Free Arundel by Kenneth Roberts Page B

favors, which never vanish from their memories; and if these be not returned in kind, then the Abenakis become contemptuous, revengeful, dangerous.
    Because of these traits the English might easily have gained and held their friendship and had their assistance against the French. Instead of that, by insults, cruelties and constant frauds they early aroused the enmity of many of them and drove them over to the French; and the French, by flattery and fair dealing, made them into faithful friends.
    This, then, accounts for still another body of Abenakis known as a tribe, but actually composed of fragments of tribes. Even before my father was born there were Abenakis south of us—the Pennacooks, of whom I have spoken as living in the valley of the Merrimac. When many of these were massacred without reason by the white settlers, the remnants departed to Canada, where the governor, knowing they would be valuable in warfare, welcomed them and made a treaty with them—a treaty that has ever since been kept. They were given lands on the St. Francis River and at Beçancour, near Three Rivers. After the attack on Father Rale and the Norridgewocks in 1724, the most bitter Norridgewocks departed for St. Francis and Beçancour; and many of the Sokokis joined them after Lovewell’s raid on Pequawket in the following year. Still later many Assagunticooks removed to St. Francis.
    These Indians became known to us as the St. Francis Indians or the Northern Indians; and while they were Abenakis, like our own Abenakis, they were led by French officers and longed for revenge on those who had abused them. Yet they spoke the same musical language; read the same wampum rolls in the same way; told the same pleasing tales of the good hero-giant Glooskap and his pet loon, the evil wolf-giant Malsum, the mischief-making Indian devil Lox, the great sorcerer Pulowech, the partridge, and Pamola, the evil one.
    From all this it may be seen how a white man might be led astray in his estimate of the Indians; how, if he knew only the Sokokis, he might fall a victim to roving bands from St. Francis; how, if he knew only those from St. Francis, he might be at constant odds with friendly Assagunticooks and Penobscots.
    My father knew them all except the braves from St. Francis. Even to them he was known by reputation; and since he had dealt honestly with them, giving fair measure and true weight, never watering his rum or sanding his powder, trusting them, helping them when they were in need, scrupulously keeping his promises to them, holding them to be honorable men in all his relations with them, they in turn dealt amiably and honestly with him.
    Not only had the Norridgewocks and other tribes given wampum belts to my father, but they had erected private monuments of stone outside our stockade wall at Arundel; and so long as these monuments were not pulled down, my father’s family was at peace with the tribes who raised them.

    As the morning wore on, a breeze sprang up from the west. We stepped a mast with a small sail that hurried us past all the islands and into the end of narrow Maquoit Bay, where we disembarked and set off for Brunswick over a path so clear that in an hour we had reached the banks of the Androscoggin and presented ourselves before the captain at the fort.
    He had seen, he said, no trace of St. Francis Indians, or of a French man such as my father described, or of Mary; nor, he added, would he be likely to do so, since they would be sure to move around the fort in the concealment of the forest. Yet he offered us supplies, and summoned Warriksos and Wheyossawando, tall Assagunticooks in buckskin leggins without shirts, who readily agreed to carry us toward Fort Richmond on service of benefit to the colonies.
    We embarked under the warm mid-morning sun, and slipped down stream through trees touched here and there with frost. In less than an hour we met the salty odor of the rising tide: then entered the broad reaches of Merrymeeting Bay,