Wilderness of Spring
By EDGAR PANGBORN
... For if I am in sore plight, I would not therefore wish affliction tobe the lot of all the world. No, indeed, no! since, besides, I amdistressed by the fate of my brother Atlas, who, towards the west,stands bearing on his shoulders the pillar of heaven and earth, aburthen not easy for his arms to grasp.
—AESCHYLUS, Prometheus Bound.
Rinehart & Company, Inc.
NEW YORK TORONTO
Published simultaneously in Canada by
Clarke, Irwin & Company, Ltd., Toronto
Copyright 1958 by Edgar Pangborn
Printed in the United States of America
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-5139
To my Sister,
MARY C. PANGBORN
NOTE: Pastor John Williams of Deerfield is a historical figure; Belding,Stebbins, Hoyt, Wells and Hawks were actual names in the Deerfield of1704. With these minor exceptions, all characters in this novel arecompletely fictitious, not intended to suggest any actual person livingor dead.
The language of the dialogue is a compromise, an attempt to convey somequality of early eighteenth-century speech, but not to create a literalreproduction of it, since that might be tedious and obscure in someplaces to modern readers. For a literal reproduction the worst nuisancewould have been those words, such as "naughty," that have changed not inform but in meaning or emotional charge. I have tried to avoid all theseexcept where the context should make plain their archaic sense. I thinkthe use of "thee" and "thou" is substantially correct. At that time thesecond person singular could be used in English as in most Europeanlanguages today, for intimates and children, but the universal "you" wasalready displacing it. The third person singular verb ending wasobsolescent but still in some use; "hath" and "doth" seem to havesurvived long after the ending was abandoned in other verbs.
In the modern (Everyman) edition of Montaigne, the essay that Mr.Kenny asks for is entitled "Of Training" instead of "Use Makes Perfect."The copy from Mr. Kenny's library was the seventeenth-centurytranslation by Charles Cotton.
My special thanks to Mrs. Kelsey Flower of Deerfield, who gave mewelcome aid with the research; and to the personnel of the State Libraryat Albany, N.Y. for their unfailing helpfulness and courtesy.
E.P.
PART ONE
Chapter One
High clouds drove across the dark toward abiding calm. Ben Cory watchedthem rolling under west wind down a winter sky, until his father's voicedrew him back into the pool of firelight and candleshine. The moment'salarm of loneliness lingered, another occasion when the self disturbedby the not-self desires the assurance of boundaries. Where does the selfend and the universe begin? Ben knew the inquiry to be a corridor wheremany doors open on darkness but not all.
Most of the days of that February had been whitely brilliant, the nightsheavy with malignant doubts of wartime. Outside Deerfield's palisade,where one did not go alone, Ben at fourteen could never forget theenemy, the Others. Indians and French—or say danger itself, a thing ofthe mind harsh as an arrow in the flesh. In the cave of darkness thatwas the garret at bedtime, with Reuben's breath tickling his shoulder,the t