black rock, part 1

This is the first part of a story that I am writing that revolves around a woman trying to make her way on the frontier during the mid 18th century. The story begins amidst the aftermath of the massacre of settlers marching to Fort Edward. During the massacre, the marchers were ambushed by a tribe of Native Americans and slaughtered. As the story continues, our heroine, Cadie, finds an injured Native American man in the woods near her farmhouse. Although she initially leaves him where she finds him, she eventually takes pity on him and cares for him, nursing him back to health. As she does so, they gradually begin a love affair that is threatened not only by the imminent threat of attack from marauding parties of Native Americans, but also from the unforgiving terrain of the American frontier. Enjoy.

Chapter One
August 10, 1757
Southern Head of Lake George, NY
March to Fort Edward from Fort William Henry

As she lay there, splayed out upon the ground, Cadie Miller felt the gnarled bulge of a tree root on her thighs.

The sun was already low in the sky, burning the back of her neck. Her throat and nostrils seared when she breathed, and she gave a raspy cough, smattering her yellow sleeve with blood. Her hair, thick now with blood and dirt, had matted and stuck to her cheek. A man had fallen across the back of her legs, a short, broad knife with a cowhide handle driven between his shoulder blades. He had pinned his left arm to the ground with his chest; his right he had twisted around backward at the elbow, struggling to remove the blade.

The man outweighed her by more than half her weight. When Cadie tried to roll out from under him, his full bulk tumbled onto the heels of her feet, nearly snapping her ankles in half. A short yelp caught in her mouth, burning her tired throat like liquor. She leaned her cheek against the ground, gave a quick jerk of her legs, and the man flopped off of her and onto the grass.

Cadie’s left eye was dark, the lid tightly shut despite her continued protests that it open. She rubbed hair away from her brow with her thumb and felt something sticky on her cheek.

My eye isn’t closed, she thought. It’s open. It’s open all right. I just can’t see out of it.

She clumsily drew her left hand into her lap. The wrist had been bent the wrong way, twisted in towards her side so that it would have jabbed her in the gut if she swung the arm. The palm was turned upward and the thumb jutted away from body at an odd angle. Her sleeve was wet, and she felt a hard little knot just below the elbow. She squeezed the knot with her hand and heard a soggy sucking sound, like a man’s boot clomping through mud.

Cadie saw a black smudge at the corner of her eyes, and her vision swam, her head dipping low between her knees. Her hair fell around her neck and she coughed, then vomited.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve and looked up. She couldn’t see far in front of her. The stink of smoke and powder hung thick in the air, burning her eyes. The cicadas gave a slow drawling call and were quiet again. The shallow valley was lined on either end by thin volleys of trees, and stamping feet had turned the light bed of green grass to sod. Bodies, some without scalps, others missing only their boots and guns, were scattered across the field.

Cadie pushed herself onto her knees, throwing back the tattered tail of her skirt so that it wouldn’t catch on the heels of her boots. Black seeped into the corners of her vision, and she rocked on her feet.

Too fast. Too fast.

The raiders had been quick. She had heard a few scattered cries, something that sounded like orders being shouted, and then a horse or a wagon overturning onto the earth. Then the gentle patter of musket fire, like drops of rain pelting an open porch, and a horrible, jabbing blow from a club across the back of her neck.

She had stumbled around on her hands and knees in the dirt, not sure of where she was, her vision going. The loud, frightened cries of the other marchers left her to some other place where she could not follow them, and she had known that she was going to die.

But she had not died.

And now here she was, stumbling lamely across a low sunken valley, picking her way through the stench of human rot beneath the sweltering summer sun, her bloody hair clinging to her face and neck like a wet rag.