Follow the River

Informationen zum Autor James Alexander Thom is the author of Follow the River, Long Knife, From Sea to Shining Sea, Panther in the Sky (for which he won the prestigious Western Writers of America Spur Award for best historical novel), Sign-Talker, The Children of First Man, and The Red Heart . Klappentext NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "It takes a rare individual not only to see that history can live, but also to make it live for others. James Thom has that gift."-The Indianapolis News Mary Ingles was twenty-three, happily married, and pregnant with her third child when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement in 1755 and kidnapped her, leaving behind a bloody massacre. For months they held her captive. But nothing could imprison her spirit. With the rushing Ohio River as her guide, Mary Ingles walked one thousand miles through an untamed wilderness no white woman had ever seen. Her story lives on-extraordinary testimony to the indomitable strength of one pioneer woman who risked her life to return to her own people. Zusammenfassung NATIONAL BESTSELLER • It takes a rare individual not only to see that history can live! but also to make it live for others. James Thom has that gift. The Indianapolis News Mary Ingles was twenty-three! happily married! and pregnant with her third child when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement in 1755 and kidnapped her! leaving behind a bloody massacre. For months they held her captive. But nothing could imprison her spirit. With the rushing Ohio River as her guide! Mary Ingles walked one thousand miles through an untamed wilderness no white woman had ever seen. Her story lives onextraordinary testimony to the indomitable strength of one pioneer woman who risked her life to return to her own people.

Autorentext
James Alexander Thom is the author of Follow the River, Long Knife, From Sea to Shining Sea, Panther in the Sky (for which he won the prestigious Western Writers of America Spur Award for best historical novel), Sign-Talker, The Children of First Man, and The Red Heart.

Klappentext

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "It takes a rare individual not only to see that history can live, but also to make it live for others. James Thom has that gift."-The Indianapolis News

Mary Ingles was twenty-three, happily married, and pregnant with her third child when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement in 1755 and kidnapped her, leaving behind a bloody massacre. For months they held her captive. But nothing could imprison her spirit.

With the rushing Ohio River as her guide, Mary Ingles walked one thousand miles through an untamed wilderness no white woman had ever seen. Her story lives on-extraordinary testimony to the indomitable strength of one pioneer woman who risked her life to return to her own people.

Zusammenfassung
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “It takes a rare individual not only to see that history can live, but also to make it live for others. James Thom has that gift.”—The Indianapolis News

Mary Ingles was twenty-three, happily married, and pregnant with her third child when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement in 1755 and kidnapped her, leaving behind a bloody massacre. For months they held her captive. But nothing could imprison her spirit.

With the rushing Ohio River as her guide, Mary Ingles walked one thousand miles through an untamed wilderness no white woman had ever seen. Her story lives on—extraordinary testimony to the indomitable strength of one pioneer woman who risked her life to return to her own people.

Leseprobe
CHAPTER
1
 
Sunday, July 8, 1755
 
She shivered, despite the heat of the hearth, and glanced again toward the sunny rectangle of the cabin door. No one was there, not a shadow. But she felt that same uneasiness that had returned to her several times this morning: a sense that if she had looked a second sooner there would have been a figure in the doorway.
 
It was not the nature of Mary Draper Ingles to be afraid in the daytime. Sometimes in the deep wilderness nights, when the wolves wailed and the owls conspired high on the Blue Ridge east of the valley, when the dying fire made shapes move on the ceiling and the restless sleeping children rustled their corn-shuck mattresses, Mary Ingles would feel frightened. But seldom was she fearful in bright daylight like this, when the valley was familiar and peaceful and the locusts unreeled their eternal dry shrills under the summer sun.
 
Mary turned back to the cookfire. Its heat baked her sweaty face. The little black iron stewpot with the rabbit in it was almost bubbling over now. She pulled it across the iron arm a little, moving it away from the hottest coals, so that the stew might simmer the afternoon away and be at its tenderest when William came back up from the fields. The old clock at the far end of the room ticked slowly.
 
She brushed a strand of sweat-damp auburn hair back away from her cheek. She braced her palms on her knees to help lift her weight from the low puncheon stool and stood up, wheezing with the effort. Her swollen belly, firm and turgid with life, tugged down at all the strong young muscles of her torso. She smoothed the faded homespun cloth of her dress down over the mound and cupped her palms underneath, a caress and an appraisal. It would be happening any day now; she could feel that.
 
She paused there, looking through the sunny doorway, out at the lush meadows, over the dark green treetops, toward the ranks of somber Allegheny mountains marching away to the west where no one except Indians lived.
 
This little group of cabins at Draper’s Meadows was deeper into the mountains than any other white community in Virginia. It was the first settlement west of what her husband Will called the Allegheny “divide.” She and Will had been, indeed, the first white people wed on this wild side of the Blue Ridge. Five years ago, it had been: a pastoral wedding between the blue mountains with God seeming to breathe through the whole vast stillness of it. And they had lived prosperously and happily and in peace those five years. Their health was robust and both of their first two children had lived. The valley, fertile with limestone-rich soil where dense bluegrass grew and rippled, was irrigated by never-failing limestone springs, whose waters flowed down crystalline creeks into the lovely, twisting New River and thence out of their valley into the uncharted west. It was a place for health and high spirits, where one’s first look out the cabin door every morning made the heart swell up. So, surely her uneasiness of this morning would pass.
 
Of course, Mary Ingles knew, a woman’s feelings are at their most unsettled, their most skittish, when she is full of the humors of childbearing. She tried to smile away her anxiety. Even William had made light of it this morning, as he often made light of women’s fears. This morning he had passed it off just that way, as the spookishness of a mother-to-be.
 
“Must’ee go?” she had asked him after their Sunday morning prayers, when the valley had still been full of the shadow of the ridge. “I … I be afraid, a wee bit.
And William Ingles had hesitated here in this cabin door with his cradle scythe over one shoulder, a bag of hoecake and a watergourd over the other. He had never before heard Mary profess fear in the daytime. “Why afraid?” he had said then, with that joshing smile of his, looking down at her swollen middle. “When Tommy an’ Georgie come, y’ squzz ’em oot slick as a grape-pip. And your ma’s here to help. Bettie’s here, too, who wasna before. And if ’ee start birthin’, why, only…