Chapter 13
The night I didn’t die
I sat for a couple hours watching the angry men, waiting for something to happen, but I wasn’t prepared when it did. It started when the local man came back to the school. He said something to knife-man who responded with a really nasty smile and then walked over to me.
“The three of us are going to have a conversation outside.” He said with a grin.
“Are you sure Mr. Foster wants that?” I looked to the library to see if he was even aware of what was happening. The door was closed. Just my luck.
“This is what we want.” He pointed the knife at me and motioned with it that I was supposed to rise. So I did. I would see if I had better odds when it was just the three of us outside.
As it turns out, thugs can be pretty clever. We walked through the village to the last house, with them a step behind me, one pointing a pistol at me the other holding his ever-ready knife. This didn’t look good. When we got to the house knife-man body-slammed me into the front wall and held his knife to my throat.
“Put your hands behind you and you might live the night.” I thought that pretty unlikely, but I did as I was told. They used some rope on my wrists and then pulled me to the snowmobiles. “Now we are going for a ride.” Knife-man got on the front of the snowmobile and I was forced on to the back. The instant I was on the seat he took off flying with the other man in close pursuit. Wherever we were going, we were going there fast.
They pulled onto the river and headed east. Maybe this would be okay, maybe they were just taking me back to the other village. Of course maybe the Easter bunny would bring us all candy when we arrived. Needless to say, we never got there. They drove like crazy for about an hour, easily covering fifty miles. Then they stopped. Apparently this was where I was to die.
“Get off.” Knife-man shot an elbow into my stomach to get me off his machine. He then cut off the ropes and put them in his pocket. “Now you get to walk. It is about fifty miles back to our village, and I would guess about a hundred to the next. Wouldn’t you say so Henri?”
“Oh yes, a hundred easy. But don’t worry about that mister fancy professor, you can always decide you would rather walk the fifty miles back to us. We would be happy to see you again.” As you can imagine, he was laughing through this. He was really amazed by his own cleverness.
“It is currently about forty below, with a storm headed in. I give you maybe two hours before the cold kills you. By that time you might be able walk maybe 5 miles.”
“He won’t even make four. We’ll come back in a couple days and find him buried in snow. He’ll just be a lump on the side of the trail.” And the two of them took off. Could I hear laughing over their engine noises? Probably, but I was well past caring about what they were doing and more concerned about what I would do. They were probably right – I would not have long before the cold killed me.
Planning was fairly simple. I really had no options. Try to make it to one of the villages? Laughable. Even if I started running, I would be dead before I got five miles. If I was going to survive the night, I was going to have to do it right here. There was a bit of moonlight so I could see somewhat, not that it mattered. There was nothing to see, just an endless sheet of snow. I looked around for a tree, a bush, anything that might burn or shelter me. Nothing. This had to be the emptiest place on an empty plain.
In Boy Scouts once we had dug snow caves. I figured I would give that a try. On the embankment of the river there were a few snow drifts. I walked to the biggest one, got down on my hands and knees, and started digging. I got in far enough to get my head inside, but the wind was picking up and my backside was frozen pretty quickly. The snow was crusty and hard and I made slow progress. Worse, the drift wasn’t really deep, maybe a couple feet. Would I even be able to make a shelter for myself? Meanwhile, I mentally counted off the minutes. Thirty? Sixty? Soon it was far more than an hour and I knew I was running out of time. I was barely making progress. My hands hurt, I was working up a sweat, and the wind just kept getting faster and faster and colder and colder. I kept working, but I could feel the first signs of hypothermia – light-headedness. I was in maybe waste deep with my ass hanging out to the world when I heard snowmobiles. Had they decided they would come back to shoot me?
“What are you doing?” Marc parked his snowmobile about three feet from me and looked down.
“Snow cave.” My mouth didn’t seem to want to work. The words “snow cave” sounded funny somehow.
“You still would have been dead by morning. Get on.” He slid forward on his seat and I struggled to my feet. Just standing seemed difficult. My feet were clumsy. I practically fell onto him as I straddled the snowmobile. He took off in a hurry and I grabbed on from behind as best I could. I have to admit I hugged him pretty hard, both for warmth, and also from gratitude. I wasn’t going to die.
There were half a dozen snowmobiles with Marc and we all raced east. I held on tight for the first hour, but the chill got pretty deep into my bones and I was losing it fast after that. At one point I felt Marc grab one of my arms and pull me forward. Apparently I was sliding off the back. I was pretty dizzy and sleepy. I don’t think I was much help. I leaned forward, basically collapsed on his back. He held me there while also steering his machine. I am not sure how he did that. Did we make it back to his village? Yes, but I don’t know how. The next clear sense I had of the world was me being dropped naked into a tub of very warm water. It hurt. I thought both my feet and my hands would explode. I actually struggled to get out of the tub, but several guys held me in. Wow, it hurt badly. Then they started pouring hot chocolate down my throat. I swallowed, choked, swallowed some more. Worse yet, at some point I started crying. What an awful night. I was in the bath over an hour, then bundled in layers of blankets and laid by the furnace. I was asleep almost instantly.
It was afternoon before I woke up. Every muscle in my body screamed at me. Shivering had strained all of them. When I pushed myself up into a sitting position, one of the women rushed over with a cup of hot chocolate. I hate the stuff now. Bad memories. She had a lot to say to me in Sioux while I drank the chocolate, and then finished in French when she saw I didn’t understand her.
“My son, home soon.” I assumed she meant Marc. I was happy to wait. I pushed my back up against a wall to hold myself in a sitting position and wondered if my body would ever hurt less. It was probably an hour before Marc did come home, but I was in no rush. I felt real comfortable leaning back on that wall. It as a nice wall. Very flat. Very solid. I felt myself nodding off again.
“So how many angry men did you count?” Marc had a chair pulled up in front of me. Behind him were six very elderly men. Behind them were at least ten other men. I probably should have been uncomfortable sitting naked under some blankets, propped up against a wall, but I was in no position to move, and I didn’t much care. Maybe that was the hot chocolate talking.
“Twenty three, plus the local man – Henri.”
“Yes, Henri.” There was some discussion in Sioux behind Marc with the name “Henri” repeated several times, but then that subsided.
“What else can you tell us?”
“They are staying in the school. I walked through the town but I did not see any of them in the houses there.”
“And what do they want.”
“They want a meeting.” Marc made a face when I said that. Obviously they wanted a meeting. Did I know more than that? Not for sure, but I could make a pretty good guess. “Foster wants Louisiana to war with the rest of Canada. If he is here, it is because he thinks you will help. Maybe you will be on the Louisiana side, maybe on the other, but somehow he wants to involve you. Somehow you and the angry men will get involved in the war he wants. Maybe you will be the ones who start it.”
At this point I was forgotten. The men had a very long talk, all in Sioux. On occasion they look
ed my way, or gestured in my direction, but they never spoke to me again. Eventually I struggled to stand, walked into one of the bedrooms, and went back to sleep.
When I woke up that evening, I found my clothes next to me on the bed. I got the hint – it was time for me to get dressed. I did so and went into the kitchen. The house was empty except for one woman who was about Marc’s age. A sister?
“You should eat lots.” She pointed to a chair at the table.
“Oddly, I am not hungry.”
“You are cold sick. Eat.” She gave me a big plate of meat and potatoes all under a thick layer of gravy. I can’t say I was real attracted, but I ate some and then some more, and eventually finished it all. I have to say it made me feel much better.
“Where is everyone?” I must have been feeling better – my curiosity was returning.
“They are at the potlatch. It will last longer now.”
“Oh?”
“They can’t go home.” That made sense to me. No one would go home until they determined what to do about Foster and the angry men. That would be a tough problem to solve. “You should go to school. They have questions.”
Fair enough. I thanked her for the food, put on my heaviest coat and hat and walked to the school. It was dark and cold. I could hear drumming from the school. It sounded different than it had the night before. Or was it two nights? I was a bit muddled.
The gym was even more packed than it had been on Friday. And the dancing was different. For one thing, only men were dancing. And this dancing was not beautiful. The men were sweat soaked, and intense. Frankly, it was intimidating. They carried weapons – bows, spears, rifles – and pushed them high into the air in some kind of syncopation I didn’t understand, but the gesture was clear enough. Someone was going to get hurt.
I scanned the crowd for Marc, but he found me before I found him. He waved me over to a classroom. Inside I found the same men who had been at the house earlier, plus maybe a dozen more. The desks had been pushed aside and replaced by a circle of chairs. The chairs were taken by the older men. Younger men stood behind. So did several women.
“Thank you for coming.” It was the oldest man there who greeted me. He rose, and all the others followed. How can I describe him? He might have been eighty, given the lines on his face, or maybe it was just the harsh wind and sun over many years. He looked sturdy, despite his age. No big belly, but not skin and bones either. His hair was white and long and he held it in place with a beaded headband. And his face? Round, very brown, with a nose that was a bit large. But what I saw in the face was a welcome. He was truly glad to see me. “I would like us to take a walk. Would that be okay?”
“Of course.” He crossed the circle to my side and led me out a side door to a stairway. It turned out the school had a second floor. Why it would need one was a mystery, but I climbed the stairs with him and we followed a short hallway to what must have been a music room. There were instruments around and music stands, and notes on a chalkboard. He motioned for me to take a chair, and he sat across from me, maybe three feet away.
“In the old days we used to call men like me, ‘Chief.’ Now I am pleased to be an elder. My French name is Robert deMille. I have a Sioux name too, but we will use French. Is that okay?”
“I am pleased to meet you. I am Shawn Murphy.”
“Yes, I had fun reading some of your postings last summer. That is where you met this Foster?”
“Yes. He is an odd man. He is wealthy, very bright and very well traveled. And I think he wants to start a war.”
“And you don’t.”
“No.” I stopped there, but he just waited. He wanted more, I guessed. “We historians are dangerous describers of war. We describe the wars that were, not the wars that will be. So people are always surprised, usually badly. The First World War was the worst example. Europe hadn’t had a war in forty years. People remembered grandpa’s war – the Franco Prussian War – as lasting months. That’s the war historians wrote about. Then a new war came along and lasted years and destroyed a generation. They weren’t ready for machine guns or modern artillery or trenches. They weren’t ready to see millions of men die in the mud. When the shooting starts in Louisiana, everyone thinks they know how that will go. They don’t. They can’t. Foster loves history. He studies it; he thinks he understands it. I think he believes he can change it. I think he is a very dangerous man.”
“He was in Louisiana, and now he is here. So he has brought his danger here. And he has brought some dangerous men with him.”
“When he was in Louisiana he supported the Louisiana National Army. They are a dangerous group. The people he has here I think are less dangerous. You call them ‘angry men.’ I think they are just a rabble.”
“They tried to kill you.”
“Two of them did. I don’t think the others knew what those two were doing, and I don’t think Foster knew. They just decided to get rid of me on their own. Even there, they could have just shot me, but they wanted it to look like an accident in case Foster found out.”
“So, a rabble.”
“Yes, a rabble. I don’t think Foster has much real control over these men.”
“Thank you.” The elder stood, and it was clear our interview was over. As we left the room, he had one final comment. “When this is all over, I would like to talk about some tribal history with you.”
“I would be honored.”