Читать книгу Rabble in Arms: A Chronicle of Arundel and the Burgoyne Invasion - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 11

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At Allen’s Landing, where the Winooski River flows into Lake Champlain, there was, as Cap had surmised, little besides a sawmill and a gristmill, and a store run by one of the Allens that are almost as plentiful in the Hampshire grants as are Starks in New Hampshire. Here we found ourselves the owners of two canoes for which Cap Huff, during his absence from our smallpox camp, had arranged to trade his horse and frying pans. They were ancient relics, the bark gone in patches and the pitch over their seams black and broken with age, so that they looked to me about as seaworthy as corn-cribs.

Nason and Verrieul, however, commended Cap’s judgment in acquiring them. They were North canoes, Verrieul said, made by Indians far to the north-west, beyond the Grand Portage on Lake Superior; so they must have been brought here and abandoned by traders. To me they seemed unwieldy things, too large for any use; but Verrieul said No: they were snug and tidy, easy to handle by comparison with the great Master canoes, which were forty feet long, and needed fourteen men to paddle: yet they were heavy enough for lake travel, unlike the twenty-foot half-canoes to which eastern pork-eaters like ourselves are accustomed. They were nine paces long, and two paces wide, each one constructed to accommodate eleven men—a look-out in the bow, a steersman standing in the stern, six middlemen with paddles on the three thwarts amidships, and three passengers.

Following Verrieul’s instructions, we peeled bark from yellow birches and laid it over the rents in these dilapidated hulks, stitching it in place with what he called wattape—the fine roots of red spruces; after which Nason and Verrieul daubed the seams with melted pine pitch. It was like a miracle to see these bargains of Cap’s changed, almost in a moment, from wragged wrecks into trim and glistening craft.

Yet Verrieul’s face grew longer when we tried them in the water; for with six men sitting high on the thwarts, the canoes moved so skittishly that even a landsman could see we were like to end our days on the bottom of Lake Champlain. We must have practice, Verrieul said, in balancing ourselves. He had no sooner said it than Cap bawled to us from the shore that he had learned from the settlers at Allen’s Landing that a fleet of bateaux, loaded with supplies, had passed north the day before.

“There ain’t enough supplies here to feed a sick peewit!” Cap shouted. “We better catch up with those bateaux, Stevie, and find some food before the troops get ahead of us! You know how soldiers are, Stevie: never thinking of nothing but food!”

He kept up his bellowing and complaining until Nason beached the canoes and ordered us to get our packs aboard so that we could set off after the supply-boats.

Since this gave us no time to perfect ourselves in balancing, there was nothing to do but eliminate the need for it; and this we did by lashing a block to the bottom of each canoe and stepping a mast in it—a mast with a single yard, so we could lie in the bottom of the canoe and sail ourselves.

When Cap lumbered down to join us, and stowed himself into the after part of our canoe, between Verrieul and Nathaniel, who tended the tacks of our rude sail while I handled the steering paddle, he was in a bitter humour; for the suddenness of our departure had cut him short in some of his trading ventures. He had been forced, he said, to exchange some of the choicest of his supplies for a bundle of paper money corded up like old love letters, hundreds of dollars worth of it. It was all the fault of Congress, he said recklessly. Congress had taken a hand in financial matters, and printed money whenever any one needed some, which was about as sensible as a man promising to marry every girl he saw. In such a case, he said, the girls soon got to know that his promises didn’t mean anything, and he couldn’t even get a howdy-do out of them, let alone anything more comforting; and that was the way with Congress money. The people were learning that it didn’t mean anything, and in no time at all they would be refusing to sell even a squash pie for anything less than two thousand dollars in Congress money.

Nason, who had taken Tom Bickford to handle the steering oar of his canoe, shouted to us to get along. “Keep going,” he said, “till dark, or till your seams open up.”

So, to the tune of Cap’s grumbling, we slid out into the lake on a fair wind, set a course between the point of Grand Isle and the high shores of Valcour Island, and were off on our long journey to the northward—a journey that we hoped, as do all those who go off to war, would bring us nothing but comradeship and gay adventure, and perhaps a little glory.

I am not much of an admirer of fresh water; for to me it seems weak and treacherous, always, becoming suddenly angry over nothing and tossing up hysterical imitations of waves. So furious are these, and at the same time so devoid of substance, that a vessel may readily fall through them from lack of support, and sink. Yet if I should be condemned to spend a part of my life on fresh water, I could put up with Lake Champlain better than with most; for though its water has a muddy look, its rugged shores are full of coves and grown up to handsome timber; and beyond its eastern shore bulk the Green Mountains of the Hampshire Grants, as satisfying a mountain-wall as a man can see anywhere.

When Cap had indiscreetly aired his opinions of the financial abilities of Congress, he seemed to cast about in his mind for other things at which to grumble; and at length, in a hoarse and angry voice, he questioned Verrieul concerning the Indians who might be used against us by the English—provided we had heard correctly in London from Marie de Sabrevois.

“You want to listen to this, Cap’n Peter,” he told me, while Verrieul pondered. “You never can tell when information about these red weasels might come in handy.” Cap was a profane man, and put no curb on his tongue where Indians were concerned when he was with me; though when Nason was present, he sometimes contented himself with looking distant and haughty when red men were mentioned.

“Weasels?” Verrieul asked quickly. “Which ones do you call weasels?”

“All of ’em!” Cap replied promptly. “They’re all a lot of dirty, thieving, red weasels! Cut your throat quick as a wink, and can’t hold their liquor!”

“How about your friend Natanis that I have heard you speak of?” Verrieul asked. “How many throats has he cut?”

Cap was indignant. “Don’t get the wrong idea about Natanis,” he said. “He’s a friend. He’s different, Natanis is. Stevie saved his life once. We’ve all kind of helped each other a few times.”

“But dirty, eh?” Verrieul asked.

“I told you he was different,” Cap growled. “He really ain’t an Indian, except for having an Indian father and mother and a red hide. He don’t even drink, the poor ignorollamus; he don’t understand nothing about pleasure at all!”

Verrieul nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, that’s a strange thing about Indians. We find them peculiar because, although they are called savage, they are often as civilised as white men, and sometimes more so.”

“Like hell they are!” Cap said. “How are they?”

“Because,” Verrieul said, “in every Indian nation, even the worst, there are many good men, and more honest ones, and even some that are merciful towards their enemies, which is against all common sense. White men, being civilised and not at all savage, avoid common sense as much as possible; but all Indians, whether good or bad, are taught to have a high regard for common sense. Those that are merciful, therefore, are merciful in spite of their teachings; whereas white men, who are for ever taught to be merciful, are often the opposite.”

Cap muttered and scratched his head. “I don’t see no sense to what you say! Why is it against common sense to be merciful to an enemy?”

“Look,” Verrieul said. “We’re making war against the English. We make war against them in order to kill them, do we not?”

“For sure we do!” Cap admitted.

“That’s why Indians fight, too,” Verrieul said. “To kill their enemies. They can’t understand it, many of them, when they’re asked to go out and kill enemies, and are then told it’s cruel to kill them when the opportunity presents. The way to kill enemies is not to be merciful to them, they say, but to kill them.”

“They’re a lot of dirty, underhand red stinks,” Cap said.

“There’s another thing,” Verrieul told us. “The nations change a good deal. It depends on the Manitousiou—m’téoulin—or whatever a nation calls the man whose words it finds most acceptable. Sorcerer, maybe, you’d call him; or maybe magician. Shaman, the western nations say. The nations are almost like trading companies: under good men they’re better than under bad men. And as the years go on, they learn how to do things better. Even the Montagnais have learned to make leggings that don’t fall apart every time the wind blows. I guess we were pretty bad three hundred years ago. I guess we were dirty, and superstitious, too, maybe; and maybe even cruel. The Revrint Doctor Wheelock told me that when the Holy Catholic Church tortured people, it thought up worse tortures than any Indian ever imagined. Catholics have changed, the Revrint Wheelock said, and so have the Indians. They’re better than they were a hundred and fifty years ago—better than they were when the Jesuit fathers first lived among them.”

“Just a lot of red stinks!” Cap repeated.

“One thing I quickly learned when I travelled with James Deane,” Verrieul said, seeming not to hear Cap’s words, “was that if you live with Hurons, you’re sure that Hurons are the kindest people on earth, and Iroquois the most terrible; whereas if you live with Iroquois, you feel that no man ever had truer friends than the Iroquois, and that Hurons are wild beasts.”

“Buzzards!” Cap remarked. “Red buzzards!”

“Well,” Verrieul said, “if they’re buzzards, how do you account for the white children who have been captured by Indian nations, and liked them so well they refused to go back to live with white men again?”

“Listen!” Cap said. “When a man gets used to buzzards, he ain’t going to where there’s buzzards he ain’t used to, is he? He likes the buzzards he’s got used to now better than the buzzards he used to be used to, don’t he? Don’t it stand to reason? You answer me that!”

“Now I have become confused,” Verrieul smiled apologetically. “But in spite of what you say, Captain Huff—or maybe not in spite of it—I don’t know which—James Deane is no buzzard. It is true, though, that after he had spent some years with the Oneidas, it was with great difficulty he was persuaded to come to Hanover with the Revrint Doctor Wheelock. The Sachem of St. Francis, Joseph Gill: he was a white captive, and so was his wife. He’s a wise man—no buzzard at all; but he wouldn’t go back to live with white people, nor his wife either; by no means! In Dartmouth there are three from Caughnawaga, all grandchildren of white captives who would never go back among white people—the grandson of Mr. Stacy from Ipswich, and the grandson of Mr. Tarbull from Groton, and the grandson of Eunice Williams from Deerfield.”

Cap Huff reached back and touched me on the knee. “You don’t want to take too much stock in what he says, Cap’n Peter.” He looked at Verrieul indignantly. “You’re like all the rest of these friends of the Indians! Ask ’em something straightforward and honest about the red weasels, and they tell you everything but what you want to know. All I want to know is which of these red buzzards we’ll have to fight; and the answer I get is a lot of talk about white men that want to be Indians!”

That was Cap Huff’s way when the talk turned on Indians. He would ask for information about them; but it seemed impossible for him to believe anything he heard, or even to listen to the information for which he asked. It was plain to be seen that Verrieul would have answered Cap’s questions as well as he could if Cap had let him; but the more Verrieul tried, the louder Cap grumbled and swore, so that Verrieul finally had to give it up.

... Thanks to our blanket sails and a fair wind, we camped that night on Isle La Motte, near the Canadian end of the lake, not only to rest our cramped muscles, but also to pitch our canoes once more; for the constant movement of these large canoes cracks off the pitch, so that they must be re-pitched each day.

We were eager to get forward. Our pork was gone, and there was not enough corn meal among all of us to nourish a chickadee. We had nothing to give substance to the fish Zelph cooked for us: they were watery and tasteless; no more filling than slush. Therefore we were restless and up with the false dawn, and afloat again soon after, hastening north between rocky shores that drew constantly closer together, and watching eagerly for the supply-boats of which Cap had learned.

So intently did we peer ahead into the faint mists that rose from the surface of this narrowing lake that without knowing how it happened, or when, we saw that the lake was a lake no longer, but had become a broad brown river that swept us along between banks as flat as those behind us had been steep and rocky. We had come to Canada at last.

The river was the Richelieu, though Verrieul said it was also known as the Iroquois River, because it was the pathway followed by the Iroquois when they went north, as they often did in the old days, to wage war on the Montagnais.

This river, said Verrieul, ran straight north and emptied into the St. Lawrence at Sorel, the town at the end of the tremendous wide place known as Lake St. Peter, and that was how we would go: through St. John’s, a matter of thirty miles from Lake Champlain: then on twice as far again to Sorel, through water a little broken: then down the St. Lawrence to Quebec.