Snow Swept Moors: A Highland Winter Collection, page 43
Once outside, the warriors surrounded them and were spitting orders in some garbled language. There had to be a dozen in the war party, armed with tomahawks, knives, and muskets.
Catriona glanced questioning at Coowee. “What are they saying?”
Coowee’s narrow, nutmeg-colored face was tight with terror. Having chosen to live among the whites, she could expect no leniency at the hands of these warriors. She humped her bony shoulders and only shook her head in the negative.
Catriona glanced uneasily at Esau. His jaw was working as if he were chewing tobacco. “Talking about killing, maybe.”
“When last did you hear tell of their burning anyone at the stake?” Jethro choked out.
She had heard only of white people burning their victims at the stake, victims like Jacob’s mother. Before she could respond, the leader spat some kind of order, and one of the braves whacked Jethro hard upside his temple with the walnut stock of his Brown Bess.
Jethro staggered, and she sprang to clutch his shoulder as he sagged. But a brave, the lower portion of his face a grotesque mask striped with red and black horizontal bands, stepped between her and Jethro.
Their captors shoved them out of the cabin yard, past the fields, forded Hollering Woman Creek, and herded them into the dense forest on the other side. Mile after mile they trudged. The pace the Indians set was fast, but the hours dragged.
Catriona’s leather patents rubbed excruciating blisters on her feet. Branches and brambles scratched her face and arms. Mosquitoes stabbed at her exposed flesh, and spider webs netted her tumbled hair, which had long since lost its cap and pins. A trail left, she knew, Jacob would track. Even the forest birds fell silent at the funeral procession-like forced march.
If she judged the position of the sun correctly, the Indians halted, at last, at midday near a mossy creek. The captives fell at once to their knees to drink the cold, clear water. Their captor’s treatment of Jethro, after he had piped up, underscored the case for silence among them.
However, Billy’s whimpering and whining were growing louder. His eyes were dark smudges, his hair a thatch of scarecrow straw, his face dirty and briar-scratched. Immediately, Mary slapped her hand over his mouth. “Hush!”
“Here,” Catriona whispered, digging into her tied-on pocket to produce her half-eaten biscuit leftover from that morning. She proffered it to the tired child.
Immediately, his grimy hands grabbed it, and he gobbled it in one swallow.
Mary edged closer to Catriona. “Thank yuh. Listen here,” she whispered, inclining her brown hair closer to Catriona’s red hair. “Dragging Canoe, he’s the big wig among the Cherokee Middle House tribes. So, tis odd he would lead a small raiding party. What fer? To capture only the six of us’uns?”
Unless – unless, Jacob had put him up to it, as he had threatened.
At once, she dismissed the thought. Aye, Fergus had said if Jacob wanted something, he never gave up. When he determined a course of action, he held resolutely to it. It was inconceivable, though, he would have her kidnapped to teach her a lesson for her spiteful outburst about preferring to be an Indian’s squaw than his wife.
Even more inconceivable that he would risk the lives of others. But he was part Indian, had been raised mostly with the Indians, thought like the Indians. Could she really ever understand the complex man?
When Dragging Canoe stepped closer and motioned with an abrupt jerk of his hand for them to rise and move out, Billy’s little mouth curled in a pout, and he said defiantly, “No.”
It was the first word Catriona had heard from the child. But now was not the time for him to decide to test his gift of speech. Quickly, Esau bent and scooped up the child to straddle atop his shoulders. “Gotcha, Billy,” he said quietly. “We’re going for a piggy-back ride.”
Only then did Catriona notice Coowee. Her twisted foot, fatigued by the forced march at the rapid pace, did not hold up as she struggled to stand. She fell on her knees. Catriona braced her arm around the woman’s waist and hefted her upright. Jethro scrambled to support her other side, but he was not in much better shape, still woozy as he was with the nasty slam his head had taken.
Coowee’s knees kept buckling. She shook her head, her braids swishing her nearly non-existent breasts. “Me no . . . no walk.” She tugged free of Catriona and Jethro and plopped back down. “Go. Go walk.”
“We can do this,” Catriona said and knelt to latch an arm once more about Coowee’s skinny waist.
A dozen pair of inimical eyes watched. At their grunts and prods, she and Jethro hauled Coowee to her moccasined feet and fell in line behind the others, with warriors both leading and trailing them.
Following the other captives, they plunged through underbrush, down slippery slopes and up brambly knolls. Her arm supporting Coowee raged with the numbing pain. Coowee fought back groans. Jethro swayed with almost every step. The knocking on his noggin had taken the sap out of him.
The trail they took sometimes intertwined and often paralleled the 200-mile-long Wilderness Road, the only way to get back and forth between the settlements of North Carolina and the newer ones in the Virginia territories of Kentucky and Tennessee. The path was, at times, no more than a narrow track. It wound through brush, craggy heights, and boggy bottoms, along which they were pushed single file. It was here, single file, that Catriona worried most for Coowee.
Several hours later, when Catriona stumbled on a rocky incline, slicing her shin on a jutting slab, she lost her footing. She grabbed at a drooping pine branch, but her numbed hand gave way. Jethro grabbed for her, but both she and Coowee went rolling, taking down the Indian directly behind them.
The other Indians leaped out of the way. At the bottom of the ravine, the buck sprang to his feet. The feather thrust through his topknot drooped forlornly. His comrades laughed and yelped taunts that Catriona, lying partially beneath Coowee, did not quite understand. But their obscene gestures comparing the feather with that part of his genitals were obvious, as well as, their motions at the prostrate Coowee and Catriona.
Fury contorted the buck’s painted face. His knife blade glittered in the dappled sunlight.
Half-trapped under Coowee, Catriona could only watch the blade gouge downward. In that single instant, before it could scoop out her heart, she saw her parents’ loving faces, heard old Phoebe’s querulous voice waking her far too early, felt Jacob’s callused and fire-scarred hand reaching up in the night from the pallet to clasp hers.
Chapter Fourteen
Time blurred. Two, maybe three, days of even more fast-paced traveling, with Dragging Canoe allotting only a few stops for water and periodic rest.
During one of those all-too-brief rest periods, Mary told their captive group, now numbering only five, “They’re in a tearin’ hurry ta git wherever it is they’re headed.”
Coowee’s grizzly murder was still a nightmare in the backs of Catriona’s lids whenever she closed them. She was afraid to sleep, afraid to dream, afraid of their fate. Afraid even to eat, afraid her portion would not be doled out pemmican but a serving of Coowee’s eviscerated heart.
Their destination, she learned, was a Cherokee town, Coyate, on the banks of the Little Tennessee River, the area where Fergus had said Jacob and Caswell and staff had been headed.
Her mind had plenty of time to entertain yet again the possibilities that Jacob was behind their capture, that she was a fool to believe he had integrity, much less, a conscience.
Now painfully barefoot, she and the other captives were shoved through a gate. Its solid fortification walls of thick logs surrounded the Indian village. Lookouts were stationed along a wooden walkway at the top.
It seemed the whole town had turned out to taunt the arriving captives. She and the rest stumbled and limped past jeering women and old men and darting children and dogs and into the seven-sided council house built atop an earthen mound.
In the council house, on the far side of the large stone-rimmed hearth, sat a swarthy man on an array of buffalo robes. His long gray braids draped a sagging bare chest that was tattooed. She did not recognize it as being the same design as that of Jacob’s. To either side of him sat a couple of other stolid-faced braves.
From behind, unseen hands thrust her to her knees. The same occurred to Mary, Jethro, and Esau, who toted in his arms a spent and nigh unconscious Billy. Dragging Canoe seated himself between them and the old man, with his apparent advisors, and began conversing with him in staccato-like exchanges.
At one point, the old Indian’s rheumy eyes fastened on her. Dragging Canoe shot to his feet in one fluid motion, crossed to stand behind her and yank a lock of her filthy red hair up for all to see. The implication was obvious. A shudder of horror rippled through her.
After a moment, the old Indian nodded and muttered something. From what she could fathom, the nod was one more of boredom with the subject than that of agreement to what Dragging Canoe was proposing.
Then, during the rest of Dragging Canoe’s diatribe, the old man shifted his intense focus from her to Esau. Regarding their fate, she had no clue as to what the council decided but, at last, an emphatic nod, this time from the chief, sent their captors escorting them – all but Esau – to a small dome-like house sunk into the ground.
“What do you think they could be doing with him?” Jethro asked, dropping down before its fire pit and cautiously glancing around the darkened, malodorous room.
Mary, with Billy now huddled within the loop of her arm, stared across the fire pit at his worried expression. “I’m thinking the chief took a gander at Esau’s walleyes and straight-aways up and decided that Esau’s the tribe’s lucky rabbit’s foot.”
Catriona nudged aside some small rocks with her bare foot, swollen with suppurating sores, and curled up in the ash-crusted dirt. She yawned. “We can only hope that favorable superstition will extend to us, as his friends, as well.” She was fatigued beyond caring. Besides, flight was out of the question in that village of what she estimated to be nearly two thousand or so. If the Indians decided to scalp or kill her, there was nothing to be done about it. She might as well rest while she could.
Which turned out to be a wise consideration, as even before sunrise the next morning a fat, grumpy squaw entered. A puffed birthmark blemished most of her right cheek. She carried a cane tray with wooden bowls filled with some kind of putrid gruel and prodded them to eat quickly.
Billy’s little fist rubbed his sleepy eyes. He glanced at the maggoty food and shook his head back and forth. His dirty mop of yellow hair swished across his brows.
“Yew gotta eat, Billy,” Mary coaxed.
“I canna blame him,” Catriona said, frowning down at her bowl of moving vermin.
In what seemed mere minutes, the squaw returned and whisked away the tray with two bowls untouched. Mary and Jethro had scarfed the contents of theirs.
Then three braves appeared at the curtained doorway. One swooped up a squirming, yelling Billy, and the second prodded Jethro with the butt of his tomahawk to follow him outside, which he did with alacrity. The remaining Indian motioned for Catriona and Mary to set off in another direction.
He led them outside the gate to a cornfield, where, with a copper disk just tipping the predawn dark outline of a forest on Catriona’s right, they were set to work with a few other squaws. They were to gather into baskets harnessed on their backs the windrows of corn cobs, harvested the day before.
Throughout that day, all the women toiled under guard with nary a word permitted exchanged between her and Mary. That copper disk had charred Catriona’s pale flesh by the time it dropped behind the mountains on her left. And by that time, painful ant bites dotted her feet and calves. They were a mere aggravation compared to the gripping pain in the muscles ridging her spine. She hobbled like an old woman.
Only near dusk did the squaws return to the village and Mary and she to the hovel. Built of tree branches bent in a circular shape and plastered with mud and clay, its musty dry darkness was a relief. But the moldering beaver pelts suspended from the arched branches were not. Neither were the odors of horse manure, rancid bear meat, and human feces. None of this she had noticed before, so utterly drained had she been from the forced and fast paced march.
At once, she slumped over onto her side. Her stomach growled, but she shrank from what might be in the family cooking pot in the hovel’s center – stories were widespread of Indian cuisine containing anything from turtle tails to dog paws to slugs. If this cuisine was the reason for the Cherokee’s legendary height, she would settle for her own and forego the delicacies.
Likewise, her sunburned flesh shrank at painful contact with anything. She was totally tortured. And, here she had thought her duties as a frontier wife had been extraordinarily demanding. “Mary, wake me please, if this be a nightmare.”
“Yuhr alive,” Mary said, stretching out, as well. “Mebbe not so purty anymore.”
She might have taken offense, but she could hear tears weighting the woman’s next words. “I can only hope me Billy behaved – and the savages haven’t bashed out his brains.”
She was struck with guilt. Not once, in stooping and collecting along the rows of cornstalks, had she given Billy even a thought. Her thoughts had centered around only how to escape.
Certainly, if not for Jacob’s need for a white wife, a strong white wife able to bear children – and read, she would be ensconced in the leaded pane-glass window seat of her bedroom back at Campbelton – and reading.
No, she would not.
Afton Manor was gone. Never more to exist except in memory.
The animal skin curtain lifted, and Jethro slipped inside to plop down with them. As soon as his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he asked, “Esau? Billy?”
Mary shook her head. Her lips crunched into a thin line. Then, she got out, “We don’t know nuttin’ of ‘em.”
“They had me hoeing weeds with squaws in a squash garden,” Jethro said. “Got the feeling what they’re jist biding their time with us.”
A short while later, Esau appeared with Billy in hand. The kid was astonishingly at ease. After the horror of witnessing his father’s scalping, Catriona would have thought this captivity would have reduced him to a blubbering mess. But, no. Mayhap, Esau had managed to reassure him. Or mayhap, it was as if the child, at that young age, had realized he had seen the worse and could live through anything after that.
“Momma,” he yelled, hurtling his thin, little body against Mary, while she struggled upright from her dead-like slumber.
Yet another word from the boy – Momma. Catriona exchanged a significant glance with Mary.
Esau squatted next to Mary but directed his statement at Catriona and Jethro. “Looks as though we may be here for a while.”
She pushed to a sitting position and shoveled her filthy, bloody, stinking hair from her sunburned face. “You mean it is possible, though, we might be permitted to leave at some point?”
“That Chief Atakullakulla – the one with the tattooed clan markings on his chest – he didn’t rightly say so. But from what I can tell, his son Dragging Canoe and hisself are in opposing camps. Dragging Canoe, he is fer ripping out the beating heart of every white man twixts here and the coast. His father is sidling. Says that while it would seem better for the red men to die like warriors than to dwindle away by inches, their deaths will in the end be for naught. That the white man will take away their homes, their land, and the red man will be no more.”
“What’s that mean fer us’uns?” Mary demanded, drawing a worn-out Billy into her lap and cradling his head against her meager chest.
“Means we do what they tell us. I was trussed off to follow their medicine man around the day long.”
His walleyes sought out Catriona. “Not much difference far as I make out twixts them and yew Highlanders.”
“What?” she asked, knowing that her thoughts must be fuzzy, what with lack of sleep and hunger and all the other deprivations.
“The Aniwaya – the Wolf Clan of hunters and warriors – is the largest of the clans here. From what I can figger, their clans are related by blood through a female ancestor. Women preside as chiefs of their own council.”
“Well, yuh can be sure,” Mary drawled, “that our fat hostess here is gonna make sure she has first rights to us.”
“So what happens now?” Catriona asked of Esau. “Can we be ransomed?” That was the best she could hope for the five of them.
“’Pears our fate hinges not on any kind of councilwoman but on a white man what that they are waiting to show up. Reckon he’s got hisself some kind of clout with the Indians . . . and is most likely the scurvy swine behind our capture.”
Clout with the Indians? That could only be Jacob. God help her, maybe she was with child, as he had once questioned, because now, although she had not cried since their seizure and during their days of forced march to the Indian village, not even upon Coowee’s death, she wanted to weep her heart out at the possibility her husband would commit such a senseless and heartless reprisal.
Yet, that practical part of her nature begged her emotionally ragged side that reigned now under this duress to hold off judgment. She had not wanted to admit that she had come to hold her husband in some high regard, but, indeed she had – and she desperately needed to believe she was wrong about his being responsible for their captivity.
The next day was more of the same, except instead of exposing her skin to a burning, blistering sun in cornfields, she and Mary were sent with a berry picking party to have their skin pricked and gouged by briars.
And yet another day, they were sent out to gather firewood, the heavy loads which they toted strapped by grapevines to their back. The fat squaw with the facial birthmark took great delight in switching their arms and legs with a three-foot-long hickory stick if they moved too slowly. Jethro had dubbed her ‘Mole Woman.’
Ultimately, rage boiled over Catriona’s tolerance level. She grabbed the switch from the squaw and, staring her directly in the eye, snapped the switch between her hands.
