Varnum cleared his throat importantly. He had become increasingly impatient as I lost myself in the pages of his ancestor.
“You’ve probably been wondering all evening why I invited you,” he said. “This—this phenomenon as you call it is beginning to be troublesome to me. There are some fine stands of pine beyond the last camp, between the Penaubsket and the marshes. I’ll have that lumber at any price.”
“If you can get your crews to go into the area,” I said. “They seem to have little stomach for it.”
Varnum took a deep draught of bourbon. “Exactly. As long as these animals that keep floating downriver are unexplained, my boys’ll be jumpier than a bull at fly time about getting into that timber. We know the animals drowned. The vet examined a few, and found nothing from disease, no marks or broken skin, no singed fur from a brush fire—nothing except water in the lungs. The question is, why in Hell did they jump into the Penaubsket in the first place?”
“Perhaps they were driven,” I hazarded.
“By what?”
“The Headless Horseman,” I answered, sipping my Cointreau. Varnum failed to detect the note of humor in my voice. “You’re not superstitious too, are you?”
“It was merely a drollery,” I assured him.
“Oh. Well, whatever the reason my friend, I won’t have my men harassed by a will of the wisp and a few sopping animals. I’m going along with you. When do you leave?”
I was inwardly seething at being told that I would be accompanied, but allowed little sign of this emotion to betray itself on my face. It would be, at least, better than going it alone. “I plan to leave day after tomorrow,” I replied. “Tomorrow I’ll hire the horses at the livery stable.”
“Good, I’ll see you then,” said Varnum, rising from his seat. Apparently the evening was over, although it was only ten o’clock.
At the door there were no amenities, simply a curt “Good night” by Varnum, as though dismissing an inferior. As I rode in the wagon back to the inn I found myself boiling over my host’s bad manners. For the sake of a guide to my project site I would suffer the man’s company, although it probably would not be the most pleasant two weeks I would spend at a site. I consoled myself by fondling the tenth of Cointreau which I had surreptitiously tucked into the inside pocket of my black greatcoat upon leaving. “Why waste it on a boor with no palate,” I thought, and laughed aloud. The first frogs answered from the marshes where the faint blue will o’ the wisp hung over last winter’s cattails like an augury.
* * *
By the time of our meeting two days later I had hired four horses, two as mounts and two for portage. It had taken me almost a full day to prepare the gear we would transport to the burial site of the Massaquoits—the probing bars, shovels, picks, brooms, and padded hardwood boxes which would protect whatever fragile birchbark rolls had survived. This baggage, plus rations, camping equipment, firearms, and a copy of Pope’s Essay on Man, composed the burdens of our two pack horses.
We left Dunstable as the sun rose on a clear day, a rarity in the New England spring. When I gave Varnum my compass readings and landmark notes on the site, he found that we would be able to use the most northerly of the logging camps as a jumping-off point for the burial ground. Thus, we were able to keep to logging roads and tracks for a good part of the trek.
On entering the great New England forest I experienced an almost religious awe which was never duplicated in any other jungle, veldt, canebrake, or tundra of this earth. A brooding stillness invested all. The light filtered greenly through the solemn pines and hemlocks so that even the air we breathed seemed the color of the vegetation which pressed in around us. The sound of hooves was muffled by the thick carpet of dry reddish needles, the organic sediment of the centuries. When a bird called, the echo amid the quiet was startling—one felt that a blasphemer had defiled a dark and sacred place. And the small towns and hamlets of the forest seemed to share my awe, huddled as they were along the seamarshes as if they preferred the known dangers of the sullen North Atlantic to the silent encroachments of the dark woods; their names stark, staunch, reflecting the cold indefatigability of the Yankee settlers—Sabbathday, Icepond, Landsem Depot, Wind Flume, and Bell Shoals.
Varnum was immune to such feelings, riding before me with his head sunk into a great woolen muffler, lost in thoughts of cutting schedules, board feet, and distances along the Penaubsket to the mill at Dunstable. He also seemed unmoved by the unshakeably ominous foreboding which had beset me since leaving the town. I found my mind turning back inexorably to the sight of the animals revolving lifelessly in the black eddies of the millpond, and to the thought of the blue nimbus, so much like the will o’ the wisp, but feared by the lumbermen more than the Penaubsket at flood. I tried to concentrate on the work which lay ahead—finding the site, the excavations, the discovery, identification, and packing of the Massaquoit pictographs. But there in the greenish light and stillness north of Dunstable the emotion was irrepressible.
On the morning of the third day, after a night’s halt at the most northerly of the logging camps, we arrived at the site. The reader may wonder at the ease with which we located the tribal ground of the Massaquoits. But in addition to compass fixes and landmark notes I had another factor working for me—the almost eternal sterility of land used for many years as a camping place. Because of constant foot traffic, cooking and smelting fires, and the disposal of alkaline solutions used in primitive tanning, the land is so leached and eroded that it can support only the hardiest of weeds.
I recognized the site immediately upon breaking out of the scrub pine into the roughly circular fifteen acre clearing. There were no middens, or refuse mounds, for these had long ago vanished under the winds of the summer hurricane and incursions of scavenger animals. There were, however, rows of blackish depressions in the earth which once held the lodge-poles supporting the Massaquoit dwellings. Except for these the ground was clean of any trace of a civilization; if anything were to be found here, it would be an occasional discarded arrowhead, or shard of pottery, or other artifact of the tribe. The birchbark picture records would be in the burial ground, distributed among the graves of the chiefs and first warriors. Unlike many of their neighbors, the tribe of Pauquatoag cremated their dead and interred the remains; the corpse was not lashed to a scaffold or tree limb to tatter in the wind.
We made camp at the center of the clearing, pitching the two one-man tents about twenty yards apart on either side of the fire. I was eager to find the burial ground, and Varnum wished to ride through the area both to inspect the stands of timber and to search for any trace of the mystery which had been worrying his men. Accordingly, we agreed to meet back at camp before sundown.
Through the long afternoon I made shallow preliminary excavations at the burial ground, about a mile north-west of our camp. It was not long before I found the first of the pictographs, interred with the remains of one who had been a major warrior. The primitive stick figures might have come from the hand of a child, so simple were they, carefully drawn in berry dyes on sheets of birchbark packed in a matrix of alkaline ash which preserved them from fungus and bacteria through the centuries. But while the analytical faculties of my mind feasted on the details of the records, my emotions were disturbed with the same sense of foreboding which had dogged me on the passage from Dunstable. Perhaps it was the starkness of the area, or the solemnity of walking in the footpaths of a vanished race. Whatever the cause, I was relieved to find Varnum waiting at the camp on my return.