Читать книгу An Embarrassment of Riches - James Howard Kunstler - Страница 11

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?”

“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.

“What is your mission?” I asked.

“Why, to render aid to the unfortunate.”

“Ah ha. What if I told you that we were at this very moment in the clutches of a treacherous and unregenerate villain?”

The Woodsman burst into another paroxysm of laughter.

“This has been a most diverting encounter,” he told us. “I can’t tell you when I’ve had better company of the human sort. Bears, as you know, are humorous critters, and wolves enjoy a roguish sort o’twitting, but we are in the main a melancholy race, don’t you agree?”

He bowed and doffed his skunkskin cap.

“What if I told you that the gentleman to my right were holding a pistol in my ribs this entire while?” I said.

Bilbo now erupted into a fit of counterfeit hilarity whilst Bessie honked and Neddy yipped. It struck me that the scoundrel had entered the wrong profession after all; had he taken to the stage, he would have made a fortune by now, so superb was his flair for the sham; while his talent as a pirate seemed merely ordinary.

This provoked yet another outburst of laughter in the Woodsman. He gripped his side and staggered over to lean against a tree trunk, so incapacitating was his jollity.

“Really,” he protested, “this is too much. I must be on my way … ho ho ho ho ho … ha ha ha ha ha … hee hee hee hee hee….” And with his final farewell he backed out of our firelit glade and disappeared into the lugubrious darkness, his laughter subsumed into another sudden and freakish blast of warm wind that rattled the treetops.

“Bilbo,” said I, “you are an obdurate wretch.”

“Thou art a cloaca incarnate,” Uncle added.

“What a way to speak to your partner,” Bilbo replied.

The next several days, in fine weather, we floated down the Ohio between hilly, forested banks, sometimes abreast of steep gray bluffs. There were infrequent other craft upon the river, a keelboat like ours here, a gundalow there, a skiff, a broadhorn loaded with barrels, a scow full of hides, a lone Indian in his dugout. None of these could we hail, nor stop and parley with. The pretense of “partnership” aside, Bilbo hardly let us out of his sight a moment. Our relation of captives and captor went on as before. By day, we were confined within the limits of our boat; that is, free to roam its cramped deck. After supper each evening ashore, Uncle and I were bound back to back, at the wrists, with a leash run to the vigilant dwarf, and thus suffered to find sleep as we might. And not an hour of any day or night passed that I did not dream of escaping these scum. Sooner or later, of course, the mists of gullibility would disperse in Bilbo’s mind and our fountain of youth would stand unveiled for the hoax it was—which hour would bring leaden balls to both our brains.

“Uncle,” I whispered one night as the others snored symphonically across the dying fire. “Uncle, we must conceive some plan of escape!”

“Was that not the idea behind thy fountain of youth ploy?”

“’Twas a mere buying of time. I beg you, sir. Rack your imagination!”

“If only we could lay our hands upon any of an hundred noxious herbs that abound in the woods,” Uncle mused, “and somehow contrive to slip a dose upon these wretches. But Sammy, I must tell thee, being a Quaker I could not make myself a murderer, even of these scum who would be ours.”

“Let me do the job, then, Uncle, for I shall attend to it with relish.”

“Sammy!” he whispered, horrified. “To be thine accomplice would be one and the same thing. No, we must find some herb that is grossly incapacitating, yet not deadly, some—”

“Phrensyweed?” I ventured.

“Exactly! Furor muscaetoxicus,” Uncle agreed enthusiastically. “’Twould be ideal: incapacitating, yet not lethal. But, alack, ’tis such a rare and retiring little weed. Why, in complete freedom we would be hard-pressed to locate a patch. In our present confinement, I can’t see how—”

“I think I know a way,” I said, a scheme taking shape in my mind requiring the amorous exploitation of that poor misbegotten creature, Bessie. Meanwhile, Uncle described for me in minute and vivid detail the characteristics of phrensyweed, that I might easily recognize it and snatch a handful before Bilbo took a notion to snatch our lives.

Just after noon the following day a brief thundershower had sweetened the air by disuniting the noxious vapors that lay heavy upon the Ohio. I was sitting idly atop the cabin roof whilst Uncle leaned against a biscuit cask watching Neddy scratch behind his ear for fleas, as any mongrel might. Bilbo emerged from the companionway with a specimen jar of whiskey.

“Studying my stalwart little companion?” Bilbo inquired, not impolitely. Though a villain through and through, he was a sociable villain. Our mode of travel, the scenery and teeming wildlife, failed to divert him, so he sought to enliven the hours of tedious flotation with palaver. Until now, he had found Uncle taciturn to one extreme and myself overlavish to the other extreme in scorn and effrontery. “Shall I tell you Neddy’s history?” he asked.

“Can we prevent you?” I replied.

“You shall not regret it. The afternoon will take wing and fly.”

“Captain, the stage is yours.”

He bowed, sipped his whiskey, cleared his throat, and blew his nose over the gunwale.

“Are you ready?”

“Let’s have it,” I said.

“Abandoned in a wood outside of Pott’s Town, Pennsylvania, Neddy was raised among the wolves—”

“What bosh!”

“Strange but true. Taken into the pack by a nursing female, he was suckled through infancy at the teat of his wolf-mother. Happily did he disport himself in the wild with his brother and sister wolves. And sadly did he bid them all forever farewell when it was time for the litter to depart the den and strike out upon their own—”

“Any fool knows that a wolf pup and an human baby do not mature in the same span of time,” I said.

“I compress my narrative for dramatic effect.”

“O, well then….”

“He struck out on his own, in his own good time,” Bilbo glared at me. “By and by he endeavored to find a mate. No she-wolf would have him. The packs drove him away with snarl, fang, and claw. As the seasons chased one another, there he repined in his lonely den, an outcast. Then, one twilight in the approach of another winter, when a full moon shone coldly through the bare branches of the leafless trees, did Neddy, in a state of delirious despondency, wander into the rifle sights of a Pennsylvania marksman, who brought him down with a fifty-caliber ball to the shoulder. Imagine this huntsman’s surprise to wade through the browning bracken and discover his prey to be of the human form!”

The dwarf began to snuffle. Soon his remembered miseries brought forth a draft of tears. Though entirely skeptical of this account, I found it hard to listen and watch unmoved. Even Uncle paid rapt attention.

“Ah me,” Bilbo continued, dabbing his own moist eyes with the tattered lace cuff of his yellowed linen shirtsleeve. “This huntsman brought poor Neddy back to his hovel and there nursed him back to health—not out of kindness, but upon reasons of the basest calculation, for the moment he was able to stand upon all four limbs did this churl in buckskins sell Neddy to an enterprising Yankee named Artemis Swatley for the sum of one Spanish gold dollar. This Swatley, a Connecticut peddler with his wagonload of pots and pans, fancied himself something of a showman, and hauled about from town to town a collection of oddities—a six-legged cow, jars of pickled monstrosities of nature, a trio of speechless albino acrobats, and a plaster o’Paris effigy said to be the very mummy of King Philip, the notorious Wampanoag firebrand—all as a sort of window-dressing, as ’twere, to gather the ignorant country folk in order to sell them wooden nutmegs, nostrums, short-weighted sugarplums, and sundry gewgaws of the cheapest manufacture. He featured Neddy in this exhibition of horrors as ‘Bungo the Dogboy.’”

“Dreadful,” Uncle declared, completely enthralled.

“Came the revolution,” Bilbo went on portentously. “Alarms! Chaos! Confusion! Slaughter! Swatley’s miserable caravan chanced to be caught in the vicinity of Monmouth Courthouse ’twixt a company of bloodthirsting Hessians on the one hand and a mob of fractious Jersey rabble on the other. This rabble destroyed his wagonload of wooden nutmegs and shoddy tinware whilst the Hessians captured his freaks, Neddy amongst them. Need I tell you he was cruelly treated by those mercenary German brutes? They released him upon their withdrawal to New York. Amid the clangor and smoke of war did poor Neddy wander the countryside, knowing not whether he were truly man or beast, his little heart a’palpitating with sorrow, and yet the indomitable will to live still burning in his bosom.”

Neddy let loose a melancholy howl. Bilbo patted him upon his tin cap.

“There, there,” he said. “Where was I?”

“The war,” Uncle refreshed his memory.

“Ay yes. It ended. At last, peace descends upon the land. The doves return to their roosts. The chimes ring out. The States are confederated, the Articles of Peace signed. Commerce and agriculture reawaken from the nightmare slumber. Neddy is taken in by a series of masters, one crueler than the next. He is used for everything from fetching wingshot ducks out of the freezing Chesapeake Bay to treeing coons in the County of Albemarle, Virginia. Barbarous children pull his ears. Till comes the day he wanders west.”

Neddy ceased his lamentations and sat back upon his haunches, a far-away look in his eyes.

“Ah, the West, my babes! That motherland of the castoff, the unwanted, the eccentric, of society’s flotsam and jetsam. Here he fled. Here he reapplied himself to those feral arts learned at his mother’s teat. Here did he at last find that peace of mind, that contentment, which society had denied him. Here, in the wilderness, on that little island in the Ohio, did Bessie and I find him, and enter into the mutually advantageous relation in which you found us.”

Bilbo sighed and drained the whiskey from his jar. Uncle’s jaw had fallen progressively agape as the rascal had ground out this inconceivable fustian narrative.

“Bilbo,” I said from my makeshift balcony seat on the cabin roof, “you have missed your calling. Beat a hasty path back to New York and take to the boards, I implore you!”

“’Twas true, to every last detail,” he protested.

“Come now. How could you possibly have any knowledge of this creature’s history lest you were at his side through each tribulation.”

“I know because he told me,” Bilbo said.

“He told you!” both Uncle and I exclaimed.

“How else might he have conveyed such a wealth of detail?”

I climbed down off the roof and approached the dwarf.

“Do you speak English?” I addressed him directly.

The dwarf shrugged his shoulders.

“Neddy speaks only when he has something important to say,” Bilbo answered for him.

“I see,” said I, still astounded. “Well, here is a question I deem to be of some importance: how in God’s name did he ever come to associate himself with such a thieving, nefarious, and unregenerate mountebank as you, Captain Melancton Bilbo, Esquire?”

“I was the only human being who ever showed him a moment’s kindness,” said Bilbo with an expansive gesture of his skillet-sized hands, and there the matter rested.

Later that same afternoon, we rounded a sharp bend in the river to see, at about three miles’ distance, a column of black smoke rising from the verdure. A look through our telescope disclosed many alarming details.

The smoke arose from a sandy prominence at the junction of a tributary stream—no doubt the Dismal River—and this smoke issued not from a chimney, nor smokehouse, nor brick furnace, but from what appeared to be a rubble of ashes. This, we had been told, was the site of Bottomley’s Trading Station. As we drew closer, the scene appeared more desolate and awful. There was no sign of life. An odor, as of burning hides, soon reached our nostrils.

“Man the sweeps,” Bilbo ordered us in an anxious tone of voice. “Make for that cove on the near bank.”

We guided our craft to the place in question. It was a quiet eddy, out of the Ohio’s currents.

“Put down the anchor,” Bilbo said. “We’d best lay to for a while.”

“Do you think it was Indians?” I asked.

“Do I think it was Indians?” Bilbo replied mockingly. “Well, now, who else do you supposed might o’done this? Kublee Khan?”

A pitiless silence weighed upon the melancholy scene, as sinister in its own way as any fracas of marauding savages. Carrion crows wheeled soundlessly over the site, and at a great altitude. An hour passed and the sun descended behind the pillar of smoke. At twilight a few songbirds trilled wanly in the surrounding banks. The cinders of Bottomley’s Station glowed forbiddingly across the water as night finally fell.

We remained in place, an hundred yards off the shore in our eddy. Bilbo disallowed the firing up of our shipboard brazier on the grounds that savages lurking on shore might swim out, try to climb on board, and assassinate us. We nibbled military biscuits. There was no moon. The shore rang with the cries of countless beasts. Sleep was out of the question. The hours dragged by as though time itself had been fettered in chains of lead.

Dawn spread over the river like an ague. Fog obscured all banks. Our craft was enveloped in a dense miasma, each unseen leaping fish sending an alarm through our company as though it were the stroke of a swimming Indian, dagger clenched between his teeth and his savage heart bent on murderous mischief.

In a little while, a chill breeze arose out of the west. We could smell the burnt station before this breeze dispersed the fog and revealed it. A fine drizzle began to spray out of the gray, cloud-clotted sky.

“Weigh anchor,” Bilbo finally said, “and let’s see what the rascals left.”

With that, we made for the far bank.

Minutes later, we were wading ashore. I was limp with terror. Bilbo strode up the bank, pistol in hand, and motioned us to follow with a jerk of his head. We followed. Neddy scampered ahead. Soon he was barking at something in the charred weeds. We ran up to see what it was.

Though we walk daily through this life hand-in-hand with the portent of death, though we are daily accosted by news of tragedy, though our kith and kin are yearly snatched by disease and accident from this only world we know into the daunting eternities, though we even divert ourselves by viewing plays about death, murder, regicide, suicide, massacre, poisoning, hanging, dueling, et cetera ad nauseum, it is actually uncommon amongst ordinary folk to view the unfortunate victims of such violent fates. We may sit at the bedside of a departing parent, we may minister to the injured, the stricken child, the mother in labor. But all these are domestic scenes chiefly of the bedchamber and do not prepare us for those scenes of brutality that are frequent occurrences on the frontier. Such was the portrait of horror that now presented itself to me, and I was seized at once by an explosive nausea—made worse by an empty stomach—that brought me down on all fours in the fire-blackened weeds.

The corpse was stiffened into a pose that eloquently bespoke its owner’s final agonies. The top of its head was a blackened mass of clotted blood and flies, like an obscene skullcap, where the fellow had been scalped.

There is a belief lately that this practice was actually taught the red man by us whites, and though there are countless records of abuses by us against the native tribes down through the centuries, it is also true that they had perfected the arts of mutilation in their own right before any Englishman or Spaniard set foot upon this continent. Scalping was an act too deeply embroidered in the fabric of their war customs to have been merely borrowed, and only a sentimentalist would believe the Indian to be less imaginative in this respect than any other race of men.

The eyes of this unfortunate soul, presumably Mr. Bottomley himself, were stark staring open, and his mouth was gape, as if in that final instant he gazed in awe at his gentle green world turned a howling red hell. The droning blowflies swarmed at his lips and nostrils. Seven arrows had penetrated various parts of his body, though none in his heart or lungs—another sign that his death had not been quick. His feet were naked, denoting the theft of his boots. His clothing was singed, but not burnt. The stench of this tragic butchery is a memory that all the roses in Ohio would not avail to erase.

“Poor devil,” Bilbo muttered. Neddy whined. Uncle tried to close those terror-stricken eyes and straighten the body supine on the ground, but rigor mortis defied his efforts. Bilbo, meanwhile, marched up to the smoldering ruin of the station itself and gingerly sifted through the ashes looking for items of utility that the Indians or flames had not already claimed. It was from there, whilst Uncle and I fussed with Bottomley, that I heard the pirate exclaim, simply but ominously, “O, dear…!”

We hurried over. Just beyond the heap of blackened rubble and a smaller gutted outbuilding, Bilbo knelt cradling a woman who yet lived, but who had obviously been the victim of abuses so fiendishly vile as to challenge one’s most cherished precepts of a merciful God. Like her husband, she too had been scalped. A sanguinary trail, sort of an horrific red-black smudge in the weeds, evidenced that she had been carried off some distance by her assailants and then, with a struggle of heroic proportion, had somehow managed to crawl back to the only refuge her mind could conceive—though that refuge had already been destroyed.

Her breathing came in short, weak huffs, like a puppy panting on a hot day. She made no effort to speak. The lower portion of her calico skirt was dyed entirely red with her own blood, while the shoulders were similarly ensanguined from her scalp wound. Uncle knelt beside her, opposite the encradling Bilbo, and tried to give her water from his wooden flask. Moments later, she simply ceased to be, her anguish and woe extinguished along with the life she had lately owned. It was when Bilbo laid her back down upon the earth that we discovered the hidden, obscene, and monstrous torment the savages had inflicted upon her. For, some minutes after she had ceased breathing, we all witnessed a movement ’neath her blood-soaked skirt. At first, we merely glanced at each other in bewilderment. Then, Bilbo, being the least fastidious among us, simply lifted the garment up, and there, between her blood-smudged thighs, protruded the rear half of a baby porcupine, itself desperately struggling for life and freedom. All four of us leaped from the sight of this abomination as though we had glimpsed the very face of all that is unholy. I reeled away, toward the river. A gunshot resounded. I looked back up the bank. There stood Bilbo, his pistol pointed toward the ground, muzzle smoking.

“A curse! A curse!” he shouted into the swollen gray heavens. “A curse, by God’s wrathful hand, on those red devils!”

The words had barely left his mouth when those very heavens opened wide their floodgates and it began to pour.

“To the boat! Back to the boat!” Bilbo shouted at us through the downpour, beckoning with his huge, apelike arm.

“We cannot just leave them to rot,” Uncle protested loudly.

“This is the frontier, sir!” Bilbo shouted back.

“Thou scum! I shall not leave ’til they are buried like Christians.”

Bilbo had already begun wading out to the keelboat with Neddy on his shoulders. Uncle stood fast. The dwarf leaped aboard whilst Bilbo hoisted himself on deck. There he stood, dripping in the downpour, a hand upon the pistol in his sash.

“Come, I say!” he importuned us.

“No,” Uncle shouted back.

Bilbo drew his pistol and held it up.

“I shall count to three,” he said. “Come aboard or rot with them. One….”

“For Godsake!” I pleaded with Uncle, shivering in the cold rain.

“Two….”

“Please!”

“Three.”

Bilbo pulled the trigger. The pistol clicked emptily, its charge already spent upon the porcupine. The villain laughed.

“You contumacious dunderhead!” he shook his fist at Uncle. “Even if we had the leisure to bury those poor wretches, we do not have at hand so much as a shovel!” Bilbo burst out laughing again. Uncle maintained his resolute posture, but glanced about at the ground as though flummoxed.

“We could weight them with stones and commit their bodies to the river,” he suggested. “Thee has claimed to have served in the navy under Captain Jones. Surely thee has heard of burial at sea.”

“At sea one has no choice, sir,” Bilbo riposted. “’Tis a prophylactic measure. Either one carries a stinking corpse on board or one disposes of it. What does it matter if these poor souls are eaten by catfish or worms or buzzards?”

Uncle was already gathering stones.

“All right, all right, by the everlasting cod of Christ! Gather your stones and let’s be done with it!”

And so we bound the poor brutalized Bottomleys in shrouds of burlap, weighted them with stones, and committed their bodies to the confluence of the two rivers with a few words of consecration, that they might meet their Lord and Savior in a better world than this one.