Read Savage Lands for Free Online

are a Frenchman. Serve your King with honour. When it is time, we shall return for you.’
    The leave-taking ceremony was concluded, the preparations almost complete. The chief had repaired to the temple to exhort the savage gods to look favourably upon the expedition and grant it safe passage. A procession of savages accompanied the white men down the hill to the river, stamping their feet and beating drums. It was still early, but the day was already oppressively warm. By the bayou the close-set copse of trees offered no respite but, like a huddle of perspiring men, gave out its own sour-smelling heat.
    The boy waited by the copse, half hidden by a brake of cane, watching as the men loaded the last of their supplies. Their faces were scarlet and shiny with sweat and they slapped in vain at the veils of biting insects that hung about their necks. In the muddy shallows the pirogues rocked gently. They were heavily laden, the savages’ deerskins mounded in the bow; inside the crates the chickens squawked, scratching and banging their wings against the wooden sides. The boxes of lead and powder were set with care upon a folded pad of sailcloth so that they might remain dry.
    It was time for the party to depart. The commandant called the boy’s name. He did not answer. Instead he watched as an alligator cruised the far side of the river, only its nostrils and its hooded eyes visible above the yellow crust of the water. One of the men had told the boy that to snare human prey, alligators had been known to call out to passers-by in the voice of a child.
    The boy did not know whether to believe this or not. On his first day at the garrison at Mobile, he had seen the dog belonging to the commissary bitten by a rattlesnake. The beast did not even live a quarter of an hour, but swelled up so much that it was unable to move and died with a ghastly choking, as if it had swallowed its own tongue. Astounded by the speed of its demise, the boy had regarded its passing less with sympathy than a kind of grisly enthralment, but now, as the men uncoiled the ropes securing the pirogues and with a great deal of shouting and splashing pushed out into the wide stream, he felt a sharp pang of grief for the poor dead creature and his nose prickled. He rubbed it roughly with the back of his hand.
    Raising his gun the commandant saluted the village with two volleys of musketry.
    Upstream against the current, the pirogues made slow progress. It was several minutes before they reached the bend in the creek and passed out of sight. Behind the boy, high on the hill, dark smoke rose from behind the palisades and smudged the blank sheet of the sky. Calling out to one another in their garbled tongue, the last of the natives turned away from the river and began to climb the path back to the village.
    The boy leaned against a thick staff of cane, his fingers seeking out the swollen ridges of its joints. He felt hollow, as though the soft parts of him had been carried away upstream, bundled up with the deerskins and the squawking fowls. On the other side of the creek, the alligator rose again, paused and sank out of sight. The stream smoothed and steadied and continued on its way.
    They were gone.
    He was all alone, cast adrift among the savages. He spoke not a word of their language. He knew none of their names or whether indeed they possessed any. He knew nothing of where he was, except that the French garrison was eight days’ travel away, through forests and swamps swarming with every kind of terror. He had not the faintest notion when he might see one of his countrymen again.
    As he stepped out from the cane brake, the boy trod in a hillock of soft earth and a swarm of red ants spread like a rash across his boots and up over his bare ankles, setting his skin on fire. There were ants inside his boots. As he tugged them off, the boy once again felt the prickle of tears behind his eyes. The missioners claimed that there were savages who strangled their