Free Miracle in the Wilderness by Paul Gallico

T HIS STORY was told to me when I was a boy, by my great-grandmother on a Christmas Eve by the fire. I always believed that stories told by great-grandmothers must be so, for their old eyes look inward and they recall. Or perhaps when it is something that has happened in the long-ago far beyond their lifespan or even those of generations preceding them they remember things that someone before them has remembered.
    I never knew whether this was something she had heard, or perhaps read in old letters yellowing in an attic, but only that it happened in the wilderness of Britain’s colony in the New World, in the long distant past on Christmas Eve.
    Time had diminished my great-grandmother to the weightlessness of a bird and as fragile, yet her dark eyes were bright with communication and undiminished life. At ninety she was as hale and active seemingly as ever she had been. As she spoke, glowing pictures formed themselves in my mind for she had the storyteller’s gift, punctuating her narrative with alert and vigorous gestures. Hers was the power to cause me to hear sounds out of the past and even as she would wrinkle her tiny, almost translucent nose I would capture a whiff of long forgotten odors.
    The parlor where we forgathered was warmed by the log fire and filled with the pine and sugar scented fragrance of the Christmas tree but time and place were banished as she spoke. Her voice, when she began, was crisp and dry like the crunch of snowshoes on the feet of the Indian scouts she told about. It was as though she had known them intimately, rasping over the hard crust of week old snow in the dark forest of the wilderness as they made their way northwards by a last quarter moon with their three captives, the man, the woman and the infant.
    She made me see the file proceeding along the beaten forest trail where the moonlight breaking through the treetops cast blue shadows on the surface and distorted the forms of the Algonkin raiding party, hulking in their furs of beaver and muskrat, causing them to loom more huge and monstrous even than they were. She helped me to smell the rancid fetor of the Indians against the crispness of frost on spruce and pine, the leathery odor of buckskin and the rich animal hair of the pelts they wore against the cold.
    Occasionally there was the thunder of a slip of snow disturbed from a laden branch, from time to time the clash of a steel axe-head against musket butt, the snort or explosive exhalations of the pony of the mounted Indian and the heartbreaking moans of the woman who had been roughly handled. The Indians did not try to maintain silence for it was impossible in the winter forest. They relied upon swiftness to take them out of reach of any pursuing parties of Iroquois bent on rescue or vengeance.
    Darker than the forest aisles was the agony of mind of Jasper Adams because of the disaster that had overtaken them this morning of December 24, 1755, and his knowledge of the fate that awaited them when they reached Algonkin territory. More poignant still was the anguish and torment of his wife Dorcas who, through a moment’s heedlessness and disobedience, had been the unwitting cause of the catastrophe.
    The land where Jasper Adams had settled, cleared the forest and built the cabin that was about half stout fort and where Dorcas was delivered of Asher, their first born, was hewed out of the northwest section of New York, not far from French-controlled territory.
    Though roughly protected by a chain of British posts, they depended rather on the sturdiness of the house and the vigilance and knowledge of Jasper. He had hunted and farmed the frontier for ten years before he married Dorcas Bonner, young, lovely and but newly arrived from England with her family, part of yet another trickle of landless emigrants from the old country hoping to improve their fortunes in the New World. They had reached Albany by schooner. There Dorcas had been wooed and won by Jasper who had journeyed eastward