Woods Runner

by Gary Paulsen

  Also by Gary Paulsen

  Alida’s Song • The Amazing Life of Birds • The Beet Fields

  The Boy Who Owned the School

  The Brian Books: The River, Brian’s Winter, Brian’s Return, and Brian’s Hunt

  Canyons • Caught by the Sea: My Life on Boats

  The Cookcamp • The Crossing

  Danger on Midnight River • Dogsong

  Father Water, Mother Woods • The Glass Café

  Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books

  Harris and Me • Hatchet

  The Haymeadow • How Angel Peterson Got His Name

  The Island • Lawn Boy • The Legend of Bass Reeves

  Molly McGinty Has a Really Good Day

  The Monument • Mudshark • My Life in Dog Years

  Nightjohn • The Night the White Deer Died

  Notes from the Dog

  Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northers

  The Quilt • The Rifle

  Sarny: A Life Remembered • The Schernoff Discoveries

  Soldier’s Heart • The Time Hackers • The Transall Saga

  Tucket’s Travels (the Tucket’s West series, Books One through Five)

  The Voyage of the Frog • The White Fox Chronicles • The Winter Room

  Picture books, illustrated by Ruth Wright Paulsen: Canoe Days and Dogteam

  With appreciation, for Shelby

  Author’s Note

  I’ve written this book a bit differently from my other historical fiction, alternating the fiction with historical segments that I feel are essential for the reader. I did this for two reasons. One: I wanted to set Samuel’s story against the larger context of the Revolutionary War. And two: I wanted readers to understand what it was really like to live on the frontier at that time, with virtually nothing—no money, no electricity, no towns, few neighbors—nothing but your own strength.

  Contents

  PART 1

  GREEN / The Forest—1776

  CHAPTER 1

  Communication

  CHAPTER 2

  Frontier Life

  CHAPTER 3

  PART 2

  RED / War—1776

  Weapons

  CHAPTER 4

  The Americans

  CHAPTER 5

  The British

  CHAPTER 6

  The World

  CHAPTER 7

  Warfare

  CHAPTER 8

  Wounds

  CHAPTER 9

  American Spirit

  CHAPTER 10

  The Hessians

  CHAPTER 11

  PART 3

  GREEN / New York—1776

  War Orphans

  CHAPTER 12

  Civilian Deaths

  CHAPTER 13

  New York City

  CHAPTER 14

  Covert Communication

  CHAPTER 15

  Civilian Intelligence

  CHAPTER 16

  Prisoners of the British

  CHAPTER 17

  Treatment of Prisoners of War

  CHAPTER 18

  British Behavior

  CHAPTER 19

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  PART 1

  GREEN

  The Forest—1776

  CHAPTER

  1

  He was not sure exactly when he became a child of the forest.

  One day it seemed he was eleven and playing in the dirt around the cabin or helping with chores, and the next, he was thirteen, carrying a .40-caliber Pennsylvania flintlock rifle, wearing smoked-buckskin clothing and moccasins, moving through the woods like a knife through water while he tracked deer to bring home to the cabin for meat.

  He sat now by a game trail waiting for the deer he knew would come soon. He had heard it, a branch brushing a hairy side, a twig cracking, smelled it when the wind blew toward him, the musk and urine of a buck. He checked the priming on his rifle while he waited, his mind and body relaxed, patient, ears and eyes and nose alert. Quiet. Every part of him at rest, yet focused and intense.

  And he pictured his life, how he lived in two worlds.

  Sometimes Samuel thought that a line dividing those worlds went right through their cabin. To the west, beyond the small parchment window made of grease-soaked sheepskin scraped paper-thin, lay the forest.

  The forest was unimaginably vast, impenetrable, mysterious and dark. His father had told him that a man could walk west for a month, walk as fast as he could, and never see the sun, so high and dense was the canopy of leaves.

  Even close to their homestead—twelve acres clawed out of the timber with a small log cabin and a lean-to for a barn—the forest was so thick that in the summer Samuel could not see more than ten or fifteen yards into it. Some oak and elm and maple trees were four and five feet in diameter and so tall and thickly foliaged their height could only be guessed.

  A wild world.

  And while there were trails made by game and sometimes used by natives, settlers or trappers, the paths wandered and meandered so that they were impossible to use in any sensible way. Except to hunt.

  When he first started going into the forest, Samuel went only a short distance. That first time, though he was well armed with his light Pennsylvania rifle and dry powder and a good knife, he instantly felt that he was in an alien world.

  As a human he did not belong. It was a world that did not care about man any more than it cared about dirt, or grass, or leaves. He did not get lost that first time, because he’d marked trees with his knife as he walked so he could find his way out; but still, in some way he felt lost, as if, were he not careful, a part of him would disappear and never return, gone to the wildness. Samuel had heard stories of that happening to some men. They entered the forest to hunt or trap or look for new land to settle and simply vanished.

  “Gone to the woods,” people said of them.

  Some, he knew, were dead. Killed by accident, or panthers or bear or Indians. He had seen such bodies. One, a man mauled to death by a bear that had attacked his horse while the man was plowing; the man’s head was eaten; another, killed by an arrow through the throat. An arrow, Samuel knew, that came out of the woods from a bow that was never seen, shot by a man who was never known. And when he was small, safe inside the cabin near the mud-brick fireplace with his mother and father, he had heard the panthers scream; they sounded like a woman gone mad.

  Oh, he knew the forest could kill. Once, sitting by the fire, a distant relative, a shirttail uncle who was a very old man of nearly fifty named Ishmael, had looked over his shoulder as if expecting to see monsters and said, “Nothing dies of old age in the forest. Not bugs, not deer, not bear nor panthers nor man. Live long enough, be slow enough, get old enough and something eats you. Everything kills.”

  And yet Samuel loved the forest now. He knew the sounds and smells and images like he knew his own mind, his own yard. Each time he had entered he’d gone farther, learned more, marked more trees with his knife, until he always knew where he was. Now he thought of the deep forest as his home, as much as their cabin.

  But some men vanished for other reasons, too. Because the forest pulled them and the wild would not let them go. Three years ago, when Samuel was ten, he had seen one of these men, a man who moved like smoke, his rifle a part of his arm, a tomahawk through his belt next to a slab-bladed knife, eyes that saw all things, ears that heard all things. One family in the settlement had a room on their cabin that was a kind of store. The man had come to the store to buy small bits of cloth and powder and English flints for his rifle at the same time Samuel was waiting for his mother to buy thread.

  The man smelled of deep forest, of smoke and blood and grease and something green—Samuel knew he smelled that way, too. The stranger could
not be still. As he stood waiting, he moved. Though he was courteous and nodded to people, as soon as he had the supplies for his rifle and some salt, he left. He was there one moment and gone the next, into the trees, gliding on soft moccasins to become part of the forest, as much as any tree or leaf or animal. He went west.

  Away from man, away from the buildings and the settled land.

  Now Samuel heard a new sound. He moved his eyes slowly to the left without turning his head and was rewarded by seeing a tick-infested rabbit sitting by a tree trying to clear the insects out of his ears. Samuel smiled. Even in dead of winter the rabbits were always trying to rid themselves of the pests.

  The sight made him think of his mother, who was intensely curious and had once asked him to take her into the forest. They had not gone far, not over five hundred yards from the edge of the clearing, and had stopped under a towering oak where sunlight could not get through. There was a subdued green light over everything. Even their faces looked a gentle green.

  “I have to go back,” she said, her eyes wide, wrapping a shawl tightly around her shoulders, though it was summer-warm. “This is too … too … thick. Even the air is green. So thick it feels like it could be cut. I have to go back now.”

  Although Samuel’s parents lived in the wilderness, they were not a part of it. They had been raised in towns and had been educated in schools where they’d been taught to read and write and play musical instruments. They moved west when Samuel was a baby, so that they could devote themselves to a quiet life of hard physical work and contemplation. They loved the woods, but they did not understand them. Not like Samuel.

  They had told their son that they didn’t belong in towns, either. They weren’t comfortable in the world of roads, houses and villages. East of the imaginary line in the cabin was what his father and mother called civilization.

  They told Samuel about the chaos of towns that they’d escaped. There were noises—hammers clanging at blacksmith forges, chickens clucking, dogs barking, cows lowing, horses whinnying and whickering, people who always seemed to need to be talking to one another.

  There wasn’t noise in the forest.

  There were smells: wood smoke filled the air in every season because it wasn’t just for heat, but to cook as well; the smell of oak for long fires, pine for short and fast and hot fires. The smell of bread, and sometimes, if they were lucky and had honey or rock sugar to pulverize in a sack with a hammer, sweet pie. The odor of stew cooking in the cast-iron pot over an outside fire or in an iron kettle hung in the fireplace, the scent flying up through the chimney and out over the ground as the wind moved the smoke around. There was the tang of manure, stacked in back of small shedlike barns to age before it was put on gardens; horse and cow and chicken manure from their farm and other farms. So many smells swirled by the same wind throughout the small valley.

  Their valley was like a huge bowl, nestled in the hills in far western Pennsylvania. Here lived, and had always lived, Samuel Lehi Smith, age thirteen, with his father, Olin, and his mother, Abigail, parents whom Samuel did not always understand but whom he loved.

  They read to him about the world beyond from their prized books. All the long winter nights with tallow candles burning while they sat by the fireplace, they read aloud to each other. At first he’d listened as they took turns. Later he read to himself and knew the joyous romp of words on paper. He read all the books they had in the cabin and then books from other cabins in the valley so that he could know more and more of a world found only in his imagination and dreams.

  To the east lay the faraway world of enormous cities and the Great Sea and Europe and Ancient Rome and Darkest Africa and the mysterious land of the Asias and so many people they couldn’t be counted. All kinds of different people with foreign languages and their knowledge of strange worlds.

  To the east lay polished shoes and ornate clothes and formal manners and enormous wealth. His mother would spin tales for him about cultured men who wore carefully powdered wigs and dipped snuff out of little silver snuffboxes and beautiful women dressed in gowns of silk and satin with swirling petticoats as they danced in the great houses and exclusive salons of London and Paris.

  Now. The deer stepped out. It stood in complete profile not thirty yards away. Samuel held his breath. He waited for it to turn away, look around in caution. When it did, he raised the rifle and cocked the hammer, pulling it back as quietly as he could, the sear dropping in with a soft snick. The rifle had two triggers, a “set” trigger that armed a second, front trigger and made it so sensitive that a mere brush released the hammer. He moved his finger from the set trigger and laid it next to but didn’t touch the hair trigger. Then he settled the German silver blade of the front sight into the tiny notch of the rear sight and floated the tip of the blade sight until it rested just below the shoulder of the young buck.

  Directly over its heart.

  A half second, no, a quarter second passed. Samuel could touch the hair trigger now and the hammer would drop, the flint would scrape the metal “frizzen,” kicking it out of the way and showering sparks down on the powder in the small pan, which would ignite and blow a hot jet of gas into the touch hole on the side of the barrel of the rifle, setting off the charge, propelling the small .40-caliber ball down the bore. Before the buck heard the sound of the rifle, the ball would pass through the heart and out the other side of the deer, killing it.

  And yet he did not pull the trigger. He waited. Part of a second, then a full second. And another. The deer turned, saw him standing there. With a convulsive explosion of muscle, it jumped straight in the air. It landed running and disappeared into the trees.

  The whole time Samuel had not really been thinking of the deer, but what lay east. Of what they called civilization. He eased the hammer of the rifle down to the first notch on the sear, a safety position, and lowered the weapon. Oddly, he wasn’t disappointed that he’d not taken the deer, though the fresh meat would have been nice roasted over the hearth. He’d killed plenty of deer, sometimes ten or fifteen a day, so many they could not possibly eat all the meat. He often shot them because the deer raided the cornfields and had to be killed to save the crops. Most families did not like deer meat anyway. They considered it stringy and tough and it was often wormy. The preferred meat was bear or beaver, which were richer and less “cordy.”

  This deer would have been nice. They had not had fresh meat in nearly two weeks. But it was gone now.

  He could not stop his wondering about what lay to the east. The World. It was supposed to be a better place than the frontier, with a more sensible way to live. And yet he had just learned an ugly truth about that world only the evening before.

  Those people in the world who were supposed to be civilized, full of knowledge and wisdom and graciousness and wealth and education, were caught in the madness of vicious, bloody war.

  It did not make any sense.

  Samuel started trotting back toward the cabin in an easy shuffle-walk that moved him quietly and at some speed without wearing out his moccasins; he was lucky to get a month per pair before they wore through at the heels.

  He moved without a great deal of effort, his eyes and ears missing very little as he almost flowed through the forest.

  But his mind was still on the man who had brought the sheet of paper the night before.

  Communication

  In the year 1776, the fastest form of travel for any distance over thirty or forty miles was by ship. With steady wind, a sailing vessel could clock one to two hundred miles a day for weeks on end.

  A horse could cover thirty, maybe even forty, miles a day, although not for an extended period without breaking down.

  At best, coaches could do a hundred miles in a twenty-four-hour day by changing horses every ten or fifteen miles, but only if the roads were in good shape, which they almost never were.

  A man could walk twenty or thirty miles a day—faster for short periods, but always depending on conditions of land, weather and footg
ear. Fifteen miles a day was standard.

  So there was no fast and dependable way to transmit information in those years—no telegraph, no telephone, no Internet, no texting, no overnight delivery services.

  It might take five or six days for knowledge of an important event to move just ten miles, carried by a traveler on foot. Settlements were twelve to fifteen miles apart. And information was carried by hand from person to person on paper or, in most cases, shared by word of mouth.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Samuel had returned home from the forest the night before and found his parents sipping tea with Isaac, an old man of the forest who stopped by their cabin every few months while he was hunting. This time, though, he had news. He carried information about a fight in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, where militia had fired on and defeated British soldiers. The battle had happened months before, all the way back in April of 1775.

  Isaac seemed to be made entirely of scraps of old leather and rags. He was bald and wore a ratty cap with patches of fur that had been worn away. He was tall and thin and for many years had lived in a cabin some twenty miles to the east. He was so much a part of the forest that even his brief visits with Samuel’s family caused him discomfort.

  He’d decided to move farther into the frontier when a wagon, pulled by oxen, came into the clearing near his cabin. The family was traveling westward, looking for a piece of land to farm, and had chosen a spot not far from Isaac’s place.

  The family was, Isaac said, “a crowd. And I knew it was time to move on, seeing as how I don’t do particular good with crowds of people.”

  As he was taking his leave from the small shack where he had lived, the family had given him the scrap of paper, soft with wear from all the hands it had passed through, so he could share the news with fellow travelers he met on his journey. They told him of other events they had heard of along the way. He tried to remember the details, but admitted that he wasn’t much for conversation.