Ishmael glanced at Duncan then turned uneasily toward the woman. “I was not scared, Mother,” he said hesitantly. “I was listening. My grandfather thought lightning bolts must be words spoken between the spirits of the sky and spirits of the land. He used to take me out in the storms and listen, marking the differences in the sounds. He taught me how there were different kinds of thunder, whispering thunder and angry thunder, patient thunder and warning thunder.”
Before the boy could react, the woman reached out and pressed him to her breast. The hell dog sniffed Ishmael, then turned to the front of the lodge and sat facing outward, as if protecting them all now.
The woman held the boy for a long time. It was not clear who was comforting whom.
“The dog,” Duncan ventured. “Is he yours?”
Hetty cocked her head. “A warrior belongs to no one. Sometimes he disappears for weeks at a time. But the day that belt came, he was back.”
“In Albany they called him the hell dog.”
The Welsh woman considered his words in silence then nodded, as if approving of the name.
Suddenly Ishmael reached inside his shirt and produced the fletched end of an arrow and tossed it on the ground by the fire. At first Duncan thought he was showing it to Hetty, but then he saw in her face that she had seen it before. He had used the letters, as Duncan had, to find the woman, but then he had shown her the arrow. Duncan picked it up and studied the long stiff feathers of its fletching. The coloring was of a bird unfamiliar to Duncan in a distinctive uniform pattern, each dark grey feather bearing two circles of white. He realized he too had seen the pattern before, drawn in the dirt floor of Hetty’s hut beside the crumbled letter Ishmael had left there. It meant something to the woman.
“I stole it from a raider’s quiver when he set it down,” Ishmael explained to Duncan, “and broke off the end to show my grandfather afterwards. He knew the fletching of every arrow made on this side of the Mississippi.” He looked up with a melancholy glance at Duncan. “But now I know. It was Mingo,” Ishmael said to Hetty in a questioning tone. “Because you went west, not north, to find your captured son.”
When she did not disagree, he turned to Duncan. “I thought she would give me some notion of where the raiders would go. Then I saw that belt. A Mingo delivered that belt to her.”
“But you raised the alarm in the fort by crying out that Hurons had attacked.”
A spark of mischief flashed in Ishmael’s eyes. “Because they would never react if I said they were Mingoes. I thought there was a chance the troops could trap the Mingoes close to town and maybe I could speak with them. I never expected to be arrested.” He paused as he saw the uncertainty still on Duncan’s face. “No Mingo would come so far east as Champlain except for his war.”
“His war?” Duncan asked. He glanced at Hetty, suddenly remembering that she had lived with the Mingoes, that they had been the tribe that had banished her.
“The half-king’s,” Ishmael said in a near whisper. “The one who spills blood for the old gods.”
Duncan weighed the boy’s words and began to glimpse the depth of his pain. “Why,” he asked Hetty, “would his grandfather and the others of Bethel Church have to die to protect the old gods? Why would the old gods need the king’s coins? Why take the other children?” Why, he wanted to ask, would a feather and belt of beads cause you to leave your life behind?
Her eyes filled with challenge, as if she resented his questions. “You will have to ask him,” Hetty replied. “If he lets you keep your tongue.”
No, Duncan meant to protest, I have to find Conawago and the children. “We will never find him in the wilderness,” he said instead.
“The white sachem will know where to find him,” she declared, and she began packing for travel.
They paddled for hours, making steady but slow progress, the current against them having strengthened from the rains, with Hetty and Ishmael in the center of their canoe, the old woman fast asleep. The dog had made no effort to climb into their crowded vessel but followed the trail that hugged the bank, keeping pace with long, effortless strides.
They had rounded a big bend in the river when Hetty pointed to a landing where a score of canoes were pulled up on the bank. Macaulay nodded at Duncan’s suggestion that he stay hidden near the canoe, then they followed Hetty up a trail that wound through huge sycamore trees.
When the thick trees opened onto a broad field, Duncan expected to find a palisaded fort, and he halted in surprise. A European estate had been transported into the wilderness. The tall three-story house in the center of the sprawling yard was of cut stone, as was a sturdy blockhouse on the hill overlooking the compound. A hundred paces beyond the great house was a mill, its wheel turning against the water of the brook beside it, and a large barn that seemed to be in use as a lodging for native visitors. Several of the Indians could be seen bending over steaming pots at half a dozen fires, while others worked butter churns and still another group butchered a deer hanging from a tree. He looked back at the house, noticing now its heavy shutters and the narrow slotted windows on the upper floors. The house itself was a fortress.
It had been Macaulay who had revealed the identity of the white sachem, explaining that the taverns of Albany echoed with tales of the legendary William Johnson, who reigned over the colonial and tribal troops in the region, the hot-blooded Irishman who had been awarded a baronetcy after leading the famed victory at Lake George three years before. Duncan tried to recollect what he had read about the man, who often figured in the New York and Philadelphia journals. William Johnson had been an impoverished teenager when he had arrived from Ireland to set up a trading post along the river. No European had been more adept at forming bonds with the Iroquois, and he had quickly risen to become not only the senior emissary between Britain and the tribes but also senior officer of the peculiar militia of the region, which combined tribal warriors with Dutch, German, and English settlers. The Hero of Lake George, the journals had labeled him after he and his irregulars had won the first significant victory for the British at the long lake. He had been lauded not only for defeating the French with his largely Iroquois force but also for saving many French captives when the tribesmen had tried to put them to the knife.
They had arrived amidst the preparation of a feast. Planks were being laid on trestles along the broad front of the house. Several tribal women wearing calico dresses seemed in charge of the household and were directing a small army of younger natives, German settlers, and even several Africans.
Hetty seemed uneasy around so many strangers, but Duncan saw the bright curiosity in Ishmael’s eyes, and, leaving his pack and rifle with Hetty as she settled onto a log in the shadows, he led the boy into the throng. The long table was quickly being transformed as tankards and chargers of wood, pewter, and even china materialized on its planks. No one objected when Duncan guided the wide-eyed boy into the huge house. The wide central hallway held several small paintings on its yellow plaster walls, framed landscapes of mountains and lakes, but otherwise the hall had the air of an arsenal. Racks of muskets lined one side, racks of spear-like spontoons and halberds the other. The walls of the sitting room, however, offered neither signs of war nor of European opulence. They were adorned with the trappings of an Iroquois chief, including a half circle of tribal arrows radiating like the rays of a rising sun from an orange hub. An elegant robe of fur and feathers hung on another wall, under a long ceremonial pipe. Beautifully worked tomahawks and clay bowls with crenulated patterns along their lips lay across the mantle of the fireplace.