Animal Appetite

devoted to true crime. Poking around among the actual books, I found nothing about Jack’s murder.
    My computer search for anything about Hannah Duston was equally unproductive, but in the short time I had left before I needed to get home to take care of the dogs, I browsed in the shelves devoted to colonial Massachusetts and found a few short write-ups, one in an old history of the commonwealth, the other in a book called Travels in New England and New York originally published in 1821 and written by Timothy Dwight, who’d been the president of Yale.
    Let me summarize what I learned that day about Hannah Duston. According to Dwight, on March 5, 1697, Thomas Duston was working in a field. His wife, Hannah, was at home. She’d had a baby six days earlier. With Hannah was her nurse, Mary Neff. A midwife? Suddenly, a party of what the books stubbornly called “Indians”—what tribe?—attacked Haverhill and approached the Duston house. Thomas evidently got there too late to rescue Hannah, Mary, and the baby, or maybe he just didn’t feel up to the task. I couldn’t tell. Still, he managed to mount his horse and round up his seven other children. (On the Haverhill monument, hadn’t there been eight?) I couldn’t tell whether he’d gone to the field armed or had entered the house in time to get his gun. In either case, returning the fire of his attackers (or, according to some sources, holding his fire), Duston defended the children all the way to a distant house—a garrison, maybe—where this part of the Duston family found safety.
    Meanwhile, another group of what I am forced to call Indians broke in, plundered and burned the house, and departed, taking Hannah, the baby, and Mary Neff as captives. Before the little band had gone far, the infant was snatched from the nurse’s arms and killed: dashed against a tree.
    So much for Dances with Wolves.
    According to Dwight, late April 1697 found Hannah Duston and Mary Neff near what is now Concord, New Hampshire. (Hadn’t the Haverhill monument said March 30?) By then, the women were traveling with a group of twelve Indians and another captive, a young English boy, en route to a remote settlement where, Hannah was told, the prisoners would be stripped naked and forced to run the gauntlet. Instigated by Hannah, the English boy, who had been taken captive some time before, questioned his master about where to strike to kill someone instantly. In the middle of the night, as her captors slept, Hannah Duston used the knowledge the boy obtained. With the help of Mary Neff and the boy, she “dispatched,” as Dwight delicately phrased it, ten of the twelve Indians. The other two escaped. Hannah Duston returned to Haverhill with ten scalps.
    Now that’s what I call tough.
     

Five

     
    It’s almost impossible these days to find a really goo vet who makes house calls like Steve Delaney’s. At ten-thirty that night, we got out of bed to finish the take-out seafood lasagna he’d brought for dinner, and as we ate it, I started to ask, “Steve, if I’d had a baby six days ago and—”
    “Are you breaking the news?” Steve has a really beautiful smile. His blue-green eyes change colors. He has a pointer, Lady, and a shepherd—German shepherd dog—India, but if he wanted a breed to match his looks, he’d own a Chesapeake Bay retriever. His brown hair waves like a Chessie’s, and he’s muscular, with no fat. “Let me finish! It’s strictly hypothetical.”
    “Damn.”
    “I’m serious. Suppose I’d had a baby six days ago, and suddenly the house is surrounded by hostile Indians. Algonquins. Native Americans. Someone. I don’t know who they were yet. Anyway, you’re out in a field, and then you discover that there I am, baby to my breast, about to be murdered and scalped.”
    “I grab my sickle, slay them all, and rescue the damsel in distress.”
    “That,” I said, “is exactly what Thomas Duston didn’t do. He supposedly despaired of saving Hannah and the baby, and rescued their other kids instead. Seven, I think. Possibly eight. These experts can’t get their stories straight. Anyway, if I’d been Hannah, I’d have been none too thrilled to see him rushing off, leaving me to be taken captive.”
    I waited while Steve ate some lasagna. He had a grandmother or maybe a great-grandmother who was apparently the world’s last believer in some nutty health craze called “Fletcherizing.” She made him chew everything thirty times before he