Ella and Everett in the beginning

When the French patrol boat was but a speck down river, Everett squirmed out of his hot hole and brushed the dirt and stinging red ants from his neck. The fresh breeze offered a glorious cooling bath of air into which Everett twisted and danced and shook himself like an old, water-soaked dog, gradually moving closer to Ella who sat pensively on a log staring out at the river.

"That Frenchy, there's got an eye for you, ain't he," Everett teased.

"Would he now?" she said, "Is that what you think?"

"I'd cut his bloomin throat," Everett snorted, scratching feverishly at his itchy neck, swatting at the stinging ants.

"Aye, you would," she said with a skeptical frown.

"Oh, what a gentleman, though," Everett grinned, with a mock bow.

"He's got good manners," she said quietly. "I like a gentleman with manners."

"Then I need to work on mine," Everett laughed, in a mock twirl, bowing to his knee close enough to catch her scent.

She pulled back a bit and grinned at Everett, her eyes twinkling with bemused tolerance at his boyish, dopey charade. "A jug of cologne after a good bath would suit me," she smiled.

Everett leapt to his feet and ran down the slope and thundered into the river, diving into the cool current, twisting and coming up squirting water from his mouth, and then losing his nerve with his little flirtation and rolled back over and dove beneath the surface and swam deep and long into the channel where great, 15-foot strands of weed grass undulated and waved with the roiling current, glowing a brilliant golden-green from the scorching sun above.

His stomach churned and ached with longing, not knowing what to say or what to do, but knowing he liked her nearly as much as she scared him, which was a lot. He first felt this strange and conflicted churning the first day he saw her standing with her son before the smoldering ruins of her burnt-out cabin on the shores of Lake Champlain. He was paddling his empty canoe north from Albany after unloading several hundred pounds of beaver furs at a trading post where he'd been told the prices were double what he could get in Lachine or Montreal. By the time he got there, the prices had dropped in half, and he cursed himself for his greed and left fuming at the wasted trip. On his way home he saw Ella and her son standing like statues gazing at the crumpled ruins of the fireplace chimney that set the cabin ablaze from an early morning pine pitch fire. It was cold, misty March day, the lake still marbled with floating patches of ice. Everett pulled up to the bank to offer his help and stretch his aching legs. She was covered with soot, her face smudged with wood char and her cheeks stained with white streaks where tears washed through soot and char. They stood amid a clutter of metal pots, salvaged metal tools, and the skeleton of a flintlock rifle burned clean of its wooden stock and tilted against an enormous cast iron pot.

"Anyone hurt, ma'am?" he called from some distance so as not to startle her witless at his approach from behind.

She turned and shook her head no. He half expected she might faint away in a swoon when to his surprise she turned back and kicked a copper pot in looping arc back into the smoldering mass of ash. This was his first inkling of her capacity for anger, and he stepped back a bit lest she launch something in his direction.

"You got kin or a husband can help you out?" he asked cautiously after a respectful silence.

"He's dead six months. I have no kin save Jamie, here."

"I'm sorry, ma'am," Everett said, noting to himself that beneath the soot and char was a pretty face and smooth-curved jaw twitching hard and fast.

"I be glad to give yas a ride up to the settlement by the fort," Everett offered.

"It's overrun by diphtheria," she said still staring into the ruins.

"You ain't got nowhere to go, then," he said.

She turned to him now and grasped a damp mat of blond hair tangled over half her face and tossed it back over her shoulder. "We have nowhere to go," she said, her bright blue eyes ablaze.

At that moment, Everett's belly churned the first time with that mix of fear and attraction that flowed up and down through him in a wave that weakened his knees and tugged his breath away. He starred down at her dumbly, and she looked at him as if drilling a series of holes all over his head for his brains to dribble out.

He must have looked a fright because after a time she asked, "Are you all right?"

He was started from this stupor and replied quickly, "Yes, ma'am. I'm okay. Well, look here then. I got a little place on an island on the St. Lawrence River a couple days from here. I got room for you and the boy 'til you find somethin' better."

"How do I know I can trust you?" she asked.

Everett scratched his head and puzzled over her question. "You don't know, I guess."

"An island?"

"Yes ma'am. Got pretty sunsets at night and a cool breeze that knocks down the mosquitoes pretty good. I can teach the boy to fish if he don't know already."

She looked toward the boy and raised her brows a bit in question.

The boy nodded yes.

She leaned down and started gathering pots. "Let's go, then," she said.

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With Lucy in a storm

By late afternoon the wind had shifted to the east, and a bank of nasty clouds approached from the west. They would need an easterly to pull them upcurrent. But Lucy was now singing alongside the piano player, and drunken fishermen and sailors jammed the floor with their boots to the frantic beat of the music. Everett settled against the bar, slipping deeper and deeper into head-throbbing oblivion.

He could barely walk when Lucy finally dragged him out into driving rain and a gusty, thundery gale. Sheets of rain swept the dockside. Wind howled down the narrow quay, rain swatting and slapping the dimly lit facades of drying sheds and marine offices. Every few moments lightening torched the furious purple sky. Brilliant, glistening flashes lit a million racing droplets, frozen for a moment, then extinguished to the dim remnants of daylight shrouded in the roiling, purple-brown clouds.

When Everett leapt onto Lucy's barge, his feet skidded across the greasy wet slime, and he crashed to the deck, his head snapping against hard cedar. Bright sparks burst inside his head. He could feel his body slide across the deck and flop over the edge into the fish hold. He could feel the cold water envelope his legs, his body, his face, his head, but he could not seem to react. He felt Lucy's hand grab him harshly by the hair, and now this time the water pealed away from his flesh in exact reverse of time, as she dragged him back onto the aft deck and dropped him in a heap.

She rushed to the bow and rigged a small storm jib that flapped furiously. She yanked the bow line free and skipped along the slippery deck, stepping over Everett to set the aft mizzen. She leaned over the stern and yanked the stern line free, then heaved the sheet line to the forward jib. The sail puffed into a throbbing triangular arch. She cleated the line and set the mizzen, the sail erupting with a thud, full and throbbing from the force of the wind, the mast step squeaking from the sudden surge of force. The barge groaned and creaked at every joint, then slowly eased forward, Lucy straddling the tiller like a horse.

Everett moaned and hugged his throbbing head, a fist-sized lump emerging at the back of his head. Lightening flashed, and for a moment they could see scores of wobbling, swaying masts glow white in the glistening rain. Thunder crackled and hissed a moment later. In the sheltered port bay, the flat water danced and trembled from the wind, gusts swatting past, sweeping the water with frantic miniature waves rushing to find a place to build.

Quickly the waves grew as the port narrows opened to a broad sweep of widening river. Following waves crashed over the stern and yanked the rudder left, then right. Gusts yanked at the sails, from time to time snapping them from side to side in sudden, shuddering jibes that could have swatted either overboard or broken their necks had they failed to duck.

Despite the power of the wind, they made slow progress against the channel currents. Lucy eased toward shallower water. She sent Everett to the bow section with her sounding poll where he stabbed the water every few moments to gauge its depth. Darkness sank over them, the only light from bursts of lightening. Rain hurtled from the blackness above. Waves leapt and plunged from the blackness below.

"Yah crazy bitch," he yelled, partly to Lucy, partly to the barge, partly to the sky and river, partly to the raging storm. It was crazy trying to navigate the river in such utter darkness. They were doomed, he knew. They would die. But it didn't matter to him. Death would stop the throbbing and kill the chill. But he kept taking his soundings, ducking clear of the crazy, lurching sails. And he waited, knowing at any moment that they could move into shallows and not know which way to steer, go aground, and be smashed on the rocks by the relentless waves.

But Lucy knew. She knew that part of the river and scanned the horizon for the familiar tree line that emerged at moments with the glow of lightening and would tell her the bends and sways of the river she'd memorized from childhood. She gauged the wind in her sails, which was holding steady due east, pointing the way home. Her Uncle Joe, an Indian trapper, had taught her to navigate at night, a time when the other Indians feared the river spirits. To navigate a storm at night was the safest time of all, safe from Indians, thieves, greedy soldiers, and competing trappers who'd kill without a wince of hesitation for a canoe load of furs. So Joe moved his furs on stormy nights and taught Lucy, often taking her as his second paddle, how to work the river in its fury, scaring her senseless every time.

Even by Uncle Joe's standards, this was a fearsome storm. Lucy's fears were considerably aided by her tremendous dousing of ale. She knew this was an unnecessary risk, but she could return in one day on this easterly in what would take a three days in calmer weather in a prevailing southwest wind. Still her heart pounded from fear. The waves built as they entered Lac du St. Francois and faced a series of emerging shoals. With the expanse of water, the wind kicked up huge rolling waves that crashed over the stern, each one threatening to break the rudder or catapult her into the river where she would surely drown.

She could hear Everett screaming out soundings now.

"Ten foot."

"Eight foot."

She needed at least six.

"Ten foot," he yelled.

And over that broad expense the wind picked up its force. Unbroken by trees and hills, the wind could race at full gallop, sucking the water with it into a furious, crazy chop that lunged angrily against the steady, unrelenting current.

Each time the numbers got smaller, Lucy's heart beat faster.

Jesus, God, she thought, old Uncle Joe, let it deepen.

"Nine foot."

A big storm like that dries the throat with fear and keeps it dry, but Lucy eventually began to relax and feel the rhythms and to trust a gust would reach a peak and not suddenly explode but would race by, leaving them in a momentary, dark lull before the surge of waves chasing that gust heaved the stern upward, pushing them homeward. For a moment after a gust, a momentary pause sagged the sails, and then the boat settled heavily before a new gust whapped the mizzen, then the jib, the boat lurching heavily forward.

"Eight foot," he yelled, his voice barely audible, getting pulled into the wind as it rushed forward and skittered off the bow toward home.

"Louder," she said in an almost normal voice, her words carried to him as the wind rushed up the stern, across the decks, and up the bow deck, splitting off, some to his ears, some whapping into the sail where it would stick and push, then slither past in a swirl racing ahead of the waves.

"Eight foot," he shrieked.

Her heart bean to gallop.

"Seven,"

"Fuck off," she yelled.

"Six."

She wrapped her arms around the tiller and pushed toward shore, the bow slowly swinging, angling toward the center of the vast river.

"Six."

The barge scrapped bottom.

She yanked the sheet lines, pulling in the sails to gather the wind to her new angle, a more efficient reach that groaned at the mast step, a new angle of force from the shuddering mast. The barge scrapped and groaned, then broke free a moment.

"Seven."

"Bless you, Uncle Joe," she whispered, the tiller shuddering now as it cut the water, this heavy old barge leaping forward.

The worst angle in any boat was this following sea, dead aft. It plunged the bow downward and plowed them into river, digging, burrowing, pushing a mountain of water like a plow. But their new course lifted them, healing the old girl until the starboard deck slipped beneath the surface, the port deck lifting heavily but triumphantly like a grand frigate. She laughed at this sudden glimpse of grace from her hopeless old tub. Their glorious reach would be short lived, but she played it for every bit of speed.

"Ten foot."

"Fifteen."

And then his pole could not measure the depth as they ran the edge of the channel. She felt the bow lurch from the new force, the rudder suddenly pulling her with such force she had to set her feet against the rail. Now the risk was to be flung sideways by the current. She pulled with all her strength, feeling the water's shuddering power, feeling the water slithering like a hundred powerful snakes sliding over the surfaces of the rudder. She pulled and pulled and finally the wind pushed them leeward toward the shallows again, the rudder easing and now swaying as before from the odd lurches from following waves, back on their nasty old course. It seemed now to her that her Uncle Joe was guiding her, the boat and the wind, and the current and the waves transformed into Uncle Joe, ten years dead, guiding her home.

By morning the wind had eased but remained brisk out of the east. The black sky slowly eased to a dim, flat gray, but now she could see the silhouette of the shoreline trees, distant spires of cedars in familiar clusters marking the widest bowl of St-Francois du Lac, the first tangible reminders of home. In the far distance ahead, she could see the dim outline of the giant stone church spire of Ste-Anicet. Here the settlements thinned out. Cedars long since cut and burned within thirty miles of Montreal were now poking the sky thick as weeds.

With morning's light Everett could now brew up coffee and serve them chunks of day old bread warmed on the cook stove. Lucy's hands were knotted, her knuckles stuck shut from grasping the tiller through the night. Now she could steer with her butt and knead her blistered, bleeding palms.

The wind tugged steadily at the dark canvas sails, steam from their coffee twisting away in frantic twirls chasing the east wind west. Everett's head still throbbed, but he flung his arm around Lucy's shoulder and gave her a squeeze.

"Yer goddamned good, luv," he snorted, blowing ripples across the black surface of his coffee cup.

"Old Joe was with us," she said, "he kept us off the rocks."

Everett gazed at the dark stains of the numerous islands that sprinkled along Ste-Francois and reminded him of the corpses of ancient men laying in rest on their backs, profiles of faces and feet at each point, laid east to west, old ghosts asleep for the day but whose spirits awoke at night and rambled each island until dawn. Huge trees crafted the bodies of these old men, stands of cedars like fingers raised to the sky, massive willows round shouldered, leaf-swollen basswood trees big as bellies. He knew the islands were haunted, knew the Indians were right about strange lights and great lurching movements at dusk on still nights. He loved those old men but feared them, feared becoming one of them. Old Joe was one of them, the master of an island they called Little Joe's, so there was no argument from him that Lucy got his help that night.

Everett wasn't ready yet, still wasn't enough part of the river to belong at rest, corpses floating at anchor for eternity. Most Indians knew and left the islands to the white settlers. In his ten years on his island he'd never seen an arrowhead, no sign of an Indian camp or burial mound or piles of mussel shells, the sorts of remnants that cluttered the shoreline. On his island he'd seen just a few old camp stove parts, burned cabin posts, a table leg here or there, a patch of roofing tin from settlers who left probably from hardship or who fell through thin spots in the ice or died of disease and were buried in the river by fleeing families who'd had enough. Soon the ice would come and by February it would be a foot thick except over the channels where the ice was never thicker than an inch or two. He'd seen men go down. It was usually when there was snow, and you couldn't see the dark patches. It was very fast and very quiet. Footprints that just stopped, and in five minutes the hole was frozen over as before, and on most days, the wind silted over the hole, then the tracks, then nothing but a blinding sweep of white.

Everett navigates an ice storm

Going to Lachine was good news to Everett. There he might escape and run the few miles along the rapids to Montreal where he could lose himself in the back streets and alleys. At Lachine the crew would drink the potent ales and consort with whores, and the chances for lapses in security would surely improve. For the first time in weeks, his mood improved. But he was not so sure they would make it. Already shallow sections of the river were iced over. He was sure St-Francois du Lac would be mostly ice by now except for the deepest channels.

That night the temperature dropped to 12-degrees f. Even in his fetid little brig, the snot in Everett's nose froze as he breathed. He shivered all night wrapped in his scraggly blanket supplied only at the insistence of Gilles. The next morning sheets of black ice peeled and popped like glass as the huge vessel plowed forward riding the steady westerly toward St-Francois du Lac. The decks were slick with ice, the ropes and lines stiff, icicles forming on every ledge and protuberance as they penetrated a strange, crystalline fog.

They posted Everett and Gilles in the bow and used bells to indicate Louis' course. Everett noticed the chill in Gilles' pale face, red at the nostrils and ears and chin. His fair skin was stretched too tautly on the fine bones of his handsome, angular face. His face would soon be frost bit, Everett knew. The ruddy Louis would probably be all right, but many of these French soldiers, even the marines, seemed too delicately constructed to survive the cold, as if the gray of winter light seeped into their skin and could penetrate to their bones.

Everett leaned over the rail and watched the shards of black ice rip and shatter as the powerful bow crushed forward. He was mesmerized by blunt power of the iron-like oak penetrating the delicate black ice, lifting whole sheets in great translucent arcs that suddenly snapped and exploded in a thousand shards sharp enough to penetrate a man. This was the beginning, this shimmering black ice of a quarter inch. In a few days it could be two inches, and then the hard oak would begin to chaff and sliver, and then it would be the power of ice that would begin to chew apart this seemingly robust vessel, and if it grew yet colder, the ice would carve the bow like sharp knives and then brutal axes, ripping it to shreds. But to stop would be even worse, to stop would trap them, freeze them, crush them, sink them.

In the gray fog that day, they followed the dark path of the channel, their coats turning to icy armor plate over their chests. The sails, puffed and full, hardened into glistening arcs of sheet ice, rigid as iron. By noon, the gunship groaned and crackled under the new, enormous weight of the misty ice. From time to time, gusts would crack the surface of the ice on the sails, and thin glassy sheets tumbled to the deck and shattered like glass.

By early afternoon, Everett warned Gilles. "You'd better lower them sails, or you'll break them masts."

But the captain pressed onward, and at dusk a sudden gust swirling out of the north twisted the sails, and sheets of black ice tumbled down, and not twenty feet from them, a sailor was struck by a huge shard that split his skull and ripped his shoulder from his chest. The man fell under the weight of the shattering ice, blood pumping in hot, steaming spurts from the base of his neck onto the glistening deck. The man groaned and turned to Everett and Gilles, reaching his fingers to block the spurts of blood but only causing it to spray in odd splatters over his blood drenched face leaving only the white of his eye visible in the drench of glistening red. Further aft, a section of yard arm cracked and broke, tumbling toward the deck before yanking into a swinging arc held by a tangle of rigging lines like some doomed pendulum.

The spurts of the sailor's blood soon dwindled to an oozy flow, and then he was dead, his white eye looking off in dazed confusion.

Gilles persuaded the captain to lower the main sails, but the canvas was so stiff now that the sailors had to pound them with sticks just to soften them enough to tuck them out of the wind. Sheets and shards of ice shattered everywhere, cutting hands and fingers. Men slipped and fell, scampering helplessly on the ice-slicked decks.

By evening the temperature had dropped still further, and the ship now inched forward, ice crashing, shattering, and screaming against the hull. It was a race to Lachine across the emerging vast white of St-Francois du Lac where snow was now piled thickly on an enormous field of ice cut only by a jagged fifty-foot ribbon of black ice marking the narrowing channel. Everett was chilled to the depths, and only he seemed fully aware that this rugged craft was no better than a pile of match sticks should the channel close on them.

Ella in captivity

Nearly every night, Whispering Cloud told stories, and gradually Ella learned of the great hardships these people bore year after year. Whispering Cloud, herself, had had four husbands, all of them killed in tribal skirmishes or in combat with the English or French settlers or troops. "War ees a condition of ar lives," she told Ella.

"But you sign treaties," Ella protested. "The Iroquois are admired by white shamen as a people of sustained peace."

Whispering Cloud shrugged. "Thees was a short time. Ees over now."

Ella was surprised to learn how few deer and bear and beaver remained in the tribal wilderness. It seemed to her that wildlife prospered but remembered Everett complaining of how difficult trapping had become.

"Ees not da same," Whispering Cloud said. "When I am de child, deer everywhere, a nuisance. Ees easy to kill. And de beaver, everywhere. De pond everywhere. Flood de stream. Flood de river." She rolled her eyes in remembrance of the annoyance of beaver floods. "Then come de trapper. And de wampum. And we de Indian, we buy de gun wit de wampum. We trap. We de best. We shoot de deer, de bear, de beaver. But ees not so easy no more," she said solemnly, her sparkling dark eyes searching inward for memories, her wrinkled old face creased by dark shadows from the cabin fire.

One night the old women spoke about wars she had experienced, and Ella interrupted at one point to inquire about the brutality. "Why do the Indians take scalps."

"Ah. Better to take de head. Always. To bring back the spirit of the warrior, we cut of de head. But too many heads. Sometimes too many heads. So we take de scalp. Ees easier to carry. And then de white man. He want de scalp. De more de scalp, de more de gun and de more de whiskey for de Indian. Ees change too."

"White men have told stories of Indian torture," Ella said. "Are these stories true?"

"Could be. Why yes maybe. De Indian not use de word tor-ture. Not our word. Ees a ceremony. A brave man, he die crying, ees not so brave, ey? A coward, he die wid de clear eye. He brave man. Ready for de spirit place. A brave man wid de clear eye. He endure beeg pain. Ees a great warrior, ees ready for de spirit place. He come back to us. Ees wid us and in our hearts. Ees not enemy no more. Ees broder, ey?"

"Have missionaries ever come to your village?" Ella asked.

"Ah, why yes. De one, I am de young woman. De missionary come and we see he ees de witch. Ees de devil. Everybody sick and die. He do ceremony," she said waving her hands to pantomime the sign of the cross and other blessings. "Dey die. All dey die. Each time. Babies. Moders. Warriors. Old men. Old woman. All de ceremony. All dey die," she said shaking her head sadly.

"So we cook de missionary. Not brave dis man. Cry, cry, cry. He go to hell place. He tell us 'bout de hell place where dey cook for many, many moons." She smiled, "We start him to cook. Cry, cry, cry. He know. Before he tole us. Cook de hell. He know. Cry all de way der."

"You think he was a witch."

"Ah yes. Eees de witch. He say cook de hell," she shrugged, "he tell de way, dat man."

"I can't imagine being cooked like that," Ella shuddered.

Whispering Cloud leaned toward took Ella's hand in her warm, leathery palms. "We no cook you. No cook," she smiled. "We marry you, ey? Better dan de cook," she giggled with playful wickedness and traded nods with Turtle Cloud, and they all smiled, Ella more thinly than the others.

Gordon leads a raiding party

Gordon picked up the tracks of the Wendat along a glacial ridge running parallel to the great river. They were headed west but could be counted on to circle back any number of times. "Dees track no hide. Ees many trap," he told Everett and the others. "Dey split. We go nort. Make beeg, beeg circle."

To fool the Wendats they started south leaving tracks until they found a small creek. They walked in the creek back north, the rushing water swirling quickly around their steps, destroying any evidence of their tracks. After a few minutes, Everett and Jamie's feet were so numb they could barely walk. They stepped into the same places as the Indians in front of them, their feet so numb they couldn't feel the slippery bottom.

They followed the stream for many miles until it was little more than a trickle. Then they headed west in a single line, Gordon going last to hide their tracks. At the next creek, they headed north again, sometimes walking in thigh-deep water that surged powerfully over slimy rocks and threatened to sweep them off their feet. They walked north this way for the rest of the day, and as dusk approached, they stepped out of the creek and headed west again. They found a cave in a ridge and huddled together around a fire to warm their feet and dry their clothes. They cooked scraps of venison and melted snow still thick at the bases of pine trees and drank a bitter herbal tea that made Everett's heart pound rapidly in his chest and heated his body until he broke a sweat.

"You figure them Wendats still got our scent?" Everett asked Gordon.

"Dont know," he shrugged. "Could be yes. Could be no."

"Tell me true, Gordon. If you was them and them was us, could you follow our tracks to where we're at?"

Gordon chuckled and grinned at the other Indians. "Yessir, Evert," he smiled, "yessir."

The others grinned and nodded yes.

Everett looked around then at Jamie and scratched his head. "Bloody hell," he moaned.

Jamie leaned toward the fire and asked Gordon, "Why would them Indians follow us all this way?"

Gordon sat back a bit and slowly passed his fingertips over his lips over and over in the deepest thought. Then he leaned forward and looked directly at the boy.

"All thees time. All de hours. All de work, de cold water. Ees not-ting to me. Ees not-ting to de Wendat if he be dead, ey?"

Jamie looked at him in utter puzzlement.

Gordon sat back and wiped his fingertips back and forth over his lips, and then sat forward again, his face even closer now to the boy's. "You wan die to save tree-four hours, ey? Indian warrior very patient. Walk two, tree, four, ten days in de stream, ees nothing. Me, I walk thirty day, one year, five year, ten year in de stream. Ees not-ting to save my life. Unnerstand?"

Jamie looked at Gordon's dark glimmering eyes and slight hint of a kindly smile.

Jamie cleared his throat and said, "Yer sayin that it don't matter how long or how hard you suffer so long as it keeps you alive. And if you don't do it, you end up dead, and if yer dead it don't matter how long it took or how much it hurt. Is that what yer sayin?"

Gordon looked at Everett and the other Indians and then back and the boy, and he nodded yes. He leaned forward and patted Jamie's hand, and for a moment Jamie thought he saw tears in the Indian's eyes, and they all knew for a few moments that Gordon was looking not only into Jamie's eyes but into the eyes of his own son. The other Indians bowed their heads and nodded with Gordon and then broke into a quiet chant in honor of his living spirit.