In the Hands of the Senecas by Walter D Edmonds

Author:Walter D Edmonds [Edmonds, Walter D]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Criminals & Outlaws, Rich & Famous, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, Native American Studies, History, United States, 19th Century
ISBN: 9781789123906
Google: ml2LDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2019-01-13T04:22:11+00:00

3

She heard him going; but she was too tired now even to look after him. She forgot all about the wood she was going to get. Her face hurt her. She knew from other beatings she had had, when Gekeahsawsa had driven her out of the cabin, how the cold could make its own agony in the hurt places of her body. Some of those nights she had slept out with the dogs by the house wall. Sometimes they would let her work into their beds: nights when wolves were running back of the lake they seemed to be glad of her company. But those nights, even when the dogs were good to her, she could feel the cold creep into her sore muscles as plain as if it were a living thing that walked.

Along the trail, fires were beginning to take life from dry bark. The flames caught hold of sticks and sent up curled strings of rusty smoke. The smoke spread out along the line of fires, and then, responding to a slight draft, floated like a moving shelf over the alders.

She could smell it, acrid and half sweet; and her eyes smarted, not so much from the smoke itself as from the memory of winter nights when she had managed to lie forgotten in her corner of the house. On such nights the vent holes in the roof were nearly closed to preserve the warmth, and the smoke became a pall, filling the air, until the papooses hanging inscrutably in their swaddles suddenly acquired the human animation of coughing. Nobody ever noticed them. Their little coughing voices would go on until the fires died. But often the smoke hung so low that it was hard for the adults on the floor to breathe.

The men would sit together, sometimes playing the peach-stone games, sharpening a knife or hatchet, or splicing a snowshoe frame. The women made moccasins and leggings or did beadwork. The dark faces intent upon their employment were now lost in the waving smoke, now apparent, red in the light of the four fires. When the men talked of war trails or long hunts, telling their stories with rolling periods as though the unriddling of an otter’s tracks might be compared to the unfolding of the universe, the words sounded as though they passed through a thick gauze. Eyes became infected from the constant irritation and often long before the end of winter persons went half-blind with a constant running from their underlids. Smoke to Martha Dygart would all her life be an Indian thing; smoke and the smell of the head woman of the house.

Once Martha had been made to clean the pelt of a wolverine. The woman’s scent was like it, rank and musty, as though she lived on blood, like one of the weasel tribe.

It was nearly dark under the alders when Martha’s hand brushed against the fold of leather the ranger had left lying in her lap. She lifted it wonderingly, feeling the tears rise.

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