Follow the River Read online

  “A paradise down there by the spring, and they choose an eagle’s nest for a camp,” Mary explained.

  “So ’tis,” murmured Henry Lenard. “A safe place from pursuit, that’s why.”

  “D’y’ reckon anyone is followin’ us?”

  “Not likely, I guess. Who’s to follow? Best as I could make out, they kilt Colonel Patton. I saw Jim Cull light out f’r the woods wounded, limpin’ bad,” said Henry. “That leaves but Will and Johnny and Casper to follow. An’ maybe Bill Preston an’ Phil Lybrook, who was down th’ creek som’ers, an’ maybe stayed safe.”

  “Not Casper,” Bettie sniffled. “I saw ’em cut him up. I saw …”

  “Let’s us have a look at y’r poor blighted arm, Bettie …” Mary said, scooting carefully across the rock and closer to her. “I been frettin’ about that all the livelong day …” She didn’t want Bettie to start recalling the massacre.

  “It’s broke here. Ow! Oh! I can’t stand touchin’ …”

  “Now, down at that spring, with water and a fire and a shred o’ daylight left, I could ha’ treated that up just sweet as c’d be,” Mary commented. “But here … well, got t’ splint it somehow, at least, darlin’. Mister Lenard, would y’be so kind as to feel around f’r a few sticks please, about a foot long, I guess. An’ I’ll get me some strips o’ cloth here. Must tear the sleeve off y’r pretty dress, Bet, hon, t’ get at you. Tommy, I must ask’ee to clean up Georgie a bit. He’s messed himself, poor tad … and, Tommy,” she added, “thankee for not letting your auntie die on us. That was a good lad …”

  “I won’t die on y’ now,” Bettie murmured. “Forgive me such talk. I just …”

  “Ssshhh, now. Nought to forgive.”

  Mary ripped up the bloody sleeve of Bettie’s dress and tore strips from her own skirt, and with a few lengths of branch Henry had broken off a shrub, they prepared a makeshift splint. “This’ll hurt, now, Bettie. But just for a minute. Pull her hand there if y’d kindly do so, Mister Lenard, just a slow an’ steady pull …”

  Bettie’s shriek split the night open and quavered out over the valley when Mary probed blindly into the swollen, bloody flesh of the broken upper arm as Henry stretched the arm. Mary steeled herself against the anguished wail and tried to guide the broken ends of the bone together, as she and Will had done once for Johnny after a log-toting accident had snapped his arm.

  But there were no simple clean bone ends in Bettie’s break. The musketball had shattered the bone and Mary could feel pieces of it adrift in the tortured flesh. A pity, she thought; it’s going to heal up short. If it heals at all, she thought.

  So, as Bettie went into a merciful faint, they braced the arm as well as they could in the splint, and Mary prayed that the festering might not get too well started before they could make a decent camp with a fire and hot water and maybe a poultice of some kind—what was that we used for Johnny’s? she tried to remember; comfrey, that’s what it was, comfrey—a poultice of comfrey leaves to draw the pus and poison out.

  And at that moment a huge grab of pain in her own sore and strained pelvis reminded her of another urgent reason why they would need a decent camp any time now.

  The captives awakened themselves and each other at times throughout the night with the mutterings of their nightmares and discomforts. But the marvel of it to Mary Ingles was that they had slept at all, on the bare, crumbling stone of the cliff-top, with the dew settling on them and chilling their skin. Mary had been tormented awake countless times by the pain of stone debris grinding into her shoulders or flanks or the side of her face, and especially under her weighted hipbones, and had turned over and lain there trying to drown thoughts of their desperate straits in the muzzy undercurrent of exhaustion. She had managed to doze now and then, and when she awoke in the indistinct predawn grayness, she realized that she had fallen at last into an utter oblivion of slumber, she knew not how long. She looked about and saw her children and Bettie and Henry lying like so many dew-damp corpses in the half-light, saw the vast, foggy abyss beyond the edges of the cliff and saw the form of the Indian sentry still sitting, as if in a trance, a few feet away.

  The Indians, she saw, had not even indulged themselves with a campfire. As the light grew, she saw the warriors rise one by one from their beds of concealment, with their weapons, and she knew that they had slept—if they had slept at all—ready to do instant battle, if necessary, on this fortresslike cliff-top. They had both hobbled and rope-corralled the horses, in a grassy glade near the edge of the woods, no doubt to keep them from straying over the brink of the cliff during the night.

  The Indian camp stirred to life in silence. The river muttered and rushed below. A cricket nearby creaked its monotonous repetitions. Mary painfully detached herself from the ground, hauled herself upright and stepped among the sleeping captives to a small corner of space where she could relieve her bladder. Not wanting to squat and bare her haunches under the eyes of the Indian sentry, she simply spread her feet apart, bent her knees until her skirt hem touched the ground, gazed out over the valley and emptied herself of a long stream, concealed from his eyes. When she turned back from it, the Indian had not moved nor altered his impassive expression, but she imagined a smirk of amusement. The thought irritated her. It seemed very important somehow, though she knew she was presuming things about the Indian character, that she and the others should exhibit all the dignity their destitute circumstances would allow. Somehow, she felt, dignity might be all that could keep them alive. It was a notion she had arrived at largely by watching the straight-backed carriage of the tall chieftain.

  The sky paled. The mist began to grow pearly, then yellow, then began to separate into wisps and dissolve. Mary got the children awake and tended to them, persuading them through her own whispers and soft tones that they must not whine or talk too much. She aroused Bettie and Henry, managing to whisper to them also the conclusions she had reached about stoical and dignified behavior. “I don’t care how ever much y’ hurt, Bettie—nay, I mean, I do care—but however much, just be still and bear it. Once we get out of this, we two might just go out in the open somewhere and holler and caterwaul. But not so long as we’re in the hands of a band of nervous savages. What say y’ to that, Mister Lenard?”

  “Right smart, Mrs. Ingles. Dignity it is.”

  She mused on his apparent willingness to let her, a woman, assume the natural leadership among the hostages. Perhaps, she thought, it’s out of his respect for William.

  William! she thought, with such a mighty compression of her heart that it nearly forced undignified tears from her own eyes.

  A warrior brought a pan of food to the captives and took the place of the sentry. They ate while the Indians readied the pack train. Mary recognized some of her own hoecake, and also distributed a few sections of the rabbit she had been cooking yesterday—incredible that it was only yesterday! she thought—when the raid had so abruptly uprooted and scattered their lives.

  The Indians bound Henry’s hands again, and were about to tether him by the neck once more, when Mary took a chance on his behalf and indicated that the rope might be attached to his wrists instead of his neck. The Indians, to her surprise, simply shrugged and complied.

  Now, she thought, I reckon he can stay more dignified thataway.

  CHAPTER

  4

  They rode out northwestward that morning, following ridge trails and creekbeds, sometimes not glimpsing the river for hours. Then they would come around the brow of a mountain and there far below would be a stretch of river with an island in it, or a stunning horseshoe riverbend glinting in the morning sun under the lowering mass of some great curving cliff-face. Then up another steep ridge and into the deep woods or across a high meadow with no river to be seen for still more hours.

  When the river was out of sight for very long, Mary would suffer a dread suspicion that they were leaving it for good, and that they were being taken by some profound wilderness byway through which she could never find he
r way back for lack of landmarks. In those times she would glance back continuously, trying to find something to memorize. But those backward views were already becoming vague and muddled in her memory.

  You can only count on the river, she thought. Dear God let it be true that they never stray far from this river, or we all are lost, lost, lost from the way home.

  And then, just as she could hardly bear the dread another minute, a break in the forest would reveal the river, still coming along hundreds of feet below them; or sometimes, after they had descended a long ravine, they would suddenly come out from between two hills and find themselves right at the river’s edge, with bluffs and mountains towering on both sides as they picked their way along.

  Mary could no longer even estimate the distances they were traveling.

  I must at least, she thought, start keeping a count of the days.

  This day, she thought, which began on an eagle’s roost above a stone arch in a sharp riverbend, shall be known as our second day out. Our second day out.

  She committed it to her memory.

  By the end of their second day out, the Indians seemed to have lost much of their anxiety about being pursued. They stopped in a glade and spent an hour burying their two dead warriors and chanting over them.

  They did not ride late into the evening; instead they stopped at the base of a sheer cliff while there was still an hour of daylight. There were caves in the cliff, a few feet above the river level, and the warriors made the camp in one of these. It had a packed dirt floor, and old fire-beds made of circles of sooty stones. Pieces of Indian pottery and a few unbroken clay vessels lay here and there in the dim, cool interior, and there were old stacks of straight, slim, peeled poles and sticks which indicated that some industry—arrow making and canoe building, Mary guessed—had been conducted here in years past. In one corner lay pieces of arrowheads and a few broken stone axe heads.

  Tommy and Georgie were quite taken with the cave, and were cheerful and quiet, despite their fatigue and their general wariness of the Indians.

  The horses had been corralled in a grassy compound surrounded by dense brush at the river’s edge outside the cave, and a rope was strung from bush to bush to keep them from straying. Mary saw the chieftain send two braves climbing, with their guns slung on their backs, up the face of the cliff, one upstream and one downstream a few yards. They vanished into the cliff above, apparently into small caves overlooking the approaches to the canyon.

  Mary was scarcely able to move for the first few minutes after dismounting. Her back and pelvis were a mass of aches and stabbing pains, and her thighs cramped several times before she could knead out the muscles and straighten her limbs.

  When she was at last able to rise, she waddled to the chieftain, who stood in the mouth of the cave surveying the river and watching his braves bring firewood into the cave. He looked at her without expression, without the slightest trace of friendliness in his eyes. His severity, and the great quantity of wood the braves were fetching, suddenly alarmed Mary. A notion jumped into her mind that some of the hostages might be burned for the Indians’ entertainment. Or food! She felt a chill of the soul, and her legs began to tremble.

  Of course, she thought. The less they fear pursuit, the less they need us. For a moment she was rendered speechless by the thought, and stood with her mouth gaping while the chieftain waited to hear what she wanted.

  Be dignified, she reminded herself. Whatever it is, be dignified. She shut her mouth, stood as straight as she could and stared straight into his black-slit eyes. Then she pointed at Bettie, who sat with her back to a boulder, quiet and stoical, but going an awful pale gray in the face with the pain of her crudely splinted arm.

  “Mister,” Mary began, “I have to do something for her. I have to find something—some medicine leaves, do you understand?—for her arm.” Mary touched her own right upper arm and then pointed again at Bettie. “And I need hot water.” Even while asking for hot water, Mary remembered tales she had heard about savages ripping unborn infants from the womb and throwing them into stewpots to boil before the very eyes of their dying mothers. She remembered the warrior who had threatened to cut her open at the settlement. Was this what they were planning, with all their wood gathering? At that moment a brave entered the cave carrying a large iron sugaring kettle that had belonged to Casper Barrier at the settlement, and again Mary had to bite inside her cheeks to keep from whimpering. And as if to confirm her fears, the chieftain let a suggestion of a grim smile move the corner of his mouth.

  But in the meantime, there was Bettie to be taken care of.

  “Medicine leaves,” Mary repeated.

  “Mo-ther go there, be still,” the chieftain ordered, pointing to Bettie and the children.

  “Please, Mist …”

  “There.”

  And so the prisoners huddled together near the mouth of the cave and watched the Indians build two fires, a large one and a smaller one. The warriors rigged a wooden frame over each fire. They hung a small kettle over the smaller fire and the big kettle over the larger fire. They brought vessels of water and filled the kettles. The Indians had built and managed the fires so that they were virtually smokeless, and the little smoke that did rise from them flowed up a natural draft out of the cave mouth and up the face of the cliff.

  Mary did not express her fears to Bettie or Henry. Perhaps those or similar fears were haunting them already. But to talk of them would only worsen the fright that was already as much as they could bear in dignity. Mary settled the children side by side in a niche floored with soft, dusty earth, and told them to take a nap before supper. It was like a down mattress compared with the flinty cliff-top of the first night’s camp, and the boys’ eyes grew heavy immediately and they fell into a sound sleep. God be merciful, Mary thought. If they’re to be murdered, let it be in their sleep so’s they won’t see it coming. Then she turned to the care of Bettie’s arm. Being careful not to unsettle the position of the bones, she untied the knots in the splint’s bindings and laid back the sticks. “Some nice, for a riggin’ done blind,” observed Henry Lenard with satisfaction as he knelt and helped. “We can make a better, though, with some o’ them sticks yonder.”

  “Aye,” Mary said. “But I don’t care f’r th’ looks o’ that flesh.” The edges of the wound were swollen and were issuing a mass of greenish-white pus. There were bits of dirt and bark, even some dead gnats, in the pus, the result of their having dressed the wound by feel in the darkness. Mary knelt close, straining over her own massive, hurting belly, and sniffed the wound. The baby within her kicked, as if demanding more room. “Not stinkin’ a whole lot yet. How’s it feel, Bet?”

  “Hurts somethin’ unspeakable. An’ itches.”

  “Well, by the Eternal, if these savages have got no humanity to a sick woman, I sh’ll … Got to clean that. Raise up there, darlin’. I need your apron.” She removed it, then rose with a wheeze and stood. She went dizzy, and had to grope for a handhold on a boulder. Her vision cleared. She carried the apron straight to the small kettle and, before any warrior could move to stop her, dipped it into the boiling water. She raised it out steaming and, tossing it from hand to hand to avoid scalding herself, carried it back to Bettie’s side and stooped. “Hot, now,” she said. “Don’t jerk your arm.” And, deftly folding it into a pad, she laid it on the suppurating wound and held it there snug with her palms. Bettie lurched at the contact of the heat, but she kept the arm still.

  “Oh, merciful God,” she groaned. “Thankee, Mary. Oh, I feel it’s helpin’. Oh, leave it there. Oh, I feel it’s just a-pullin’ that corruption out …”

  Mary gathered herself to rise. “Got to rinse it hot again.” She swabbed the wound gently as she took the cloth away.

  The chieftain stood between her and the kettle, frowning. “ ’Scuse me, Mister,” she muttered, going around him. But he grabbed her arm and held her back.

  “You not do,” he said. “See this.” He nodded to a warrior who stood ove
r the kettle with an armful of various leaves and strips of green bark. As he spilled them into the boiling water, Mary recognized some of the plants as comfrey. “Go be still,” the chieftain said, shoving her back toward the other captives.

  Mary hardly dared to hope. She sat holding the sopping apron against Bettie’s wound, feeling the baby kick within herself, and tried to watch the proceedings at the fires. Into the big kettle the Indians were putting barley and cutting pieces of the venison they had taken from Mrs. Lybrook’s house. A short, slight, older warrior was bent over the smaller pot, stirring and mashing the plants in the water. The smell of a stew began to mingle with a sharp, bitter medicinal steam from the other kettle.

  And then the Indian brought a piece of cloth and a gourd to the kettle. He dipped a mass of green slime out of the kettle and into the cloth, then folded the cloth over and over to contain it. Holding it gingerly by the corners then, he brought it to Mary and held it forth to her, nodding in the direction of Bettie’s arm.

  With a rush of gratitude, Mary realized that her remotest hope had come true: the Indians had prepared a poultice of the comfrey and other medicinal leaves and barks. “Thank’ee, Mister, thank’ee thank’ee!” she kept saying as she squatted down and plastered the slick, squishy compress over the bullet wound. “Oh, I can’t believe this, merciful God, how thou work’st even through heathens and murtherers.” Mary was almost ecstatic. Surely this poultice would be even better than the ones they had learned to use in the settlement. She hummed softly while applying it. The chieftain came over once and looked down at the two women. He did not ask anything or show any expression, but for the first time Bettie spoke directly to him:

  “Y’ll burn in etarnal hell, for what y’ done t’ my poor babe …” Mary grew alarmed for the possible consequences of such an outburst, not knowing how much of it the Indian understood; but Bettie added, “… may the Devil give y’ a minute’s respite, though, for this kindness. It feels better already, sir …” And then she lapsed back with a sigh and closed her eyes.