Arundel by Kenneth Roberts Page A

sharp rocks lying among them like sharks’ teeth. When Natawammet and Woromquid went to the council house to act out their adventures for the other Abenakis, according to custom, Woromquid insisted that he had been unable to turn the bow of the canoe from a pointed rock, until my father shouted at him with such violence that he found the strength to lift the canoe entirely out of water. If my father was frightened he was frightened to good advantage, which is a form of fright that harms nobody.
    At this time I cared for none of these things, nor for the repeated declarations of Rabomis that Guerlac’s hatchet had made a crack in my skull and that I had been only the thickness of a gnat’s wing from death. I was alive, so there was no occasion, it seemed to me, to speak of death.
    I wished only to hear how we might overtake and recapture Mary; I wanted to do nothing except start again in pursuit of her. Yet my head pained villainously and my father said I was too sick to travel. I would have climbed out of bed, but couldn’t move an inch. When I was fully recovered, my father said, we would travel to Norridgewock for further news of Mary and Guerlac.
    The m’téoulin brought a sheet of thin green moss that grows on dead logs, spread on it a jelly made by boiling the roots of the linden tree, and fitted it to my head, holding it in place with a cap of buckskin whose thongs tied beneath my jaws like an old wife’s nightcap.
    For six days the m’téoulin placed moss and linden jelly on my head, forbidding me to leave the cabin; and the days passed somehow. My father sat often with me, molding bullets or discussing magic with the m’téoulin; and Rabomis brought the wampum rolls of the tribe from their hiding place and read the ancient tales of the Abenakis: how they had fought wars with the Iroquois before the white men came; how the great lord Glooskap made man from an ash tree; how Glooskap created the squirrel too large, and so made him smaller; how the geese are divided into tribes and how they hold their council with Wuchowsen the Wind Bird concerning the weather, and despatch expresses to inform the tribes of their decisions; how the Weewillmekq’ or horrible horned worm grows under water to the size of a moose; and how Lox, the crafty Indian devil, rose from the dead.
    Years before, Rabomis said, there had been many more of these tales, but some of the most ancient of the wampum rolls had been lost or destroyed, and some had been carried to Canada by turbulent warriors who wished to live in St. Francis or Beçancour, where they might obtain gifts from the French in return for making war on the Engish settlements. Once the wampum rolls were lost the tales were soon forgotten, except for fragments that had no value other than to entertain children on a winter’s night.
    My father puffed at his pipe and said that in a few score years there would be many things forgotten about the Abenakis in addition to their tales; that this was only fair, since the Abenakis preferred their own manner of living to that of the white men. The white man, said my father, wrote down his thoughts and his customs, so that his children might profit by them. Since the Abenakis would not do this, and lived only as it pleased them to live, their thoughts and customs must vanish as trees vanish.
    “It may be,” said my father, “that your way of living is pleasanter than our way. If you find it so, you must be satisfied with the pleasure and not fret over the future, as does the white man.”
    Rabomis, slender and straight in her long deerskin jerkin, belted tight around the waist with a band of wampum, put her hand on my father’s shoulder. “There are some,” she said, “who live as they do because they are not allowed to live otherwise.”
    My father, seeing Jacataqua and myself staring, stooped to knock out his pipe on the hearth, so that Rabomis’s hand fell from his shoulder; and for some reason, whenever people since that time