When Phoebe trudged by, sandwiched between James Dunn and Noah Cluff like a sandpiper between two curlews, I called to her to come and get dry. Her buckskins were plastered to her body and there were bluish shadows under her eyes and around her mouth, as though some of the color had run out of the handkerchief around her hair. She shook her head grimly and pulled James Dunn to his feet when he stumbled. I saw there was no sole to one of his shoes.
This, with the drenching rain and the mournful sky, led me to think gloomily on the folly of women; how they cleave most faithfully to those of us who are weakest and most worthless. Was this true, I wondered, or does it only seem true because our attentions are drawn to weak and worthless men, and our spleens aroused to see them blessed with wives or mothers as good as those of more deserving folk?
The river seemed to boil with rage, growling irascibly and sweeping away the litter of a century—hoorahs’ nests of twigs and leaves; tree trunks black with age; witches’ mats of roots festooned with foam. Great trouts rose from the bottom of the stream, trouts so dark that they looked purple, and rolled on the surface, snatching at grubs and worms, and slapping with their tails at those they couldn’t eat.
That Friday night the rain fell as I had never known it to fall, in solid sheets, like water pouring out of a hogshead. The wind rampaged terribly among the trees, coming in bursts that increased in force, as the force of a man’s breath increases when he fails to blow out a candle. With each succeeding burst we swore it could blow no harder. There was a smashing among the trees in the forest behind us from time to time; so at dawn on Saturday we made ready to depart lest the storm work some great inconvenience on us.
I have been through storms in my life fit to rank with any storms anywhere—northeasters that drove rain through the outer walls of a house and the wainscoting within; northers that whipped snow into a man’s face with such force as to peel off the skin; squalls out of the southwest that rolled a dory over twice and blew the plug out of the bottom. But never have I seen equaled the violence of this storm on Dead River.
The water had risen three feet, and the falls to which we were constantly coming were white smothers of foam. When we fought our way up through the bateaux of the Third Division, blinded by the rain that smashed at us, we found them shipping more water from the downpour than they had shipped in the buffeting of the Five Mile Ripples. There was a howl to the wind that seemed made by living creatures; noises above our heads like the screaming of innumerable wildcats. There was a creaking and splitting among the taller trees that sent us scuttling past them; and all along the edges of the forests there were newly fallen pines.
In the afternoon we passed an open meadow in which stood one tall pine, perhaps two feet in diameter at the base, a stout tree. Before our eyes the whole tree rose a little in the air and fell on its side, tearing up a flat patch of earth bigger than the floor of our kitchen in Arundel. It didn’t fall slowly, like a pine cut at the base; but with a violent quick fall, as a musket falls when a man stumbles over its stock.
As we passed a gentle hillslope, forested with pines and spruces, there was a rushing roar in the air, ominous and menacing. On the instant an irregular area of green trees on the slope, a tract three or four acres in extent, flattened as if sat upon by an enormous invisible giant.
At dusk we came up with Morgan’s riflemen. They were camped on a low point clear of trees, huddling in the lee of their bateaux, without fires. Misliking the nearness of the water and the lack of shelter, and eager for some place where we might kindle fires, we continued another mile onward in the gloom and the howling wind and rain until we came to a high ledge that would shelter us from the falling trees, which were going down on every hand amid a hellish tumult. Under the ledge we found dried twigs, and after three hours of labor we coaxed fires into being, got hot food into us, and warmed our wet clothes until they steamed.
It was midnight when we rolled ourselves in our blankets, too numb to think, and almost too numb to feel.
It was still as dark as the middle of a wet feather bed when I wakened to the sound of shouting. I lay there dazed, until a wave slapped me in the face. It soaked through my blanket and ran coldly down my thigh. Then I could hear others splashing around in water, and as I unrolled myself and got to my feet I felt how the river had come all the way up the bank, a prodigious rise, for we had camped more than my own height above the surface of the flood.
Our canoes were sunk, and most of our supplies and baggage. Some of it we found and dragged out, groping around under water like seals. We carried it to the rising ground behind us and sat there shivering until dawn, the rain having ceased and the wind grown colder.
Though the dawn came in two hours, it seemed like ten to me; and I fear it seemed longer to the colonel. I could hear him making little noises of distress with his tongue against the roof of his mouth, though he kept his troubles to himself. God knows he had plenty of them; for everything had happened to us that shouldn’t have happened.
When Sunday came we saw a sight. Where there had been a river flowing regularly between banks on the day before, there was now a great lake with trees rising from it here and there, and falls occasionally, white and angry-looking, and a current so swift that small trees bent before it.
Morgan’s division came by us at noon and Meigs’s at night, struggling hard against the current and shouting out their news to us: how their bateaux had been swamped and smashed and carried off by the flood; how pork and flour out of their scanty stores had been washed away in the twinkling of an eye, nor ever found again, and muskets carried into the depths of the river. With each piece of bad tidings our spirits grew lighter, as though the hearing of it had relieved us of another tribulation.
Our friends, as they passed, would shout at us to learn what we had lost, and when we would shout back, “Nothing but our food!” they would laugh hilariously and say they had lost five bateaux and a barrel of pork and two kegs of powder. We would all double up with mirth, slapping ourselves and declaring there was still life in the old Dead River.
When we heard how the foot soldiers, driven inland by the flood, had been obliged to strike back all the way to the high land in order to go forward, you might have thought it was the gayest news since the tea was thrown into Boston Harbor. And when we went to fishing to eke out our scanty provisions, and found the big trouts all gone away, probably into the newly flooded land, leaving nothing for us to catch save minnows the size of my thumb, the dragging out of each minnow was greeted by derisive howls. And indeed I have found it true that parlous situations bring the greatest merriment and peace of mind to those whose courage has not been wholly shattered by sickness or injustice. Why this is so I cannot tell, unless it be that all past and future worries are wiped from the mind, and the immediate present stands out absurdly clear and small against impending danger.
On Monday we found ourselves with Meigs’s division and Morgan’s division. The bateaumen were drawing themselves along by trees and submerged bushes, for the depth and quickness of the water made the bateaux difficult to handle by means of poles.
We thought the worst was over, and that with the high water we could go on quickly to the Height of Land; yet we had no sooner started than we found the foot soldiers of Meigs’s division had mistaken their way and gone traveling up a branch of the Dead River that would lead them God knew where and leave them lost in this terrible wilderness with no food. They must be brought back, Arnold said; and he sent me, with Hobomok, to do it.
We had gone two leagues when we saw a squirrel, high in a tree, cursing and flirting his tail and stamping his forepaws in a temper. Hobomok laughed and swung the canoe; and under the tree I saw Natanis smiling at us.
“Where does this water come from?” I asked.
Natanis raised his eyebrows. “There has been nothing like this in my memory—no such numbers of trees felled by one wind! It is bad.”
“Some of our men have taken a wrong direction,” I said. “Have you
seen them?”
“I met them three bends above here. I led them across the stream where there were fallen logs, and sent them to the river, a three-hour march.”
“Did they know who you were?”
Natanis looked pityingly at me. “I said I had been sent after them by the white chief.”
“Was there a small white woman among them, wearing a blue handkerchief on her head?”
“Yes,” said Natanis. “A better soldier than some of them, I think.”
It might be, I thought to myself, that what Natanis said was true; yet I had her on my mind a dozen times a day, wishing she were back in Arundel where she belonged, keeping my mother company instead of making herself a nuisance around a man’s army and occupying men’s thoughts when they should be busy on other matters. It may be I felt more put out at Phoebe than at Mrs. Grier and Mrs. Warner for marching with their husbands among the riflemen, because it was impossible for me to give my thoughts to Mary Mallinson, as I liked to do when we steamed comfortably before our campfires at the end of the day’s toil, without the thin brown face of Phoebe Dunn popping into my head and setting me to wondering about her food and her condition when I had no desire to wonder about her at all.
“There’s no need to be concerned about her,” Natanis added, staring at me curiously. “She has the body of a boy that can stand anything.” He touched the blue scar on his side and smiled affectionately, as if to remind me what he himself had endured as a boy.
I told him quickly that I was not concerned about her, and asked him whether he had taken my messages to Paul Higgins.
Natanis nodded. “Paul sent four men down the Chaudière to make canoes and tell everyone that food must be brought to Sartigan, the first of the settlements. They’ll send word to all Abenaki hunting parties along the Chaudière, and whatever they see they’ll kill for the army.”
“Well,” I said, “I know of nothing more that can be done. Follow the foot soldiers. When we make camp to-night, come up behind our fire and we’ll talk further.”
We put back to Dead River and found the colonel fidgety and lump-faced from inaction. He heaved a sigh of relief when I told him the foot soldiers had cut across country. “Now,” he said, “we can kick up a dust and be done with all this delay! We might have rowed these bateaux to Havana in the time it took to come up this broken-backed river!”
We pushed on against the devilish current, bawling and whooping at each other because the rain was over and the worst of our troubles behind us.
Now I’m not superstitious, and I put little faith in our Arundel habits of rapping on wood or spitting over the left shoulder in order to avert disaster. Yet I wish that instead of holloing and whooping that October afternoon we had rapped on wood until the skin was worn from our knuckles, and spat over our left shoulders until the river rose another foot.
We went two miles to a narrow place in the river with a smooth surge of water flowing rapidly over what looked like a gentle fall. The Indians call it Shadagee Falls, and it’s only an hour’s paddle from the Chain of Ponds.
At ordinary times there’s a drop of four feet at the fall; but the high water made it seem less. There was, we thought, nothing difficult about it; nor would there have been if all the bateaux had carried paddles as well as setting-poles. We watched the first few, manned by riflemen with paddles, pass up over it. By working until their muscles must have near split, they got over without accident. Then Hobomok and I went up, and the colonel and Oswald; but before we could continue onward we heard a frenzied shout from below us, a despairing yell, so that Hobomok whirled the canoe and we shot back over the falls.
Three bateaux had gone up abreast, their crews using only setting-poles, and laboring frantically; but all together the three of them had struck a spot where their poles found no hold. Immediately the heads of the bateaux fell off and the force of the stream drove their gunwales under water.
As the overturned boats surged downstream, the bateaux behind them strove to escape, four more turning broadside in the effort. They, too, were seized and drawn down by the violent river; and in a moment their precious contents were torn loose and sucked into the raging brown flood—muskets, powder, flour barrels, pork barrels, and salt.
While we were dragging out the crews, the colonel came back to us with the set smile and hurt eyes I have seen in the faces of men who were fighting stronger men with their fists, but would never stop until they were killed, no matter how they might be battered.
“We camp here, gentlemen, for a council of war,” I heard him say to his officers, “so we can decide how to live without any food at all.”
XXII
I HAVE often puzzled over the difference between a brave man and a man who is not brave, and it is a thing that will always baffle me. Indeed, I dislike to say this man is brave and that man a coward, because often a man will do a cowardly thing that requires more courage in the doing than a brave thing. There are many who have done brave things because they were afraid to do the cowardly things they would have preferred to do. Also some are cowards about fighting but heroes over money; some brave before audiences but cowardly alone; some brave alone but cowardly before audiences; some deadly afeared of sickness but contemptuous of a storm at sea, and so on. When I think about these things, my brain is muddled; and I arrive at no conclusion, save that every man, somewhere, has in him the spark of bravery.
At the council of war that night there was no one, I learned from Oswald, who voted for returning. The remaining provisions, Arnold admitted, would provide scant rations for a dozen crows; but determined men, he insisted, might keep alive for days by depending on what heaven sent.
“I can get a little food from Enos,” Arnold said, “and dash ahead myself to the French settlements so to send back supplies to the rest of you. All that can happen to us has happened, God knows! Anything that happens after this can’t help but be a lesser evil.”
At this Morgan, unshaven and red-eyed, his huge wrists covered with water blisters and his thighs all scratched and whipped above his Indian leggins, roared in his hoarse carter’s voice: “Go on, for God’s sake! We can feed on hope for a week!”
“I trust,” Arnold said, “we can count on something more solid. Even when everything’s gone, we can’t help but find food in these forests and the waters we’ll cross. I believe we should have a shot at it. If we’re successful, it will be a feat remembered for a thousand years to come.
“More than that, General Washington depends on us. I for one don’t propose to run home like a child, moaning I couldn’t go where I was sent because I was hungry.”
There was a growl from all the officers. Captain Dearborn, who became an ambassador afterward to some country in Europe—and a horrid sight he was, Captain Oswald declared, with tangled black whiskers that could scarce be told from the coat of the curly-haired dog between his knees, and a face as white as a clam-shell from some sickness that gnawed him—spoke up softly and said: “Sir, if I correctly gather the sense of this council, these gentlemen are for Quebec, even if they have to eat their breeches to get there.”
“You gathered correctly,” Colonel Meigs said, “but from the looks of my breeches, I’ll have nothing to eat after the first ten minutes.”
“There’s one more thing,” Arnold said, after he had thanked them. “It seems to me we should rid ourselves of those we can’t depend on. We must send back the sick, certainly; but I’m also in favor of sending back any man who’s faint-hearted about continuing.”
“I have some sick,” growled Morgan, “but no faint hearts! If I found any, I’d take ’em by the slack of their breeches and throw ’em all the way across the Height of Land!”
Late that night Oswald summoned me to the colonel’s tent. I found him writing, as was his habit when alone at night. He stabbed his pen at me over the top of his field desk when I came in.
“Now for the reward of virtue,” he said. “Back you go to a land flowing with milk and honey, and take care you do
n’t eat yourself sick.”
“My stomach’s shrunk,” I said. “I don’t need the food I needed a month ago.”
“All the more reason to beware when you find yourself among the flesh pots.” He picked up two letters. “Here are messages for Colonel Enos and Colonel Greene. Greene is waiting for Enos to come up with the reserves of food; so you’ll find ’em close together. This is important! Some of us are going to be in desperate need of food, and before you know it, too. Listen to this, now, in case you lose it.”
With that he read me the letter to Colonel Enos, dated, “Dead River, thirty miles from Chaudière Pond,” the latter being the lake my father called Megantic.
We have had a council of war [said the letter, after mentioning the extreme rains and floods], when it was thought best and ordered to send back all the sick and feeble with three days’ provisions, and directions for you to furnish them until they can reach the commissary or Norridgewock; and that on receipt of this you should proceed with as many of the best of your division as you can furnish with fifteen days’ provisions; and that the remainder whether sick or well should be immediately sent back to the commissary to whom I wrote to take all possible care of them. I make no doubt you will join with me in this matter as it may be the means of preserving the whole detachment, and of executing our plan without running any great hazard, as fifteen days will doubtless bring us to Canada. I make no doubt you will make all possible expedition.
“I’ll start at dawn,” I said, “and be as far as Colonel Greene’s division by night.”
Arnold rose from his camp stool to drive with his fist as though hitting at somebody. “Tell ’em to hurry! Hurry, hurry, hurry! We’ve been a month in the coils of this river, and a third of the distance still to go! If we could have hurried we’d have walked through the gates of Quebec by now. Get at it, and hurry; and hurry back with the news of how many are coming up!”