Animal Appetite by Susan Conant Read Free Book Online Page A

their families. The boy, Samuel Lenorson? Had the Indian family felt him to be one of their own?

    The scalping, I gathered, was not part of Hannah Duston’s original plan. Rather, it was a grisly afterthought with a mercenary motive. It’s midnight. The Indians are asleep in the tent that everyone shares. The Haverhill monument and some old engravings showed everyone in the cold outdoors, with the wigwam in the background. In New Hampshire in March? I think not. So, inside the crowded wigwam, Hannah, Mary, and Samuel, armed with stolen hatchets, strike as one. The attack begins, I believe, with the men. Hannah certainly assigns herself one. Mary or the boy, Samuel, kills the other. (Samuel’s age? I did not yet know.) Simultaneously, someone crushes the head of one of the sleeping women. Another Indian woman is wounded, but escapes, as does the boy, who would have been spared. Who kills the third woman? The remaining children? According to the books, Hannah is the leader.

    I can imagine the blood. I once saw my father’s ax slip as he was chopping wood. The blade he was slamming into a log sliced through his boot. I’d never heard him scream like that before. I’d never have believed that my father would cry for help. And his ax dug only into his foot. And only once. But the gash was deep and ugly. The wound bled and bled. Miraculously, he didn’t lose even a toe. Miraculously, one Indian boy survived, as did one wounded woman.

    Their slaughter ended, Hannah Duston, Mary Neff, and Samuel Lenorson set off in a canoe. But they turn back. There actually had been rewards for Indians, not dead or alive, either. Just dead. Proof had been required. Scalping was primarily an English practice. The rewards have been canceled. Maybe Hannah doesn’t know that. It is she who returns, she who wields the scalping knife. Soon after she reaches Haverhill, she and her husband take the scalps to Boston to petition for “publick Bounty.” It is granted. On behalf of his wife, Thomas Duston receives twenty-five pounds. The same amount is divided between Hannah’s companions in captivity “as a reward for their service in slaying divers of those barbarous salvages.” Question: What did Thomas Duston do to deserve the money? Answer: Possess a Y chromosome.

    In the midafternoon, I set aside my scholarly research on a colonial heroine to work on an article for a women’s magazine about how to get your dog to come when called. Make yourself a good target, I advised. Open your arms to your dog. Your voice is important: Make it welcome your dog. And when your dog runs to you, don’t grab him, don’t run at him, don’t invite opposition! Back up! Help him learn to move to the one who loves him. And when he gets there? Feed him. The way to a dog’s heart is through freeze-dried liver.

    I’m a convert to positive training, you see. I used to give a lot of corrections. That’s a nice way of saying that I used to inflict pain. I now use gentle methods. I get results. But I am a captive only of dogs. I am a prisoner of love. My civilized advice had nothing to do with Hannah Duston.

CHAPTER 6

    Two purported suicide notes lay on Jack Andrews’s desk the night his body was found. One, handwritten in what reminded me of my own illegible scrawl, read as follows:

     
I have slowly and reluctantly been driven to conclude that it takes more than the absence of faults to make a winner. Consequently, I am determined no longer to pursue what is obviously a lost cause. Your disappointment is my only regret.

    Love,
Jack

     
The second note had been typed on what I guessed was an IBM Selectric. Like the first, it had no salutation.

     
It is unfortunate that society judges some weaknesses more harshly than it does others. Far from desiring to create an embarrassing public furor, I am eager that what must now transpire do so as privately as possible.

    With regret,
John W. Andrews

     
Above the typed name was a scribble that I deciphered as