Animal Appetite

whatsoever to do with dogs. After dumping the Xeroxes and the tomes on the kitchen table, I made a pot of coffee and spent a few minutes savoring the sense that after all these years in Cambridge, I finally fit in. Until now, while other Cantabrigian writers were spinning dizzying theories about the causes of social revolutions, interpreting statistical factors related to contextually based aspects of psycholinguistic variation, and revealing latent feminist themes in the rediscovered works of nineteenth-century women novelists, I’d been scribbling about flea infestations and explaining, for the millionth time, how to get your dog to come when called. (Short answer: Use food.) Ah, but now? Fledgling Cambridge intellectual that I was, I preened with the pride of the newly hatched. Elizabeth Coleman: New England Captives Carried to Canada. June Namias: White Captives. John Putnam Demos: The Unredeemed Captive. And A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers! Henry David Thoreau! Dog writer no more, I settled down to transform myself into an esteemed authority on Hannah Duston.
    Disillusionment set in as soon as I opened the Coleman volume to the section about Haverhill. Indian attacks, it seemed, were part of what she called Philip’s War. Wasn’t it King Philip’s? But I didn’t even know who Philip (king or no king) was, who’d fought his war, or what it had been about. Beginning the section about Hannah Duston, I was pleased to discover the name of the boy-captive who’d assisted her: Samuel Lenorson. He’d been snatched two years earlier from his father’s farm near what is now Worcester. Two years! No wonder he’d been able to converse with his captors! The next sentence bothered me. After Hannah and Mary Neff were taken prisoner, in Haverhill, the two women supposedly traveled for a hundred and fifty miles before reaching the island where Hannah carried out her famous deed. Hold it! From Haverhill, Massachusetts, to Concord, New Hampshire? Eighty miles? Unless by a very circuitous route? Furthermore, according to Coleman, the expert, although Hannah and Mary were told otherwise, running the gauntlet was a form of torture reserved for men; there was no evidence that women had ever been subjected to it.
    Then came the killer, so to speak: Until now, I’d imagined Hannah’s captors as tall, strong men. As it turned out, of the twelve Indians, two escaped. One was a woman, who was badly wounded. The other was a boy Hannah and her companions had meant to spare. Of the ten remaining “savages,” only four were adults. Hannah Duston had killed and scalped six children.
    And that’s not my idea of heroism.
    The more I read, the worse it got. The band of twelve people was a family consisting of two men, three women, and seven children. The group had presumably been headed for a large settlement near Montreal. Roman Catholic converts, the Indians prayed three times a day. In between murdering infants and taking prisoners, I guess. I learned the name of the six-day-old baby: Martha Duston. Taking captives did at least turn out to be a practical, comprehensible activity: Indians held their captives for ransom. If Hannah had stuck it out, she’d probably have been exchanged either for guns or for French prisoners held by the English. The other thing Indians did with captives was adopt them into their families. The boy, Samuel Lenorson? Had the Indian family felt him to be one of their own?
    The scalping, I gathered, was not part of Hannah Huston’s original plan. Rather, it was a grisly afterthought with a mercenary motive. It’s midnight. The Indians are asleep in the tent that everyone shares. The Haverhill monument and some old engravings showed everyone in the cold outdoors, with the wigwam in the background. In New Hampshire in March? I think not. So, inside the crowded wigwam, Hannah, Mary, and Samuel, armed with stolen hatchets, strike as one. The attack begins, I believe, with the men. Hannah certainly assigns herself one. Mary or the boy, Samuel, kills the other. (Samuel’s age? I did not yet know.) Simultaneously, someone crushes the head of one of the sleeping women. Another Indian woman is wounded, but escapes, as does the boy, who would have been spared. Who kills the third woman? The remaining children? According to the books, Hannah is the leader.
    I can imagine the blood. I once saw my father’s ax slip as he was chopping wood. The blade he was slamming into a log sliced through his boot.