I found myself on my knees in our crow’s nest, saying over and over, “Here, here! Here, here!” Doc’s hand was around the lock of my musket. “Lay down or they’ll get us!” he kept whispering. “Lay down or they’ll see us!”

Doc’s warning came too late. They did see us. In my left shoulder I felt a sensation of intolerable heat and sharpness. From far away the echoing slam of a musket came with singular slowness to my ears.

The tree-top above me described ever-widening arcs.

Doc’s persistent voice had its effect at last. “Lay down!” he never ceased saying. “Lay down! Curl yourself around the tree! Cling to it tight! Don’t roll over! Cling to it tight!” He tugged at me until he had pulled me into a position that satisfied him.

Below us I could hear the persistent report of muskets. I was conscious, too, that Doc was whistling shrilly—the three mournful minor notes of a beetle-head plover.

“Did you kill any of ’em?” I asked him. “For God’s sake, haven’t you killed any of ’em?”

“Lay close to the tree!” Doc said. “Just take it easy and lay close to the tree!” I felt him fumbling at my shoulder, and heard him whistling and whistling, whistling and whistling.

In spite of the fire that burned in my entire upper body, I seemed to dip and swoop in a cold darkness; and in that darkness I thought I saw Ellen Phipps, Nathaniel, Marie de Sabrevois, Lanaudiere—everybody I knew—revolving in an orbit from which there was no escape: an orbit whose center was the mangled body of Jennie McCrae.

LXII

IT WAS Nason, Tom and Cap Huff, who, summoned by Doc’s whistles, frightened away the Indians and stood guard while Doc lowered me from the tree, half unconscious from the pain of the bullet that had plowed under the muscles of my back and ripped out through the top of my shoulder.

How they got me from the hilltop to the fort, and over the five miles of rutted road that lay between the fort and Moses Kill, to which the army had retreated, I have no recollection. Indeed, I was conscious of next to nothing but a delirium of pain. That night, with my wound dressed and bound up, the pain became a nightmare that continued for days, merging with a maddening frenzy through which I dizzily staggered: the dreadful vertigo of an army in retreat—for the army went back and always back, down the Hudson; across it to the Heights of Saratoga, past Schuyler’s big farm house and mills, into the town of Stillwater, closer and closer to Albany.