Then he comes back to Seth.

“We will share food with them,” he says.

That morning they shot two turkeys for breakfast and ate only the wings of one. Now they cook the other one and share it with the Miami. One woman carefully picks out the bones and saves them with the gizzards in a cracked leather sack. The men are wearing trade blankets and beads like the Ottawas, and while they eat they talk to Koman. They speak quickly, not always in Potawatomi, and Seth can understand maybe one word in five.

“Have they seen the women?” Seth asks Koman. “Say they are traveling in a flat-bottomed boat.”

The men shake their heads. The woman who collected the bird bones looks at Seth. “Your women lost?” she says in English. “No good.”

He tells her in Potawatomi that the two women are heading north. They are going to the Maumee. One has red hair.

“Many streams here.” She shakes her head. “You are first
chmokman
I see.”

A hot wind begins to blow, bringing with it the scent of damp earth. Some clouds drift across the sky and then seem to stop in a bunch. The pigs have fallen asleep in the heat.

“They are going to Gemeinschaft,” Koman tells Seth when the meal is over. A boy fills a pipe with tobacco and brings it to him. He lights it and gives it to Seth. “Pass to the father after you,” he tells him.

It is the calumet with the long white feather from the Miami’s lead canoe. Seth is not much of a smoker, but this mixture is smooth and like Koman he pulls on it twice before passing it on. “They are Christian?”

“No. They hope to buy land near the village. One daughter once lived there as a Christian with her husband, but now she is dead. Last hunting season was thin, and the one before that, and the one before that. There are signs that this season will be the same. They blame the Delawares, skin hunters they call them. They have decided to raise pigs and cattle, if they can buy a few cows from the brethren. And if they find land close enough, they are hoping that the Christian Indians will watch their livestock when they are off on the hunt.”

One of the sons says something to Koman, shrugging and smiling. When he smiles small wrinkles make an O around his mouth.

“Not enough wild meat anymore,” Koman translates.

Seth watches them smoke. They inhale deeply and seem to enjoy the conversation. They don’t have an air of despair. No feeling of tragedy. It’s just a fact: not enough wild meat. So now they will do something else, something to augment the hunting. Pigs and cattle. Seth notices a long kind of flute on the smiling son’s belt, which he has seen Old Adam use when he’s fishing—it makes a certain noise to attract the fish. The Miami will do what they have to do to survive.

The son reaches over and feels the hem of Seth’s trousers.

“What will you take for?” he asks.

The gray linen fabric is stained and ripped in one place, although that can be mended. Still, Seth is surprised. The Miami’s leather breeches are much more useful for traveling in a swamp. More effective against the mosquitoes, for one thing.

Seth points to the man’s own breeches, and they agree to trade. Wearing the breeches will mark him as Miami, or as one who trades with Miami. But he doesn’t care about that. Even better would be one of their hide tunics. He would trade everything he had if it meant even one mosquito could not get through to his skin. He goes to his canoe and comes back with Cade’s fishing net.

“This gift for you,” he says. “For your shirt?”

Twenty-One

As soon as she and Meera come out from the trees that mark the end of the Great Black Swamp, Susanna sees the two Wyandot men fishing on the riverbank.

The men’s poles are stuck fast in the sandy dirt, and they are squatting next to them playing a game with rocks—gambling?—and laughing at some mistake one of them has just made. Susanna’s first urge is to turn around and escape their notice, but where would she run to? Back into the Black Swamp? She almost cannot believe that they have gotten free of it at last. She looks at the Maumee River stretched out before them, which is wide and green and dotted with slivers of islands like thin crusts of bread. Susanna draws in her breath at the vast pale sky above the water. It’s been a long time since she has seen anything overhead except tree branches.

In the end Omie let them stay with her for three nights, but she never changed her mind about the canoe. Yet she was generous in her way, feeding them and washing their clothes and packing enough food for two weeks although she claimed the journey would take them less than half that time, even with crossing the Maumee. On the morning they left, she herself led them to the rill—to Susanna, indistinguishable from all the other rills they passed—that would lead them out of the Black Swamp. Omie lifted her hand in farewell as she turned without breaking her pace to go back. Besides pigeon pies, she gave them a jar of raisin wine and a good many bones for soup, wrapped up in a handkerchief. When Susanna drank the wine later, she fancied it carried the faint taste of flower stems.

They have come out of the trees to a spot where the Maumee turns, and the two men are on a narrow sandbar near its bend. Both of them are muscular and thin and wear only a small patch of deerskin covering their loins. Behind them lay two large cords of firewood. One stands to check his fishing pole, and Susanna steps back into the tree shadows. But Meera walks boldly past her down the bank.

“Wait,” Susanna whispers, and reaches out to grab her arm. Too late. Meera walks toward the two men and after a moment Susanna follows, feeling both annoyed and protective. Why does Meera never consult me? she thinks peevishly.

Meera approaches the two men holding something out in her hand—four white beads—and she asks the men where they can find a boatman to cross them to the other side of the river.

“We are looking for the Wyandot village,” she says in Delaware. “We were told it was to the north.”

The older man looks at Susanna and speaks quickly in a low voice, a question.

Meera says, “She is my property.”

Susanna has a moment’s surprise at that. The younger man wears an affable expression, as if everything he looks at pleases him in a way that he did not foresee. When he opens his mouth, she sees that his two front teeth have been filed to points.

There is a boatman, the older one says, just a mile or so up the river. But he warns them that the man has moods and you never know where those moods might lead him—sometimes away from his boat for days. Follow the river north until you see a small dock, he tells them. If no one is there, sit down and wait.

“And the Wyandot village is on the other side?”

He gives her directions. Although he’s a Wyandot, he doesn’t say if he is from that village or not. Meera thanks him and gives him two more white beads, which he hands to the younger man.

“
Lennowayeh-hum
,” Meera tells Susanna as they walk away.

“What’s that?”

The men are eunuchs. Susanna feels a flush of shock as Meera explains it to her. “What? But why? Are you sure?”

“Did you not notice the bundles of firewood? They have been sent to do a woman’s work. There was one in Nushemakw’s tribe. It is not so unusual.”

Susanna looks back at the men. “Was it a punishment?” The men, playing their game again, are squatting close together making their own shade. They do not look unhappy.

“Usually the men choose it themselves. I don’t know why.”

“But afterward...how do they marry?”

Meera shrugs. “Some have women as companions, some have men. The eunuch in Nushemakw’s tribe lived with a man. He made beautiful little animals out of twigs and acorn tops, and was a skilled hunter. He taught me to shoot.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died and was buried, the same as everyone else. Let us take cover, we need not walk in plain sight.”

A line of beech trees comes down to meet the riverbank, and Susanna follows Meera into their shade. The eunuchs are strong, healthy men who have chosen to live this way. She tries to understand it. Meera is telling her about some of the hunting she did with the eunuch, a bear they tracked for six days, while they walk over piles of old leaves and fallen branches. Without a path it is hard walking, and even after their time at Omie’s cabin their strength is not what it was. After a while they decide to stop and split the last pigeon pie and then they rest, each one leaning back against a tree trunk. Susanna feels herself drift into a hot doze. She is following her mother from room to room in their cabin, now a cave-like maze with dozens of doorways, but she cannot get Ellen to stop or turn around.

Something wakes her. She opens her eyes to see the younger eunuch squatting in front of her with the flat of his hands on opposite knees. He is wearing the same affable expression as before. She draws back reflexively, hitting her head on the tree trunk.

“Meera,” she says. Her voice comes out high and scared, like a child’s.

But he just smiles at her showing his pointed teeth, and says in English, “Not safe here to sleep.”

His companion stands behind him with his arms at his sides. The cords of wood are tied high up on their backs, the way women carry wood, and the older one has a string of strong-smelling fish slung over one shoulder.

Meera gets to her feet. “We weren’t...we just ate. We were resting.”

“A band of Ottawa not far away,” the older one says. “Could be mischief.” He tells them they should climb a tree and wait for the Ottawa to pass.

“Did you see them?” Meera asks. “How do you know?”

The older one says something in Wendat and both men laugh. Meera translates for Susanna: “The smell.”

They choose a thick, leafy buckeye with small orange flowers growing along the base of the trunk like tiny heads of flame. The older eunuch straightens the stems once they are up in the branches to hide their presence. From where she sits, Susanna can see the top of his head. It has been a long time since she’s seen a group of men. Her palms, gripping the tree branch, feel slippery. What would the Ottawa do if they found them? She’s heard stories of prisoners who are burned, their hearts bled into a broth. But Liza Footbound told her that stories like these were lies. Still, she tries to position her feet so they cannot be seen from the ground, and Meera, a little higher up, does the same.

When they are satisfied that Meera and Susanna are well hidden, the two eunuchs shrug their wood bundles up a little higher on their backs. Then, like Omie, they walk on without a backward glance.

For more than an hour Meera and Susanna stay up in the tree. Susanna grows hotter and more uncomfortable with each slow minute. Perhaps the Ottawa have gone by without being seen, she thinks. Perhaps they found a path farther from the river. Perhaps the eunuchs lied. But in any case, when she notices that the sun is directly overhead, that the whole of the morning has passed, she decides that she cannot stay in that cramped position a moment longer.

She says, “I’m climbing down.”

“Is it safe?” Meera whispers.

“I don’t want to miss the boatman. I don’t want to run out of food.”

She has learned one thing at least: food must be considered at every juncture. The trunk of the buckeye is smoother than it looks and her grip slips coming down, causing her to fall on the orange flowers and crushing the eunuchs’ careful work. She stands and holds her breath to listen, but can hear nothing except the sound of the rushing water and the same birdcalls they have heard all morning. Meera climbs down more carefully, and they make their way over to where the tree cover is heavier. They do not speak to each other, fearful of missing any warning sound of the Ottawa.

But they come to the ferry landing without seeing anyone. Through the tree branches Susanna spies a lopsided dock with mossy water lapping up to it, and a weathered gray shack up the shore. There the boatman sits against an unevenly nailed wall with his hat down over his eyes and a hunting rifle across his lap. He takes his time standing when Susanna calls out to him. He looks her over, and then looks at Meera, and tells them his name is Swale. He has long matted hair that reaches halfway down his back like a dark dirty web and he is swarthy for a white man. His arms and legs are fat with muscle, and when he speaks his voice is so heavy it could carry clear across the river. Yet for all of that he is barely taller than Meera. A strong, short man.