An Embarrassment of Riches Read online

  “And is partnership founded on so mushy a soil that thee would treat thine associate as a mere captive?”

  “You object to your bedding?” Bilbo laughed. “Let me remind you, sir, that this is the frontier and that you are lucky to have a roof over your head, let alone a hearth to warm your feet, not to mention the protection of this vigilant stalwart.”

  “Grrrrr,” Neddy said.

  “I am as familiar with the ways of the wild woodland as thou art acquainted with the habits of perfidy and crime,” Uncle countered. “It is the bonds I object to.”

  “A most regrettable but necessary precaution,” Bilbo said with a sigh. “Had I only a strand of potato stalk borer thread securing me to that rascal Voorhees in the silkworks fiasco … well, gentlemen, why prate on about what might have been, for ’tis the vision of what will be that drives the venture at hand. Come now, old fellow,” Bilbo took me by the elbow and guided me up the ladder to the sleeping loft at the far end of the cottage. Once upstairs, he bid me lie down on the wooden bed.

  “Am I to sleep in your daughter’s bed?”

  “Nothing is too good for such a worthy gentleman as yourself,” Bilbo said, binding my wrists and ankles to the four posts. “Sweet dreams.”

  He climbed downstairs, taking the candle with him. Soon the house was dark, save the flickering glow of the hearth. Despite my bindings, sleep quickly overwhelmed me. I don’t know how much later it was that I awoke to the sensation of hands creeping across my breast, opening my shirt buttons, then foraging in my breeches.

  “O, no!” I cried before the monster stuffed a rag in my mouth. I next felt her soft, warm, feminine flesh bear its weight upon me, while her mouth issued the telltale whistling exhalations.

  But her face was not visible to me in that near-total darkness, and I would be less than candid to aver that I was not seized by a most shameful and uncontrollable priapism, the climax of which was a taste of the life everlasting that makes us all links in the Great Chain of Being.

  3

  I awoke to the screams of quarreling blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata) and the scratching of squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) as they scurried over the roof. I realized at once, and to my horror, where I was. Bessie snuggled beside me. She stirred, lifted her frightful visage, and tenderly whistled words that, after lengthy cogitation, I made out to be “good morning, sweetheart.” My heart swam amongst my liver and lights.

  “Be kind, my pet, and untie these bonds,” said I cajolingly. She stuffed the rag back in my mouth and had her wicked way with me again, under the steamy bearskin robe. The human mind is a curious engine, for in her repeated, furious assaults I began to imagine that I was at the mercy of a gigantic rabbit. The delusion was, I regret to confess, not wholly unpleasant, for, as rabbits go, she would have made an handsome one. Far into age, the mere sight of Lepus americanus browsing on a greensward has prompted in me a shameful excitation.

  Soon voices were audible below and the cottage filled with the aroma of boiled coffee. Bessie loosed my bonds, put on one of her tattered dresses, and departed down the ladder. I waited what I hoped would seem a decent interval, and went down myself. Bilbo was fussing at the fireside. The doors and windows were flung open. Outside it was a beautiful spring day, the woods ringing with birdsong. Uncle sat grumpily at the dining table.

  Bilbo, for his part, had awakened in spirits exceedingly buoyant. With a breakfast of venison chops and biscuits drenched in molasses, he pored over the map President Jefferson had given us.

  “Hmmmmm. Ahhhhh. Ummmmm.”

  He decided at length, on the basis of my prevarications, that we should embark down the Ohio thirty leagues, turn north up the Dismal River, now called the Scioto, into the country of the Shannoah, and there search around the vicinity of that wilderness footpath known as Zane’s Trace for the fountain of youth. I assured him that I would recognize the spot when we arrived nearby.

  It was midmorning when we had reloaded our keelboat with many of the supplies lately pillaged by our business partner. It was Bilbo’s idea to drain the cask of Monongahela into our specimen jars.

  “We shall be needing both whiskey and jars,” he reasoned, “and by the time we have drained all these vessels of whiskey, we shall have reached our grail of fortune, so to speak, and the bottles will be ready to receive that stronger liquor that shall be the wonder and benefactor of all mankind.”

  By noon, we were ready to go. Bilbo stood on the silty beach facing his stolid little cottage in the verdure. He called to those two oddities of nature who constituted his kith and kin, put one prehensile arm around his daughter’s shoulder, placed his other hands [O3]upon the dwarf’s black-curled head, and bid adieu to that little island haven that had been his home in the wilderness lo these many years. Uncle and I stood mutely aside whilst the trio had their little ceremony, Bilbo himself weeping great drafts of parting tears. It was a very affecting scene—until one remembered that his happiness had been purchased at the expense of Lord knows how many waylaid innocents, such as ourselves. In any case, he evidently did not expect to return. The formality concluded, we waded out to Megatherium, cast off our lines, hoisted the anchor, and poled out into the current.

  Captive or not, it buoyed my heart to be back out upon the mainstream, floating swiftly under a fleece-dotted sky, amid the teeming waterfowls and stately vistas of the hills clothed with infinite thick woods. We had not been on the river two hours when what would we spy at the head of an island but a family of five signaling distress from the prow of a half-submerged flatboat.

  “Why, boil me in bear piss!” Bilbo cried with equal parts delight and affront. “Look what’s doing over on Cathead Island. Nowadays I guess everyone wants to go freebooting it. Ain’t that so, Neddy?”

  “Arrruk arrruk!” Neddy replied.

  Bilbo drew his pistol and sent a ball whistling over the family’s heads. The quintet leaped for their lives into the river, while Bilbo reloaded. The current carried us closer. Unlike Bilbo’s trap of a derelict, this craft showed no saplings sprouting in the deck, nor moss grown upon the gunwales. Bilbo gleefully discharged shot after shot, as fast as he could reload, blowing huge splinters out of the hull while the family remained hidden. We never did learn whether they were troubled pilgrims, or trouble incarnate, as we had lately met to our continuing woe.

  At twilight, we turned our craft into one of the innumerable coves that scallop the river’s banks, and in a fine grove of ancient walnut trees (Juglans nigra) and pin oak (Quercus phellos) we made our camp for the night. We were gathered ’round the fire enjoying a ragout of opossum (Didelphus viginiana), procured by Neddy in his mysterious fashion, when a brisk wind very suddenly arose out of the north, rattling the treetops and causing their swaying trunks to groan ominously, like the ancient druidical spirits we read about in the chronicles of Ossian. It sent a chill through all of us, including especially that poltroon, Bilbo, who halted yet another implausible braggadocio of his youthful exploits—this one placing him on the high seas as gunnery officer to none other than John Paul Jones.

  “A spring zephyr, heh heh,” he remarked unconvincingly.

  We resumed eating. A minute later something rustled the laurels at the penumbra of our firelight. Neddy growled. Bilbo drew his pistol.

  “Indians …?” I wondered aloud.

  “W-w-w-who g-g-goes there?” Bilbo called out.

  In the next instant, a figure flew out of the shrubbery with all the faultless physical grace of an acrobat. He turned an handspring, vaulted the campfire, caracoled swiftly around, performed several cartwheels, and finally leaped atop the sturdy overhanging bough of an oak. Doffing his skunkskin hat, he bowed. Our company could only gaze up at him in utter thrall.

  The figure on the limb rose from his bow. Dressed in a fringed, snow-white doeskin tunic with lapis-colored beadwork sewn at the yoke and matching leggings, he was a lean and muscular white man in the prime of life. His hair, worn shoulder length in the frontier fashion, hung in golden
curls. In the flaring firelight it glittered almost like precious metal. His face, with its solid, clefted jaw, its sparkling, even rows of pearly teeth, aquiline nose as straight as a splitter’s froe, wide, noble brow, and lustrous blue eyes, was the embodiment of those qualities we Americans idealize as the essence of manhood.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” he declared in a ringing, virile baritone. “And madam,” he added upon ascertaining with some difficulty the sex of Bessie, who had been wrapped against the chill in a blanket. “How fortunate to meet a party of my countrymen ’round the cheering campfire this fine night.” He struck an attitude out upon the limb, hand on hip, jaw stuck out, Kentucky rifle held akimbo. His posturing reminded me of the tableaux vivants of the New York theaters.

  Uncle gazed at him as an old owl might regard some passing curiosity of the forest. Bilbo looked up with undisguised suspicion. Neddy growled lowly. It was impossible to interpret the look on Bessie’s face other than that of an hare stunned by the light of a poacher’s lamp.

  “W-w-who are you, stranger?” Bilbo inquired timidly. The intruder struck a new pose. I was amazed that he could balance himself so easily upon the limb with nothing to hold on to.

  “Who am I?” the stranger echoed him and struck yet a new attitude, one of self-bemused incredulity. “Some call me Pathfinder. Some call me Deerslayer. Others know me as Natty-o’-the-wilds. The Injun calls me O-wari-aka Yunno-kwat-haw.”

  “’Tis Tuscarora,” Uncle explained aside, while our visitor struck new tableaux.

  “What’s it mean?” Bilbo asked.

  “The rough translation would be White Buffalo Mystery Man,” Uncle said.

  “What shall we call you?” I inquired.

  “You may call me …” he paused portentously, “… Woodsman.” His face lit up in an immense smile of satisfaction. With that, he leaped acrobatically from his perch and landed upon his feet as though he weighed little more than a bird. “Do I detect ragout of opossum?” he said, sniffing the air, and with a flutter of his long-lashed eyelids.

  “You do, sir,” Bilbo avouched, a trifle coolly. “Would you do us the honor of joining in our repast?”

  “The honor is mine,” the Woodsman said and sat down immediately by the fireside, legs crossed in the Indian style. He produced from his necessaries pouch a buffalo horn cup and a carved horn spoon. Bilbo ladled him a portion of the stew and he sampled it with attendant groans and hums of delectation. “Why, this is first-rate,” he pronounced. “But you have used a freshly killed varmint in it. I can tell.”

  “Naught but the best will suit our company,” Bilbo boasted.

  “I admire the sentiment, friend, but nothing flavors a ragout so well as a ’possum hung a few days. It gives the sauce a piquancy like none other. I learnt the recipe from my friends, the Wyandots, who esteem the critter above all other viands save buffalo’s tongue and wolf’s liver.”

  “Have you ever, by chance, seen such a prodigy as this?” I asked, hastily producing my sketch of megatherium.

  “Why, I have wrestled with them by the legions,” the Woodsman declared. “And won each match, by our George.”

  “You have!” said I, astounded. “Do you know what this portrait is supposed to represent?”

  “Beaver, o’course,” he stated with certainty, then stole another glance at the paper. “Isn’t it?”

  “’Tis megatherium,” I informed him. “Or ground sloth. As big as an ox. A massive but retiring brute who dwells in caves.”

  The Woodsman studied the sketch carefully once again, scratching his brow.

  “Might I have a glance, friend?” Bilbo asked unctuously, and the stranger obliged by handing it over. The pirate examined the sketch with complete absorption, brought it close to his eyes, held it out at arm’s length, turned it to one side, then the other, and finally turned it upside down, all the while pursing his lips and uttering noises of cogitation. “Hmmmmmmm … hummmmmm … huhhhhhh … hmmmmmm …”

  “I admit the sketch is crude.”

  “’Tis a queer-looking devil,” he concluded.

  “Think of the fortune in pelts, Bilbo,” I added, trying to excite his cupidity. “Why, ’twould compare to your former silkworm prospects as a gold mine to a mere doubloon.”

  At the mention of the word silkworms, he turned an ashen shade of green.

  “I’d prefer to stopper mere jars o’water than grapple with some two-ton son o’Satan,” he declared with a distasteful air and handed the portrait back to the blonde-headed nimrod.

  “I can tell ye this much about your strange beasts o’the forest,” the Woodsman addressed us in a yarn-spinning tone. “Not ten days ago did I lodge a night at the trading station of Francis Bottomley on the junction of the Ohio and Dismal Rivers, an hundred miles from here. There I met two other men, Messers Jukes and Roundtree, whom the said Bottomley had given an order upon for two teeth of a large beast that they were bringing from the falls of the Ohio for delivery to the Ohio Company at Fort Harner. These teeth and the bones of three large beasts were found in a salt lick upon a small creek that runs into the Ohio fifteen miles below the mouth of the Great Miamee—”

  “Dost hear, Sammy,” Uncle interrupted excitedly, “hard by the Great Miamee!”

  “I hear, brother,” said I, affecting disdain at his ferment. “For I am deaf no longer.”

  “Did you say you were cured from deafness?” the Woodsman himself joined the digression. “And that the two of you are brothers?”

  “What…?” said I.

  “Are we not all brothers here in the wild?” Bilbo remarked deviously.

  “Save those that are piratical scum,” I observed, hoping this Woodsman might infer my meaning and the nature of our predicament, but he merely stared across the fire in perplexity. Bilbo thereupon made pretense to guffaw, as though I had launched a jest, and poked me in my ribs. I looked down at my side and saw that the instrument of this poking was not his elbow, but the muzzle of his ever-ready pistol. The hammer was cocked and it was aimed straight at my liver.

  “Pray continue, Woodsman,” Bilbo importuned him.

  “Do I have your complete attention?” he asked.

  “Yes,” we all said. Neddy affirmed with a bark. This Woodsman’s vanity was extreme, I thought. He cleared his throat.

  “I was permitted a look at these teeth by Jukes and Roundtree. Each was better than four pounds in weight, appearing to be the farthest tooth in the jaw, a molar, but the size of a loaf o’bread and all acrinkle on top. It had the look of fine ivory about it. Jukes assured me that the rib bones of the largest of these beasts were eleven feet long, and the skull bone six feet across the forehead, and the other bones in proportion, and that there were several other teeth upon the site, some of which he called ‘horns’ that were upward of five feet long, and as much as a man could well carry. One of these he hid at a creek some distance from the place, lest the Indians should carry it away.”

  “’Tis a mastodon,” Uncle declared.

  “Why, I reckon ’twould be somebody’s master, but not mine, ho ho,” the Woodsman joked. He and Bilbo shared in this drollery a minute.

  “At Philadelphia,” said I, “Mr. Charles Willson Peale has erected the skeleton of just such a beast as you describe in his museum.”

  “Ah, Philadelphia,” Uncle sighed, wistfully, thinking of his home, “Owl’s Crossing…”

  The Woodsman flinched and glanced overhead.

  “Owls? Crossing?” he said, evincing much anxiety. At that very moment, deep in the night-shrouded forest, came the shriek of a great horned owl (Bubo virginianus). It certainly made a fellow’s skin crawl. All our party were visibly nonplussed. Bilbo, of course, affected a nervous cackle. Neddy cocked his ear to the night. The Woodsman sat erect, sniffing the chill air.

  “Sometimes you can smell ’em,” he stated mysteriously.

  “Smell what?” Bilbo asked. “Owls?”

  “No. Injuns.”

  “Do you smell any now?”

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bsp; “No,” the Woodsman said. “But there is an herd of seven Virginia deer at about a quarter mile, one elk at an half, several foxes, raccoon, and ’possum aplenty, two, no, three badgers, and rodents innumerable.”

  We heard a flapping of wings overhead.

  “Also many bats,” the Woodsman added, “and, perforce, an owl.”

  “No Indians?” Bilbo pressed.

  “Not a one,” the Woodsman declared with confidence. Suddenly, another terrifying cry issued from the darkness. “There is now one less squirrel. A fox has et him.”

  “Can thee tell all these things by a mere snuffling of the breeze?” Uncle inquired in wonderment.

  “O, yes,” the Woodsman replied. “Why, the forest air is an open book. Were I, by some misfortune, struck blind, I would yet know my exact surrounding.”

  “’Tis an amazing art,” Uncle said, and we all agreed.

  “Pshaw,” the Woodsman scoffed. “Anyone can develop the faculty. Merely spend five thousand nights in the darkling woods. Avoid the towns and especially the taverns, as nothing so muddles this ability as the stench of tobacco—what ho!” he drew himself erect again, his delicate nostrils aquiver. “Gentlemen,” he said, “a bear has just lumbered across the margin of my scent range.”

  “What distance?” I asked.

  “A mile and a quarter—hold! Wait a minute! He has shifted direction and is retreating.”

  “Do you suppose he smells us?” I asked.

  “Not a chance, for he is upwind.”

  “Why is he retreating then?” Bilbo inquired.

  “How should I know?” the Woodsman replied. “Bears have their own reasons for going where they will. My faculty permits me to locate the beasts, not to read their minds—ho ho ho!” he rocked with mirth while the rest of us traded dumb, marveling glances. “I am most grateful for your hospitality, friends, but I am constrained by my noble mission to press on at once.” He licked both spoon and cup, replaced them in his necessaries pouch, and stood up.