Woods Runner

by Gary Paulsen

  “Since they was so much noise from the sprats as it seemed a dozen of them, my thinker fuzzed up like bad powder and my recollecter might not be all it could be, but I think they said they was another fight at a place called Bunker Hill and the patriot militia got whipped there and sent running when they saw the bayonets on the British soldiers’ muskets.”

  He sat, quietly sipping the evergreen tea he always carried, a brew made from pine and spruce needles. He swore it cured colds, and he said he preferred it over “furriner tea from outside, but thankee, missus.”

  The paper he’d handed to Samuel’s father, Olin, was a single sheet that had been folded and unfolded so many times it was near to falling apart. It had been printed on a crude press with wooden block letters and was smudged and hard to read. But there was a brief description of the fight at Lexington and Concord and a drawing of figures firing muskets at some other figures that were falling to the ground.

  As Samuel studied the paper in his father’s hands, he thought: Everything in my world just got bigger.

  Two other families, the Clarks and the Overtons, pulled up in wagons. Isaac had spoken to them on his way to Samuel’s place and they wanted to hear what Olin had to say about Isaac’s news.

  Samuel looked around the small cabin on the edge of the woods that was suddenly filled with people all talking over each other about the meaning of the battles. It seemed that the strong and sturdy log walls no longer protected his family. The loud outside world his parents had escaped by moving to the frontier had found them. Samuel was excited and frightened and overwhelmed all at the same time.

  “What does it mean?” Ebenezer Clark asked Olin. His face was red and round as an apple because he drank home beer, three quarts every morning for breakfast.

  “It could be local. Just some trouble in Boston,” Samuel’s father said. “A riot or the like. There’s always a chance of rabble-rousing in the cities. And it doesn’t seem likely that a group of farmers would try to take on the entire British army.” He paused, then added thoughtfully, “England has the most powerful army and navy in the world, and a gaggle of farmers would have to be insane to fight them.”

  “Likely or not”—this from Lund Harris, a soft-spoken and careful man whose wife, Clara, sat nursing an infant—“if it happens, we have to think what it means for us out here on the edge.”

  Nobody spoke. Samuel could hear the crackle of the fire in the fireplace. In the homey, safe cabin, the craziness of the information from the east seemed impossible.

  There was always some measure of violence on the frontier: marauding savages, drunks, thieves—“evildoers,” men who operated outside the walls of reason. Harshness was to be expected in the wild.

  But nothing like this, nothing that challenged the established order, the very rule of the Crown, the civilized life that came from the English way of living.

  The very idea of fighting the British was too big to understand, too huge to even contemplate. These settlers had always been loyal to the rules of the land, obedient to the laws of the country that ruled them.

  Ben Overton stood. He was a tall, thin man whose sleeves never seemed to come to his wrists. He said, “Well, I think we should do nothing but wait and see how the wind blows.”

  And with nods and a few mumbles of affirmation the rest got up and went back to their own homes.

  Not a single person in that cabin could have known what was coming. And even if they had seen the future, they would not have been able to imagine the horror.

  Frontier Life

  The only thing that came easy to people of the frontier was land. A single family could own hundreds, even thousands of acres simply by claiming them.

  If getting the land was easily accomplished, using the land was a different matter. It had to be cleared of trees for farming. Some oaks were five or six feet in diameter, and each had to be chopped down by ax, cut into manageable sections and hauled off. Then the stump was dug out of the ground, often with a handmade wooden shovel. One stump might take a week or two of hard work, and a piece of land could have tens of dozens of trees.

  If a family was lucky they might find a clearing left by beavers, which log off an area and dam a creek to make a lake, rotting out all the stumps. When the trees and the food are gone, the beavers leave, the dam breaks down, the water drains off and there is a handy clearing left where the lake was.

  CHAPTER

  3

  The woods were never completely quiet.

  Even in silence, there would be a whisper, a soft change that told something. If you listened, complete quiet could speak worlds.

  Samuel had gone five ridges away from home, hunting, feeling the woods. Something was … off. If not wrong, then different. The woods felt strange, as if something had changed or was about to change.

  Samuel shrugged off the feeling and kept going. It was hard to measure distance, because the ridges varied in height and width and the forest canopy blocked out the sun. He was hunting bear, so he moved slowly and followed the aimless game trails looking for signs of life.

  Five ridges, going in a straight line, might have meant four or five miles. The wandering path he followed probably covered more like seven or eight.

  He had seen no fresh sign until he came halfway up the fifth ridge, a thickly forested round hump shaped like the back of a giant animal. Then he saw fresh bear droppings, still steaming, filled with berry seeds and grass stems, and he slowed his pace through the thick undergrowth until he came to the top of the ridge. To his surprise, the trees were gone, and he could see miles in all directions.

  He had hunted this direction many times, but had never reached this ridge before. The thick undergrowth in the summer and early fall had kept him from seeing this high point. He was amazed to find that below him on the western side of the ridge lay a small valley perhaps half a mile long and a quarter mile wide. The graceful chain of round meadows and lush grass was already perfect farmland. The treeless patch just needed rail fencing and a cabin to be complete.

  “Perfect,” he said aloud. “Like it was made to be used.”

  A crunching noise to his rear, to the east, brought him around. The bear was forty or so yards away, a yearling, slope-shouldered, dark brown more than black. Like a large dog, it was digging in a rotten stump on the edge of the clearing. Samuel cocked his rifle, raised it and then held. He looked above the bear across the tops of trees.

  Smoke.

  Thick clouds of smoke were rising to the east, almost straight to the east, a goodly distance away. Forest fire? But it wasn’t that dry and there had been no thunderstorms, the normal cause of forest fires.

  Then he remembered that their neighbor Overton was going to burn limbs and brush from trees he had felled and cleared. The direction and distance looked about right for the settlement.

  The bear moved, stood and looked at him, then dropped and was gone without Samuel’s firing. Another missed kill.

  The smoke was in the right direction and at the probable distance, but there was something wrong with it, the way there had been something wrong with the feel of the woods today.

  He eased the hammer down on his rifle and lowered the butt to the ground. He stood leaning on it, studying the smoke the way he would read sign from a wounded animal, trying to see the “why” of it.

  The gray smudge was wide, not just at the base but as it rose up, too wide for a single pile of slash. That could be explained by wind blowing the smoke around.

  But it was a still, clear day.

  All right, he thought, so Overton set fire to the slash and it spread into some grass and that made it wider. But the grass in the settlement area had been grazed to the ground by the livestock and what was left was still green and hard to burn.

  And would not make a wide smoke.

  Would not make such a dark, wide smoke that it could be seen from … how far?

  Maybe eight miles?

  Smoke that would show that dark and that wide from eight miles a
way on a clear, windless day had to be intentional.

  He frowned, looking at the smoke, willing it to not be what was coming into his mind like a dark snake, a slithering horror. Some kind of attack. No. He shook his head.

  No.

  There had been years of peace. Even with a war, a real war, starting back east in the towns and cities, it would not have come out here so soon; it had only been a week since they’d heard the news.

  It could not come this soon.

  But even as he thought this, his mind was calculating. Distance home: eight miles in thick forest. Time until dark: an hour, hour and a half. No moon: it would be hard dark.

  Could he run eight miles an hour through the woods in the dark?

  It would be like running blind.

  An attack.

  Had there been an attack on the settlement, on his home?

  He started running down the side of the ridge. Not a crazy run, but working low and slipping into the game trails, automatically looking for a turn or shift that would take him more directly home.

  Home.

  An attack on his home.

  An attack on his mother and father?

  And he had not been there to help.

  Deep breaths, hard, and deep pulls of air as he increased his speed, moccasins slapping the ground, rifle held out in front of him to move limbs out of the way as he loped through the forest. The green thickness that once helped him now seemed to clutch at him, pull him back, hold him.

  An attack.

  And he had not been there to protect his parents.

  PART 2

  RED

  War—1776

  Weapons

  A single rifle—something every frontier family needed, something that was an absolute necessity—might take a year or more, and a year’s wages, to get from one of the rare gunsmiths, located perhaps miles away.

  This was the only weapon many of the rebels carried into battle against the British.

  The firearm issued to the British army was called the Brown Bess musket. It was a smooth bore and fired a round ball of .75 caliber, approximately three-quarters of an inch in diameter, with a black-powder charge, ignited by flint, that pushed the ball at seven or eight hundred feet per second when it left the muzzle (modern rifles send the bullet out at just over three thousand feet per second).

  Because a round ball fired from a smoothbore is so pitifully inaccurate—the ball bounces off the side of the bore as it progresses down the barrel—the Brown Bess was really only good out to about fifty yards. The ball would vary in flight so widely that it was common for a soldier to aim at one man coming at him and hit another man four feet to the left or right.

  With the Brown Bess, each British soldier was issued a bayonet, nearly three feet long, that twist-locked to the end of the barrel and turned the empty weapon into a kind of attacking pike.

  Along with personal weapons, the British army employed artillery, small field cannon, which fired plain round balls, exploding shells and grapeshot: scores of round musket balls packed down the bore to make the cannon into something like a giant shotgun. Grapeshot was so viciously effective against columns of marching men that its destruction would not be duplicated until the use of the rapid-fire machine gun in the First World War. Whole ranks of attacking men could be torn to pieces in a single shot, the musket ball passing through man after man, ripping them apart.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Samuel smelled it before he saw anything.

  Not just the smoke from the fires. But the thick, heavy smell. Blood. Death.

  No.

  The single word took over his brain. Part of his thinking was automatic, leading him to act with caution, move with stealth. But the front part, the thinking part, hung on one word.

  No.

  He’d made good time, running hard until his lungs seemed to be on fire, then jogging until he got his breath, then back to the full-out run. There was probably another half hour of daylight before it was too dark to see. As he approached the settlement he slowed and moved off to the side. It would do no good to run head-on if the attackers were still there.

  He was silent, listening keenly. Surely if anyone was still there they would make some noise. All Samuel heard was the crackling of fire, the soft night sounds of evening birds.

  No human sound.

  At the edge of the clearing near his home he paused, frightened, no, terrified at what he would find. He was hidden in some branches and he studied the area through the leaves to make sure it was clear before he stepped out.

  The cabin was gone. Burned to the ground, side shed and all. Here and there an ember flickered and crackled and smoke rose into the evening sky but the building was no more.

  In the distance he could see that the other cabins, scattered through the clearing, had been burned as well. Dreading what he might find, he forced himself to search the ashes, looking for the slightest indication of … bodies.

  He could not bring himself to think about what he was really looking for: his parents. His brain would not allow it, though he knew the death smell came from someone. He could not allow himself to believe it was from them, from Mother and Father.

  He found nothing in the ashes. And when he spread the search out around the cabin, moving in greater circles, he still found no trace that might have been his parents.

  But as the search loop widened, he began to come across bodies—his neighbors, shot down and hacked where they’d fallen. They did not look like they had been people. What he found seemed more like trash, paper and cloth blown across the ground. But they were people, friends and families he had known. A frantic need took him, the thought that the next body might be the one he dreaded most to find, and he ran from one to another trying to identify them in the failing light. Most had been mutilated so badly it was hard to tell who they had once been.

  Overton lay by his cabin, his shirtsleeves still not down on his wrists, chest and stomach filled with arrows, his scalp gone so his face drooped without the top-skin to hold it up.

  Samuel ran from body to body in the gathering twilight until at last there were no more bodies to find. No matter how fast he ran, how wide he ran, he did not find his parents. Along with six or seven others, they had not been killed, or at least not been killed here. They had been taken away. They had not been killed. He clung to that thought—they had not been killed.

  He stood, his breathing ragged, sobbing softly. Twice he had thrown up, and the smell and taste mixed with the tears of frustration and grief for his friends, and rage for what had been done to them. He knew that if he lived to be a hundred, he would never lose the taste, the smell or the images of what he had seen: the madness of what men could do to other men in savage rage.

  Dark caught him now. He had circled through the settlement and was back at his own cabin, or where it had been. There was nothing left that would furnish light; all of the candles had melted. But he trapped some of the embers that were still glowing and made a campfire off from the cabin a bit. In its light he found the woodpile, which, oddly, had not been burned, and at the side of the pile there was a stack of pine-pitch knots and roots that his mother had used to start fires. The pitch concentrated in the knots burned with a smoky hot flame that lasted for an hour or more and would work as a torch. Near the garden plot he found the oak shovel they had used to turn the earth for gardening. The attackers had overlooked it or left it as useless, because anything of value had been taken or destroyed.

  There were nine bodies to be buried before the coyotes, wolves and bear came. He knew that he would be moving come daylight, tracking, looking for sign, so the burying had to be done tonight.

  Carrying spare pine knots and the shovel, he went from body to body. He dug a shallow grave next to each one, knowing that it might not be enough to protect them, that scavengers might dig them up, but so pressed for time that he had no choice. He covered each as best he could. Three were children and did not take as long, and though it was hard to t
ell exactly who they were in the dark and with the condition of the bodies, he remembered the children laughing and playing in front of the Olafsens’ cabin, two boys and a little girl with a crude doll. He found the doll in the grass and wept as he buried it with the smallest body. He cried over each corpse, thinking of them living, thinking of them meeting in the cabin and living and talking and laughing and … just being. And now all gone. Gone. He could not stop crying, thinking of his parents, wondering, worrying.

  It took five hours to bury everyone. It was still dark when he finished and looked around him. Then he realized that he should have said something over the bodies.

  He did not know the right words—something about ashes and dust—but he took another torch and went back to each grave and bowed his head and said:

  “Please, Lord, take them with you. Please.”

  It was all he could think to say and he hoped it was enough.

  He went back to the campfire by his own cabin site and sat looking into the flames.

  Praying.

  Praying for safety for his parents.

  And the others who had not been killed.

  Praying for all who survived but praying most for his parents and, squatting there by the fire, also praying for daylight to come so he could begin looking for them.

  And in half an hour, a little more, his eyes closed and sleep came and took him down, down, until he was lying on his side by the fire, sleeping deeply with all the bad dreams that he’d known would come; sleeping with twitches and jerks and whimpers at first, and then just sleeping.