This flat craft lay in the guzzle which led to a pool far out in the marsh. Stretched on his back, in the bow, was my father, his own musket and mine beside him. In the stern, crouched behind a shield of marsh grass, was Rabomis with two more muskets; for, being a sachem, she could be cleansed by the m’téoulin, and so, unlike other Indian women, was not suspected of casting a curse on every weapon she touched.
From the lookout we could see that every pool in the marsh was alive with ducks—mallards and pintails and scaup and redheads and teals, all yelling at the top of their lungs about God knows what; and here and there a few hundred geese, standing up above the ducks, silent and watchful, like giant sentinels surrounded by frivolous dwarfs; but none of them in my father’s pool.
Eventually, off to the west, I heard the sad cries of a flock of geese, beating down through the fog. They came dimly into our vision, moving slowly across the marsh; then turned toward us with doleful plaints, some two hundred of them, set their wings, and coasted with sprawling feet and high-raised heads into the pool at the end of the guzzle. Rabomis put the flat craft in motion; then, with the paddle stuck through a hole in the stern, she sculled closer to the pool with no movement of her own to be seen.
From our elevation we could see them draw nearer and nearer to their quarry; we could see the geese, alert but unsuspicious, and the addle-pated ducks splashing themselves with water and pursuing each other, all as thick as mosquito wigglers in our hogshead of rainwater in Arundel.
They stopped eight yards from the pool, concealed by a turn in the guzzle. My father rose to a sitting position and Rabomis stood behind him. The geese and the ducks leaped upward, and both my father and Rabomis shot into the mass of rising birds, out of which the dead fell by scores. While still they were thickly bunched my father and Rabomis picked up the other muskets and fired again; and again the wild fowl fell back into the pool and marsh like a storm of melons. Ducks and geese by the thousand and hundred thousand sprang into the air, Merrymeeting Bay being one of their favorite resting stations on their road to the South; and so, complaining and protesting, they resumed their journeys. Six canoes pushed out to pick up the dead and wounded, and returned with more than forty geese and seventy ducks.
The women went away to prepare the fires for smoking and drying the meat; for flies, like mosquitoes, are thick along the Kennebec; and unless meat is immediately eaten or smoked, it is blown by the flies and spoils at once. Of all the meat the Abenakis smoke for winter provisions, the breasts of ducks seem to me the best; for they are small to carry, like chips of wood, and when boiled they swell and become tender.
Had it not been for my eagerness to set off again in search for Mary it would have pleased me to remain weeks on Swan Island; for each morning hunters went out after deer and bear and beaver and otter, which were plenty on the island and on both sides of the river; and boys under sixteen, not allowed to hunt with muskets, hunted with bows for bear and wild turkey and raccoons, and for foxes for fur, and for woodchucks for soup and dog meat and fire bags.
I was permitted to go with Hobomok, the son of the m’téoulin, a fat and amiable youth, three years older than I. He was fat because of the maple sugar and sweetened bear’s fat brought to the m’téoulin by grateful and hopeful patients, and because he would not hunt far afield for game, like other boys, but preferred to sit and wait for game to come to him, even though he had to wait forever. Yet he was more successful in his hunting than many of the more active youths; more successful, even, than some of those whose age permitted them to carry muskets.
Hobomok would be a great m’téoulin, my father said, because a m’téoulin is the only Abenaki who does not hunt unless so disposed. Even a sachem is obliged to hunt when food is scarce; but a m’téoulin can sit in his cabin or in the medicine house and make m’téoulin to attract game and bring good luck to the hunters. As soon as Hobomok learned about this, my father said, he would make twice as much m’téoulin as anyone ever made before.
My father was right when he said Hobomok would be too thoughtful of his own comfort to let me exert myself overmuch. We took heavy short bows of cedar backed with hickory, blunt arrows for small game, and a few broad-heads for safety; and most of our hunting was done while sitting or lying down. Hobomok picked a likely stand of birches near the river, and we sat quietly among them until a covey of partridges walked up and flopped themselves into trees to feed on birch buds. When Hobomok whistled at them, they struck attitudes and waited patiently to be shot.
We moved, then, to a grassy swale, from the middle of which flowed a spring of cold water. This, Hobomok said, was turkey country; and if we waited a little, there would certainly be turkeys come here to drink. So we waited, lying behind a log with broad-head arrows nocked on our strings. Flies crawled on my hands: chipmunks scuttled across my legs: twigs bit into my stomach and elbows: the shadows lengthened until I feared Hobomok’s waiting might extend through the night, or even through an entire week.
And then, at sundown, three cock turkeys came out of the birches at the head of the swale, all with long beards, haughty and deliberate, and stared about them suspiciously between greedy snatches at grasshoppers. As they neared us they looked huge: gargantuan hens from a bad dream. At the spring they were twelve yards away; we could see their red wattles, the fuzz on their heads and the bronze glint on their shoulders. When Hobomok touched my leg we rose up and drove arrows through two of them. The third stretched himself out as long and thin as an otterskin tippet, and fled back up the swale as fast as Ranger can run. Each of us loosed two shafts at him, and our second ones struck him in the back. Hobomok was pleased at this, for no feathers—not even goose feathers—equal the first six feathers from a turkey’s wing for fletching an arrow.
Because of my sickness, and because a three-day rain set in from the northeast at this time, as it does each year, most unpleasant, I was obliged to linger in the camp for yet a little while, strengthening myself on ducks and partridges and venison and hominy, and such delicacies as moose nose and beaver tail. The time was not wasted. I learned from Rabomis how to make five-gallon jars from the skin on a deer’s neck, taking off a cylinder of skin over the head, removing the hair, drawing one end tight together and gathering the other around a small hollow stick, then blowing through the stick until the skin is inflated like a bladder. This, when dried, is good for transporting raccoon or bear oil.
Hobomok instructed me in the making of fire pouches, which is done by cutting a slit at the back of a woodchuck’s neck and drawing the body through the slit, so the skin is left whole. Then the skin is turned back from the skull, the skull is cleaned and scraped and pushed again into the skin. Thus the head becomes a knob; and when the knob is tucked under the belt the pouch is supported by it and never falls. The fire itself is contained in two large clam-shells, lined with clay, a small hole being left for escaping smoke. Between the shells is packed rotted yellow birch, which holds fire for a day. The shells are bound together and placed in the pouch; and by this means fire is carried safely through the heaviest rains.
But the thought of Mary was in my mind; so when the northeaster had blown itself out I again begged my father to set out on the trail of Guerlac and his Indians. The only reminder of my wound was a jagged scar that ached before a storm, which it has done ever since.
That night my father made up our packs and instructed Rabomis concerning the gathering of beaver and otter skins against his return, saying he would give better prices than Clark and Lake, the traders on Arrowsic Island, who had cheated the Swan Islanders for years.
Also the m’téoulin came with his dyed feathers, wildcat’s shoulder blade and moose-tooth pipe, to prophesy about our travels; but when he had rubbed the shoulder blade and blown smoke on it and warmed it before the fire and brushed it with the feathers, he grumbled because the bone was covered with the images of soldiers instead of with our own figures. My father asked idly how the soldiers were dressed; and the m’téoulin, whisking busily with
the feathers, said some were dressed in red and some in white.
And what, asked my father, was happening? The m’téoulin said one army was fleeing before the other, though he could not say whether the red uniforms fled, or the white ones.
At this my father said everyone knew James Wolfe and Jeffrey Amherst were trying to capture Quebec, and if he thought to impress us with a prophecy that was not a prophecy at all he was grievously mistaken. He would do better, my father told him, to go into the woods and kill another wildcat with a bigger and more prophetic shoulder blade.
The m’téoulin laughed, for he liked my father and knew my father liked him. He said he could see on the bone that we would have a long trip and that all those who began it would return safely.
Since that was the case, my father remarked, he would take the m’téoulin’s son Hobomok on this long trip, to provide companionship for me. The m’téoulin stared doubtfully at his wildcat bone; but when my father laughed derisively he said quickly: “Hobomok will go and learn from you.”
“Good!” said my father. He stretched himself and yawned and let down the bearskins across the inner part of the cabin, in which Jacataqua and I slept.
In the moist, biting cold of the next dawn we set off in a long canoe, Woromquid and Natawammet in the bow and stern as before, and Hobomok in the bow close to Woromquid, wearing nothing but a blanket over his belt cloth, so he could leap out when the occasion demanded. Behind me was my father, his back against a bundle of dried venison and smoked duck breasts. There was a villainous wailing from the whole tribe; louder even than the outcries of the millions of wild fowl that sprang from the marsh as we pushed down the guzzle. I would have wept myself at the grief of Rabomis and Jacataqua if it had not been for the stony face of my father, which reminded me of his saying that if one makes no display of grief he recovers sooner from it.
VII
IF I had a beaver skin for every reason that has been given to me for the name of the river Kennebec I would have enough to make a robe that would go many times around the one I most love, she being slender and smooth and straight like a musket barrel, but not so hard and cold.
Some say it was named for a chief, Cannibis, who lived along its shores; but I misdoubt the whole river would be named for one man.
Others say it is from the Abenaki words quen-ne-bec, meaning “long blade”; yet there is no resemblance between the Kennebec and a long blade, unless it be a long blade of dried seaweed—the last thing to which a river would be likened by anyone save a fish.
The truth is more simple. Westward of Montreal there are Indian nations that make medicine to the rattlesnake, regarding him as sacred. When they find one, they sit in a circle, blowing pipe-smoke at him. They hail him politely as Manitou Kinnibec, praying he will send them good hunting and good crops. This often proves pleasing to the rattlesnake; and if he shows signs of amiability, the Indians think their prayers will be granted.
So I say that our river was named by the Indians after Manitou Kinnibec; for the Kennebec twists like a serpent sprawled in the sun on a tilted ledge. At its head its tongue is forked; and far away, at its smaller end in the Northern forests, it has its rise in small lakes strung together like rattles on the tail of Manitou Kinnibec. Likewise, the men of Maine, though they write its name “Kennebec,” speak always of it as the Kinnibec, and always will, because that is the fashion of their speech. Also there are some of us who, though we love it, must think of it, at times, as of Manitou Kinnibec—cold and sinister and dangerous, threatening torture and death to the unwary.
In the fold of one of its greatest serpent curves, beyond the outer edge of the meager white settlements, and a third of the way to the St. Lawrence, a flat point of land, shaped like the quarter part of one of my sister Cynthia’s pies, juts out into the river from the pine-clad hills behind. Above it, so close that the noise of their brawling fills the air, are the falls of Norridgewock.
Here on this point was the Abenaki town of Norridgewock, open to the sun as soon as the chill Kennebec mists had lifted from the river, and surrounded by a country rich in trout, salmon, bear, deer, turkey, raccoons, and hardwood ridges. Norridgewock was more substantial than other Indian towns. Around it was a stockade; and its lodges, made of logs, were arranged on streets like the towns of white men. At the northern end of the town, toward the falls, was a wooden chapel, with a belfry surmounted by a cross; for during the days of Father Rale the Norridgewock Abenakis were known as the most Christian of all the Kennebec Indians, though to my way of thinking it changed them from the Abenakis of Swan Island and the Androscoggin only in making them, for a time, more eager to take the scalps of settlers.
My father always said he could not blame the Abenakis overmuch for their anger against the white settlers and that cold-blooded body of Boston speculators known as the Plymouth Company.
The trouble, he said, arose from the inability of each side to understand the other, and over the natural kindliness of the Abenakis as opposed to the natural greed of white men. God knows I am sick of hearing the tale from the Abenakis; for I cannot go in their lodges without one of them fatiguing me with a long harangue about the theft of their lands. Yet their tale agrees with my father’s, so I will put it down and have done with it:
The Abenakis possessed all their lands together, and any Abenaki had a right to use any land belonging to the Abenaki nation. Their territory was never divided, and each one of them owned an equal part, which was an imaginary part and never defined. Thus no Abenaki could sell land, because every piece belonged to every other member of the nation as much as to him. He could not understand, even, how one person could own the entire rights to a piece of land and, if he desired, banish all others from it. The Abenaki mind cannot grasp it, any more than the mind of my dog Ranger could grasp it if I told him he could only chase rabbits within certain boundaries.
Consequently, when a white man asked an Abenaki sachem to sell property to him the sachem could comprehend the sale of nothing save the right which he himself possessed—the right to hunt and fish on that piece of land, and dwell on it, in company with its other possessors. For that reason the Abenakis, in good faith, showed their kindness to white men by repeatedly selling the same piece of land to different people. There was no dishonesty about it; for there are no people more honest or greater respecters of the rights of others. Until dishonest white men came among them, they hung their beaver and otter skins on racks in the forest, secure in the knowledge that no other Abenaki would ever take them.
That is why the Abenakis have sold, as the saying goes, their choicest tracts for next to nothing—for a keg of powder, or a bottle of rum, or a pair of blue cloth trousers.
Old Mattahannada, an Abenaki sachem of the Kennebec almost a hundred years before I was born, sold a million acres on the lower Kennebec to William Bradford of the Plymouth Company for two kegs of rum and a barrel of bread. Only an idiot could believe that a sachem—a wise man—would be so witless as to sell all the rights on a million acres of land for such a sum. Not even the worst robbers among the traders have been able to trick the Abenakis into selling beaver skins for a lower rate than one blanket for twenty pounds of beaver, one pair of scarlet cloth pantaloons for fifteen pounds of beaver, and one shirt for ten pounds of beaver.
I say again it was not the land that Indians sold, but the right to hunt or fish on the land. Every white man that bought land rights from Indians knew this was so, but persuaded the Indians to sign papers that would make an outright sale of the transaction when brought before a judge.
If the Plymouth Company were still in its full strength and vigor, as in the days when it persuaded Governor Shirley of Massachusetts to build the forts on the Kennebec, I would be less free with my words. It was the heads of the Plymouth Company that persecuted Roger Williams and drove him into the wilderness because he attacked the company and denounced it for robbing the Indians of their land. They were dangerous men, preying on weakness and hiding behind pulpits, and one
needed to be wary with them unless he wished to lose his possessions and his good name.
At no time during my life, however, would it have been necessary for me to be wary with the Norridgewocks, even though they are known far and wide as savages, whereas the members of the Plymouth Company are admired as Christian gentlemen.
As we swept around the bend in the river and up to the pleasant point of Norridgewock, there was a movement of reds and blues among the cabins; for the Norridgewock braves, many of them, wear tunics of red or blue cloth except when hunting, having been encouraged in this manner of dress by Father Rale. The women wear mantles of red or blue cloth falling below the knee, and above their moccasins a sort of stocking of white deerskin. Around their heads they bind a light cloth knotted at the back and hanging to the waist or lower, peculiar but becoming, and not common to any other tribe of Indians anywhere.
The sachem of the Norridgewocks, Manatqua, was an old man with no hair, a rare thing among the Abenakis. He had taken from the cheek of a wildcat the piece of skin from which the whiskers sprout, and stuck it to the top of his head with pitch. The gray tuft was divided in three parts, like a scalp-lock, each part decorated with a wampum band and an eagle’s feather. In appearance it was unnatural, and seemingly there was an insecurity about it in Manatqua’s mind, for he dropped his forehead against the heel of his hand from time to time, as if in thought, and fingered the edges of his artificial scalp-lock to assure himself it was still there.