Dawn on a Distant Shore Read Free

Elizabeth our best!"
    Nathaniel raised a
hand in acknowledgment. "Thank you, Axel. Jed, I was supposed to send
Martha Southern word, would you take care of that for me?"
    "I will. Tomorrow
we'll wet the child's head, proper like."
    "We'll do that,
God willing."
    Liam had gone out onto
the porch, but the older woman hung back to put a hand on Nathaniel's arm.
"Elizabeth's strong, and Hannah's with her. That girl of yours has got the
touch, you know that."
    She's only ten years
old.
    Nathaniel could see
that thought sitting there in the troubled lines that bracketed Curiosity's
mouth. "Elizabeth asked for you. She wanted you." And me. I should
be there.
    Curiosity squinted at
him. Never the kind to offer false comfort, she nodded, and followed him outside.
     
    Strung out in single
file with Nathaniel leading and Liam bringing up the rear, they left the village
on snowshoes. They carried tin lanterns that cast dancing pinpricks of light over
the new snow: a scattering of golden stars to match the fiery ones overhead.
The night sky had been scrubbed clean; the moon was knife edged and cold, as
cold as the air that stung the throat and nose.
    Nathaniel glanced over
his shoulder now and then to gauge Curiosity's pace. Thus far she showed no
signs of tiring, in spite of the late hour and interrupted sleep. Frontier women ,
his father often said. When one of their own is in need, they can set
creation on its ear.
    He had set out to
fetch her almost twenty-four hours ago. She was his father-in-law's housekeeper,
but Curiosity Freeman was more than that: Elizabeth's friend, and his own, the clearest
head in the village and the closest thing Paradise had to a doctor since
Richard Todd had decided to spend the winter in Johnstown; she had always been
a better midwife, anyway. With a midwife's sense of timing, she had been ready
for him, her basket packed. She wiped the flour from her hands and arms and
passed the kneading over to her daughter, calling out to her husband, Galileo,
that she was on her way. Judge Middleton was still abed, and they left without
disturbing him.
    "Let him
sleep," she had said, strapping on her snowshoes. "Ain't nothing a
man can do to ease a daughter in labor anyways, and my Polly will see to his
breakfast. Did you send Anna word? I'd be glad of her help, with the rest of
your womenfolk away."
    "Liam's gone to
fetch her."
    "Let's get
moving, then. First children ain't usually in a hurry, but you never
know."
    But the whiteout had
come down on them just outside the village, turning the world he knew tree by
tree into a flickering mirror of silver and white, impossible to navigate. That
they had found the trading post was a miracle in itself; that he had been able
to wait there hour after hour without losing his mind was another. Nathaniel
could not put the picture out of his head: Elizabeth in labor with only Hannah
beside her. He had lost his first wife--Hannah's mother--in childbirth on a warm
summer night that felt nothing and everything like this one.
    He wiped the freezing
sweat from his brow, and increased his pace.
     
    The mountain was
called Hidden Wolf, and the high vale where his father had built a homestead
forty years ago, Lake in the Clouds. This was a translation of the
Kahnyen'kehâka name, but the whites had never found anything better to call the
place where the mountain folded inward on itself. Triangular in shape, the
valley was big enough for two L-shaped cabins, a barn, kitchen gardens, and a
sizable cornfield on its outer edge, where the shoulder gave way to the precipice.
At the opposite end, a waterfall dropped into a shallow gorge in a series of
glittering, frozen arches. Below it a small lake was ringed with concentric
collars of ice.
    When he was within
earshot of the falls, Nathaniel broke away and left the others to struggle on
without him. Past the first cabin where he had been raised, dark now with his
father gone to Montréal and the rest of the family at Good Pasture. On