Animal Appetite

cruelties.
    One last point. As I’ve mentioned, when Elizabeth Emerson was only eleven, her father, Michael Emerson, was convicted of beating and kicking her. During Elizabeth’s first pregnancy, she named a man named Timothy Swan as the father of her baby. Five years later, she denied her second pregnancy. Elizabeth Emerson lived with her parents. The twins were born in Elizabeth’s parents’ house. Michael and Hannah Emerson were in the house when Elizabeth delivered. She gave birth alone, with no help, or so she testified. Presumed guilty, she was executed for the murder of the babies. Faced with Cotton Mather’s threats of hell fire, Elizabeth Emerson protested her innocence to the end.
    Elizabeth Emerson had no supporters and no defense. I wish she’d had me at her side. In the manner of her sister Hannah, I’d have pointed a finger of accusation. When those twins were born and murdered, who else was in that house? I’d have asked. Who else had already endured the shame of a bastard child in the family? Whom would Elizabeth have shielded? And who was the one person there with a criminal record of violence against children? Against his own child? It’s possible, I suppose, that both Michael and Hannah Emerson killed Elizabeth’s babies. It’s even possible that the twins were stillborn. My finger of accusation, however, would point and, in fact, does point at Michael Emerson, the grandfather of the babies, the abusive father of Elizabeth Emerson, the father of Hannah Duston.
     

Thirty-Four

     
    So, Rita, judge for yourself. Here is my story about Hannah Duston. By my standards, it has almost nothing to do with dogs. Do I win or lose? Or are all bets off?
    I’ve been tempted to cheat. I came close to saying nothing about the boy captives and the hollow log, nothing about the Abenaki and the totemic animals. I am still tempted. Randall Carey, however, taught me a lesson about the hazards of cheating. I wouldn’t plagiarize. But without my knowledge of Randall Carey, I might fall into the sin of selective omission.
    So here it is. My Aunt Cassie, Leah’s mother and my mother’s sister, was thrilled to hear that instead of diverting Leah from her academic pursuits by encouraging her to waste her time on dogs, I’d finally turned Leah’s attention and my heretofore wasted talents to a respectable field, namely, colonial history. Aunt Cassie said as much to a relative of ours named Louise, who is something like Leah’s and my fourth cousin once removed. We’d never met her. Probably because Louise isn’t a dog person, my mother had never mentioned her and I’d never heard of her. Although Louise, like Aunt Cassie, dwells in dogless apostasy from the family faith, she is religious nonetheless and—there really is a point to all this—recently switched creeds by converting to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As you may or may not know—I didn’t—the Mormon Church is the world’s largest repository of genealogical information. The idea, as I understand it, is that you are obligated to convert your ancestors, posthumously, of course, and that to do so, you need to know their names. An interest in pedigrees runs in our lines. My mother’s obsession with family trees was, however, strictly limited to the ancestry of golden retrievers. If she’d known what Louise found out, she wouldn’t have cared at all.
    I was more than interested. I was outright horrified. It means nothing. It bothers me nonetheless.
    My mother was. So is Aunt Cassie. So is Leah. I, too, am a direct descendant of Hannah Duston.
     

Author’s Note

     
    With the exception of the imaginary And One Fought Back, the sources Holly consults for information about Hannah Duston are real. Especially useful to the author was Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
    The Haverhill Historical Society’s Buttonwoods Museum is located at 240 Water Street, Haverhill, Massachusetts 01830. For information, call (508) 374-4626.
     

About the Author

     
    SUSAN CONANT, three-time recipient of the Maxwell Award for fiction writing given by the Dog Writers’ Association of America, lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her husband, two cats, and two Alaskan malamutes— Frostfield Firestar’s Kobuk, C.G.C, and Frostfield Perfect Crime, C.G.C, called Rowdy. She is the author of ten Dog Lover’s Mysteries and is now at work on her eleventh, Barker