Girl in a Buckskin

under the hill.
    Dear God, let it be Eseck with a new musket come home again, she prayed.
    The shot came from the north, perhaps three miles away. Stopping only to tighten her snowshoes Becky headed north, keeping to the woods and taking care not to leave a trail behind her. When she reached the broad valley the going was easier. In her mind she went over the better plan for seeing without being seen. She would go north to the dead birch, then west toward the brook, and taking cover in the woods around the brook she would work her way to the top of the hill from which she could look down across the valley. But for now speed was the most important and she kept out of the deeper woods until she reached the dead birch with its arms flung out at the sky like a tormented person begging God for help. There she swerved west toward the brook.
    It was at the brook that she found the knapsack. Someone had recently knelt at the edge of the stream where the ice was thin and chopped a hole to drink water. Here there were long scratches from a hunting knife, but what dismayed Becky were the drops of blood in the snow. Whoever had come this way was wounded, and so badly wounded he had never noticed the knapsack dropped in the middle of the frozen stream. With quick fingers she dug into it, bringing out a noggin carved from the burl of a tree, a file, a handful of com, a powder horn carved with pictures of horses and guns and a Bible.
    None of these was Eseck’s.
    Becky sat back on her knees and stared dully at the knapsack. She had been so sure it was Eseck that her heart felt bruised and sick. Never had she considered the thought of another white man, not here, so far north of Wnahtakook. A stranger was dangerous. The man who lay ahead somewhere, dead or alive, might be a deer reeve, a magistrate or a militiaman—and she was a fugitive. It would go passing hard for her if she were dragged back to the Leggetts against her will. She would be stoned at the pillory or whipped at the post or branded for life.
    She hesitated. However dangerous the man might be he was sick and obviously lost and the knapsack showed her he was one of her own kind. And she could never live with herself if she left him to the woods. If he were still alive his death would be on her conscience and if he were dead then she owed him a decent Christian burial. She picked up the knapsack and began to follow his trail.
    The man had staggered through the brush with no heed at all. Half a mile south she found where he had sat down and removed one of his snowshoes. A few yards farther he had torn off the other. He must have been mad or delirious to leave his snowshoes behind, but without them she knew he could not be far.
    She found him sprawled over a log in the middle of a pretty grove of white birches. Too weak to hold the musket he had propped it against the log to fire it and his hand still curved around it protectively. Becky sank down beside him in the snow and tried to turn him over.
    He was a huge, broad-shouldered giant of a man and he did not turn easily. Unfastening his leather tunic Becky felt for his heart and to her surprise found it still beating. She sat hack on her heels and scowled at him. In truth it would be hard to kill a man a big as this one but what she was to do with him she couldn’t for the moment imagine.
    He stirred and moaned. One arm jerked up to cover his eyes and he muttered something wildly. Touching his forehead Becky found it burning with fever. The bleeding came from his arm which was drenched and black with blood, and why the wolves and catamounts had not found him by now she did not guess, unless they were back in the woods waiting for him to die.
    Cutting away his jacket she paled at the sight of the wound and an arrow, tom off at the nib, still embedded in his arm. The wound was at least a day old and badly festered. Now there was nothing to do but build a fire and tend the arm. Sighing heavily Becky left the man and cut down a small birch tree with the tomahawk at her belt, stripped it of its bark, then gathered the peelings into a mound on the snow. When she had added heavier kindling to the mound she bent over it and scratched a fire, using the birch bark as tinder. Then she arranged the rest of the branches in a wheel around the fire so that when the end of each limb had burned through she could feed it fresh wood without getting to her feet. There was nothing to melt snow in but the noggin, a pitifully small