Savage Lands by Clare Clark Page A

the swamps and forests around the town for acorns and edible roots. The garrison was sealed and the unmarried soldiers once more billeted upon the natives. Only the taverner Burelle scraped up an income of sorts. The maize beer brewed by the savages was neither as strong nor as flavoursome as French wine, but it served at least to blunt the rodent gnaw of hunger. In Burelle’s modest dwelling, the oak chest by the fireplace was crammed with darned stockings and lengths of faded silk ribbon.
    In so small a settlement it was hard to keep secrets. Hunger soured the breath and sharpened eyes and tongues. Marie-Françoise de Boisrenaud accused Renée Gilbert of entering her storehouse on the pretence of returning a dish and stealing a handful of chestnuts. Perrine Roussel came close to blows with the wife of the ferret-faced carpenter over the just apportionment of a small crop of the tasteless mushrooms that grew among the roots of the walnut tree at the edge of the forest. Jean-Claude had Elisabeth salt the meat he brought to her when it was dark and store it in a barrel he had concealed behind the woodpiles in the outhouse.
    ‘How on earth did you manage it?’ she asked him the first time, her eyes round as he unwrapped the bloody haunch of venison from his pack. ‘I thought there were no deer.’
    ‘There are always deer for the hunter who knows in which direction to point his musket.’
    ‘But so much of it! What about the others?’
    ‘If the others lack meat, then they must devise their own ways of getting it. The wise man makes sure to hunt alone. Tonight it is just you and me and a feast fit for a king. What else could possibly matter?’
    She touched her fingers to the meat, thinking of the wives and their hungry eyes, their snatching fingers. Let their husbands bring them meat, she told herself, if they care enough to do so, and she took his face in her hands and kissed him. He tasted of tobacco and the medicinal sting of eau-de-vie .
    ‘Meat,’ she murmured. ‘You work miracles.’
    She was frugal with the meat and it lasted a good while. The sacks of Indian corn they pushed beneath the bed, wrapping them in deer-skins to protect them from the mice. She did not ask where they had come from but measured out the grains carefully, half-cup by half-cup, and afterwards going on her hands and knees to pick up any that might have spilled. Once she heard footsteps in the lane outside and she froze, her fists closing over the gold kernels like contraband.
    They ate in darkness, stealthily, an old blanket over the platille window and the lamps blown out, spooning up thick gravy in the dying light of the fire. The river was frozen above the red-painted post that marked the border between the Ouma and their northern neighbours, the Bayagoulas. There could be no venturing north. There were rumours that the Chickasaw, stirred up by the English and in league with several of the smaller savage nations, planned an attack on the depleted garrison. The attack did not come. Shrivelled with cold and famine, the town closed in upon itself, hunched against the blasts of the north wind as the desolate seabirds shrieked in the ice-grey sky.
    The sacks of corn grew lean. In the bitter early mornings, when fingers fumbled buttons and the damp chill cut through bone, Elisabeth watched the pinched grey faces of her neighbours as they toiled with wood and with water. Two or three of them were big with child. She covered her head with her patched scarf and did not meet their eyes, muttering the required pleasantries with lips that were clumsy with shame and a choked-up sort of anger at the weight of their wretchedness.
    Sometimes she went with them to the forest in search of food. They spoke little, their eyes blunt with hunger and fatigue. When she discovered a fistful of sour late mulberries or a straggly half-dead patch of wild onions, she took only a few and thrust the rest at the others, refusing their gratitude. Afterwards, alone in