Massacre on the Merrimack by Jay Atkinson

Author:Jay Atkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493018178
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2015-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII

Escape from Sugar Ball Island

As light seeped in, revealing the narrow shoal, Hannah Duston rose from where she had squatted all night and woke her companions. While Mary Neff and Sam Lenorson prepared to depart, Hannah took up the loaded rifle and went along the embankment, searching for a place to launch the canoe. Snow covered the entire island, and, on the downriver side, the bluff dropped fifteen or twenty feet to the water, which was running fast and deep beneath the undercut bank.

Duston’s limbs creaked from her previous exertions, as well as the torpor of a very cold night, and her ragged clothing was stiff with blood. A young boy’s corpse, rigid as iron, was sprawled on the rocky shoal, and two more dead children were face down in the snow nearby, their mantles and exposed flesh specked with bits of frozen gore.

Walking along the riverbank, Hannah was certain that Indians were lurking all around, perhaps among the trees on the far bank, or gliding downriver in their war canoes, obscured by the rising mist. But Hannah made no attempt to conceal herself, or her intentions. The Abenaki were swift, merciless, and cruel, without any semblance of fear or restraint, ready to kill at a moment’s notice. But none of this hindered Duston any longer. To meet the Indians on their own ground, Duston had herself become a savage, ready to inflict pain and death, or suffer it, as the circumstances demanded of her.

For the first time since her arrival, Duston had a clear view of the terrain and a grasp of their situation. Sugar Ball Island was shaped like an arrowhead, with the Contoocook River descending along a high-banked gorge and splitting at the sharp end of the island, then going equally along both sides, with the broad sweep of the Merrimack passing by the blunt end. The land mass was no more than a couple of acres, though like most things, it had seemed larger in the dark, with a rising headland on the downriver side and a low triangular dell covered in pines, hemlocks, birch trees, and scrub on the pointed end. The smell of death clung to the place, though it was very cold and the wind trailed from the northwest.

Ribbons of smoke fluttered up from the ashes of the fire-trench. Just beyond it, the two dead warriors and a pair of squaws were lying stiffly on the ground where Hannah and the others had killed them. Watery blood from their noses and ears streaked the grime on their faces, and the flesh around the eyes and the bed of their fingernails had an eerie, bluish tint. Duston stepped over her master’s body without a second glance, making her way to the edge of the headland.

The island was steeply banked all around, but for the rocky strand that marked the lower end. From the bluff, Duston saw that the irregular skirt of ice protruding from the island had lengthened in the cold temperatures overnight.

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