Virgin Earth

  ‘Do you think I am afraid to die?’ she asked him as he brought her a bowl of suppawn.

  ‘I thought only that you were hungry,’ he said.

  ‘You thought right,’ she said sharply. ‘I am hungry for meat. So eat your breakfast, Eagle, and go out and drop from the sky on to a deer. The People need food. The hunters must do their work.’

  He nodded at the wisdom of what she was saying, but he could not understand how she could refuse a bowl of porridge when his own belly growled with hunger at the sight of it.

  ‘I love the People more than I love a fat belly on myself,’ she explained. ‘And I was fed from my grandmother’s bowl when she went hungry to feed me, and she was fed from hers.’

  John dipped his head and ate his porridge and gave thanks for the filling warm sweetness of it.

  When he looked up her bright hungry eyes were on him. ‘Now go and kill a deer,’ she ordered.

  It was not always easy to hunt. The days were short and icy cold, and when they had shot a white-coated hare, or a deer, or a skunk, or a foolish foraging squirrel there was less meat on the bones than on summer carcases. The fish weirs froze and the little treats which supplemented the Powhatan diet, the fruits and nuts and berries, were gone. There were edible roots which the women could dig for, and there was the great temptation of the storehouse.

  ‘Why can we not eat from the store?’ John asked Suckahanna.

  ‘We do,’ she said. ‘But we share it very carefully when there is no food to be had in any other way. It has not come to that yet. It may not come to it this year.’

  ‘But there is enough in the store to keep the village for the whole season!’ John exclaimed. ‘It will spoil if we don’t eat it!’

  She gave him a sly sideways smile. ‘No it won’t,’ she said. ‘The meat is properly smoked and the fish salted down in pots. The oysters and crayfish are smoked and dried and the seeds and nuts are dry and safe. You are pretending that the food will go bad to give you an excuse to eat.’

  John made an impatient noise and turned on his heel.

  ‘Why can we not eat the store food?’ he asked Musses.

  She shook her head. ‘That is the wealth of the People,’ she said. ‘Our inheritance. We saved it carefully, from good harvests and bad. We keep it through the winter and eat as little as we can. That is the way of this people. They are not Englishmen who eat their seed corn and then find in spring they have nothing to plant.’

  ‘Why can we not eat the store food?’ John asked Attone.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you asked Suckahanna?’

  ‘Yes, and Musses.’

  ‘And what do the women tell you?’

  ‘One tells me that we may need the food later, though we are halfway through winter already and as hungry as we can be. The other tells me that the People do not eat their seed stores. But these are not seed stores. These are dried oysters.’ John felt the juices rush into his mouth at the thought of oysters, and swallowed, hoping that his hunger did not show in his face.

  Attone took his shoulder in a hard, friendly grip and put his face close to John’s. ‘You’re right. It’s not seed. You’re right, it would be good to eat some of it now. Why do you think we have waited and worked and starved ourselves to store a year’s supply of food?’

  John shook his head. Attone’s lips came closer to his ear.

  ‘In the time of the uprising when our king, Opechancanough, went against the white men, do you know what they did to our fish weirs?’

  ‘They tore them down,’ John said, as softly as the other man.

  ‘And what they did to our crops in the fields?’

  ‘They trampled them into the mud.’

  ‘They did worse than that. They let the women plant and weed them, so we thought that they would let us get them in. Then, after we had spent a year of our labour in tending the food they came at harvest time and set light to them and to the forest around them.’ He dropped back and looked into John’s face. ‘They burned anything, without thought,’ he said. ‘I would have understood it if they had stolen the harvest from us. But they did not do that. They just burned it where it stood, ripe and ready for picking. So that winter they went hungry themselves without our food to buy. But we – we starved.’

  John nodded.

  ‘I buried my brother that year,’ Attone said quietly. ‘My older brother, who was like a father to me. He died with a belly full of frozen grass. There was nothing else to eat.’

  John nodded in silence.

  ‘So now before any brave would lift his hand against a white man he would want to know that he has a year’s supply of food in his house. Don’t you think that, my Eagle?’

  John gaped. ‘This is a supply for war?’

  The grip on his shoulder tightened so hard it was like a vice. ‘Did you think we would let them push us into the mountains, into the sea?’

  Dumbly, John shook his head.

  ‘Of course there will be war,’ Attone said matter-of-factly. ‘My son has to have a trail to follow. He has to have deer to kill. If the white man will not keep to his treaties, will not share the land, then he will have to be killed.’

  John bowed his head. He felt a great sense of impending doom.

  ‘You grieve for your people?’ Attone asked.

  ‘Yes,’ John replied. ‘Both of them.’

  The deer were fewer, hunting was hard. The men went out in twos and threes, looking for small game and birds. Attone and John left the usual trails and struck out downriver. Suckahanna watched them go, her baby strapped on her back. She embraced John and then she stood back and raised her hand in a respectful salute to her previous husband. He touched his forehead and his heart to her. ‘Suckahanna, guard my son and daughter,’ he said.

  ‘Go safely, both of you,’ she replied. ‘May the trail be smooth under your moccasins and the hunting rich.’

  The two men jogged out of the village. John was used to the steady half-running pace of the hunting party now and his calves no longer seized with cramp as his feet ate up the miles. But it was hard running in the snow. Both men were shiny with sweat when they paused to draw breath and to listen to the quietness of the winter woods all around them.

  There was a mild thaw. John could hear a steady drip drip of melting water from trees where dark-stained twigs were at last thickening with buds. Attone’s head was cocked. ‘What can you hear?’ he asked John.

  John shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

  Attone raised his eyebrows. He could never become accustomed to the insensitivity of the Englishman.

  At once he crouched and his hand went into the gesture with two raised fingers which meant, hare or rabbit. At once John crouched beside him and they both put an arrow on the bow.

  It came slowly, quite unaware of their presence. They heard it before they saw it because it was white against the white snow: a winter hare with a coat blanched like ermine. When it dropped on to its haunches the only sign that revealed its presence was the little dimples of dark footprints behind it, and the occasional betraying flick of an ear.

  Attone raised his bow and the little thwack of sound as the bow was released was the first thing that alerted the hare. It bounded up and the arrow caught it in the body, behind the foreleg. John and Attone were behind it at once but the animal raced ahead of them, the arrow jinking and diving with it, like a harpoon in a speared fish.

  Attone gave a sudden cry as he tripped and fell to the ground. John knew well enough not to check for a moment. He kept running, following the terrified creature, weaving in and out of trees, jumping over fallen logs, diving around rocks, and finally scrabbling on hands and knees through the winter-thin scrub to keep the wounded animal in sight.

  Suddenly there was a crack of a musket shot, loud and startling as cannon fire in the icy silence, and John flung himself backwards in terror. The hare was thrown into the air and fell down on its back. John rose up from the bushes, half-naked in b
ear-grease-stained skin and buckskin kilt and jerkin, and looked into the wan, half-starved face of his old friend Bertram Hobert.

  He recognised Bertram at once despite the marks of hunger and fatigue on the man’s face. He was about to cry out in greeting but the English words were sluggish on his tongue; and then he realised that Bertram was pointing his musket at John’s belly.

  ‘That’s mine,’ Bertram snarled, showing his black and rotting teeth. ‘Mine. D’you hear? My food.’

  John spread his hands in a quick deferential gesture, aware all the time of his razor-sharp reed arrows nestling in the quiver in the small of his back. He could have one on the string and loosed long before Bertram could reload and prime his musket. Was the man mad to threaten with an empty gun?

  ‘Step back.’ Bertram waved him aside. ‘Step back, or by God I’ll shoot you where you stand.’

  John went back two, three steps, and watched with silent pity as Bertram hobbled over to the dead hare. There was precious little meat on it and the rich guts and heart had been blasted out by the shot on to the snow. The silvery pelt, which would have been good to trade, had been destroyed too. Half the hare had been wasted by killing it with a gunshot whereas Attone’s reed arrow should have gone straight to the heart and left nothing more than a farthing-size hole.

  Bertram bent stiffly over the body, picked it up by the limp ears and stuffed it in his game bag. He bared his teeth at John. ‘Get away,’ he said again. ‘I’ll kill you for staring at me with your evil dark eyes. This is my land, or at any rate, near enough mine. I won’t have you or your thieving people within ten miles of my fields. Get away with you or I’ll have the soldiers out from Jamestown to hunt you down. If your village is near here we’ll find it. We’ll find you and your cubs and burn the lot of you out.’

  John stepped back, never taking his eyes from Bertram. The man’s face was a twisted ruin hammered from his old sunny, smiling confidence. John had no inclination to step forward now, to greet his old friend and shipmate by name, to make himself known. He did not want to know this man, this weak, cursing, stinking man. He did not want to claim kinship with him. The man threatened him like an enemy. If his gun had been reloaded John thought that it would have been his blood on the snow, and his belly blasted away like the hare’s. He bowed his head like a servile, frightened, enslaved Indian and backed away. In two, three paces, he was able to lean into the curve of a tree and know that a white man’s eyes would not be able to pick him out from the dapple of white snow and dark tree shadows and speckled bark.

  Hobert glared into the shadowy forest which had swallowed up his enemy in seconds. ‘I know you’re there!’ he shouted. ‘I could find you if I wanted.’

  Attone came up beside John so silently that not even a twig cracked. ‘Who’s the smelly one?’ he asked.

  ‘My neighbour, the farmer, Bertram Hobert,’ John said. The name sounded strange and awkward on his lips, he was so accustomed to the ripple of Powhatan speech.

  ‘The winter has rotted his feet,’ Attone remarked.

  John saw that the brave was right. Bertram was painfully lame and instead of shoes or boots his feet were encased in thick wrappings tied with twine.

  ‘That hurts,’ Attone said. ‘He should wear bear grease and moccasins.’

  ‘He does not know,’ John said sadly. ‘He would not know that, and only your people could teach him.’

  Attone gave him a quick smile at the unlikeliness of such a meeting and such a lesson. ‘He has our hare. Shall we kill him?’

  John put his hand on Attone’s forearm as he reached for his arrow. ‘Spare him. He was my friend.’

  Attone raised a dark eyebrow. ‘He was going to shoot you.’

  ‘He didn’t know me. But he helped me build my house when I came to the plantation. We travelled across the sea together. He has a good wife. He was once my friend. I won’t see him shot for a hare.’

  ‘I would shoot him for a mouse,’ Attone remarked, but the arrow stayed in his quiver. ‘And now we will have to cross the river. There will be no game here for miles where he is stamping on his rotting feet.’

  They caught no game though they stayed out for three days, travelling along the narrow trails which the People had used for centuries. Every now and then one of the trails would spread itself to double, even treble, the necessary width and then Attone would scowl and look out for a new house being built, a new headright created where this wide path would lead. Again and again they would see a new building standing proud, and facing the river and around it a desert of felled trees and roughly cleared land. Attone would look for a moment, his face expressionless, and then say to John: ‘We have to go on, there will be no game here.’

  They struck away from the river on the second day, since the plantations chose the riverside so that the tobacco could be floated down to the quayside at Jamestown. Once they broke away from the riverbanks things were better for them. In the deeper forest they found traces of deer again and then on the third day, as they were bearing round in a wide circle for home, a great shadowy bush caught Tradescant’s eye and as he watched, it moved. Then he felt Attone’s hand on the small of his back and his breath as he said: ‘Elk’.

  Something in the quiver of the brave’s voice set John’s heart racing too. The beast was massive, its antlers as broad as the outspread wings of a condor. Moving almost unconsciously, John fitted his arrow to his bow and felt the thinness of the shaft and the lightness of the sharpened reed arrow head. Surely, this would be like shooting peas at a carthorse, he thought. Nothing could bring this monster down.

  Attone was moving away from him. For a moment John thought that they were to make the traditional pincer movement of deer stalking but then he saw that Attone had slung his bow over his shoulder and was climbing the lowest branches of one of the trees. When he was stretched along it with an arrow on the string he nodded to John with one of his darkest smiles.

  John glanced back at the grazing elk. It was calm, unaware of their presence. John made a pointing upward gesture: should he climb too? Attone’s teeth flashed in a grin, white in the darkness. He shook his head. John should shoot at ground level.

  John realised at once why this was apparently amusing. When the elk was struck it would look around for its enemy and it would charge the first thing it saw. That would be John. Attone, in the safety of the branch of the tree, would rain down arrows, but John on the ground below would serve as decoy: as bait. John scowled at Attone, who gave him the blandest of smiles and a shrug – it was the luck of the hunt.

  John set his arrow on the string and waited. The elk sniffed the forest floor, searching for food. It turned full face to John and lifted its head for a moment, scenting the air. It was a perfect opportunity. Both arrows flew at the same second. John’s arrow, aimed for the heart, pierced the thick skin and layer of fat at the chest, while Attone’s plunged deep and unerringly into the beast’s eye. It bellowed in pain and plunged forward. A second arrow from Attone’s bow pierced its shoulder, severing the muscle of the foreleg so the animal dropped to one knee. John’s shaky second shot went wide and then he was running, dodging behind the trees as the beast came on, stumbled on, blood pouring from its head. Attone let fly one more arrow into the head again and then jumped from the tree, his knife in his hand. The flow of blood was weakening the animal, it was unable to charge. It fell to both knees, its head moving from one side to the other, the great sweep of the antlers still a danger. John peeped out from behind a tree and came running back, pulling his hunting knife with the sharp shell blade from its safe pouch. Either side of the wounded animal the two men watched for their chance. Attone, whispering the word of blessing on the dying creature, dived behind the moving antlers and plunged his knife between its high shoulders. The head slumped and John reached down and jabbed a hacking, sawing cut into the thick throat.

  The two men jumped clear as the beast rolled on its side and died. Attone nodded. ‘Good and quick,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Go, my
brother, we thank you.’

  John rubbed the sweat from his face with fingers that were wet with fresh blood. He dropped to sit on the snowy forest floor, his legs weak underneath him. ‘What if you had missed?’ he asked.

  Attone thought for a moment. ‘Missed?’

  ‘When the beast was charging at me. What if you had missed your shot?’

  Attone took a breath to answer and then John’s aggrieved face was too much for him; he could make no sensible reply. He whooped with laughter and dropped back on the cold snow. He laughed and laughed his great belly laugh of joy and John, trying to keep a straight face, trying to stay on his dignity, found it was too much for him and he started to laugh as well.

  ‘Why ask? Why should it matter to you?’ Attone demanded, wiping his eyes, and bubbling again. ‘You wouldn’t care. You’d be dead.’

  John howled at the logic of this and the two men lay like lovers, side by side on their backs in the winter forest, and laughed until their empty bellies ached while the blue winter sky above them was darkened with the passing of the geese and the wood was louder with their honking than with laughter.

  John was left to guard the carcase while Attone started the long run back to the village. It would be two days before he could bring the braves back to carry the meat into camp. John made himself as comfortable as he could for the wait, built a little bender tent of a pair of saplings and thatched it with thin winter fern, made himself a hearth at one side of it and let the tent fill with smoke for the warmth, and started the work of skinning and butchering the great beast. Attone had left his hunting knife with John, so that when John’s knife was blunted cutting the thick hide, fat and meat he would not have to waste time sharpening it. He worked from sunrise in the morning when he rose and said the Powhatan morning prayers at his morning wash in the icy water. At noon he gathered nuts and berries and ate with his dark gaze on the river, watching for shoals of fish. After his dinner he gathered firewood and set to work on the elk again. At night he cut a thin slice of elk meat to barbecue over the fire. John had lost completely the white man’s habit of gorging when food was available and starving when times were thin. He ate like one of the People, conscious all the time of the river that brought fish to him, and the winds that blew the birds to him and the woods that hid and offered the animals. It was not the way of a Powhatan to plunge into a trough of food like a hog into acorns. Food was not a free gift, it was part of a giving and taking, a balance; and a hunter must take with awareness.