Never had I seen bigger men—though they looked more like devils than men. Their faces were black; their hair rose from their shaved heads in a sort of crest. The crest was stiffened with clay and painted bright red. It was like a horse’s mane that had been clipped close, or like the crest on a dragoon’s helmet, so that it gave them a look of fierceness that was horrible. They wore buckskin leggins and red belt cloths; and the tops of their bodies were not only bare, but shining with grease. Under the left arm of each one was tied a bag made from the whole skin of a bird or animal. There was a peculiar sweet smell to them: a smell that might have been a blend of wood smoke, sweet grass, fur and rancid oil.

The sight of those black-faced figures appearing so suddenly out of nowhere held me paralyzed and speechless. I made no protest and no resistance when two of them took me by the arms and hustled me through the pines to the shore on the northern side of the headland. I seemed to be numbed and in a daze as they dragged me along.

I think the truth was that I must have been, in reality, half asleep; and in the haze of this stunned drowsiness, I dimly heard the four Indians cackling in high good humor.

On its side behind a stand of birches was a long North canoe with something that looked like a bird daubed on each end in red paint. Two more Indians were hunkered down beside the canoe. One was tending a newly made fire on which a pot rested; the other was kneeling over Doc Means and fumbling with the bundles inside his smock. Doc was bound hand and foot, as were Nathaniel and Verrieul.

When the two by the canoe saw that another captive was being brought in, they yowped and howled like animals; but since the one continued to tend his fire and the other to fumble in Doc’s smock, their howling seemed perfunctory.

I was tied and thrown down beside the others; and at that our captors ignored us. One went to sniff at the pot over the fire. Scooping out some of its contents with his fingers, he licked them noisily.

“For God’s sake,” I whispered to Doc, “where did they come from? Did they hurt Nathaniel?”

Doc’s face was pressed into a patch of moss, so that his speech was indistinct. “They stopped his circulation again. He ain’t moved since they jumped on us. He’s got to be bled. He’s got to be bled right away. Where’s all that Injun lingo that Verrieul claimed to know?”

Verrieul sighed. “You gain nothing with these people by hurried speech. To be frank with you, the suddenness of the thing was upsetting to me. I need a few moments to compose my thoughts.”