by Gary Paulsen
The fire had flared up as the men added wood. Samuel rose to his feet and went into the nearby bushes to relieve himself. His legs were wobbly but seemed to work well enough, even though he felt weak as a kitten. As one part of his body got better, another would follow. As the pain in his head went down, the hunger in his belly came up.
There was the entire back leg from an ox over the fire on a metal spit. Last night Coop had been cutting bits of it to put in Samuel’s broth. Looking at it made Samuel even more ravenous.
But the other men weren’t eating, so he held back. One, a thin man with a scraggly beard, saw Samuel looking at the meat. He pulled a knife, really a short sword, carved off a generous piece and handed it to Samuel.
“You got to eat. We might walk long today and it’s going to be hard for you to keep up without your belly is full.”
“Thank you.” Samuel took the meat—it was very tough—and he sat chewing and swallowing, watching the men clear up camp.
While Samuel watched the men and ate, he also rolled and tied up his bedroll, making certain his powder was dry and his possibles bag was ready to go. But these men were even faster.
Without speaking except to grunt and point, they seemed to get everything done with the least effort and in the quickest time. The ox was yoked and tied off to a tree. The skid that Samuel had been on, which had two long tongues that went up either side of the ox and attached to the yoke, was hooked up and packed with extra equipment—the cooking pot, blankets, muskets, a small keg of powder and another of whiskey, and, of all things, a drum left by the fleeing redcoats and Indians.
Then the men came and stood by the fire. In silence, they cut pieces of meat and ate, drinking creek water out of a wooden bucket with a wooden dipper.
Samuel still had dozens of questions but since the men were silent as they stood staring into the fire while they chewed, he held his tongue.
There were seven men. When everybody was done eating, they each took a plug of tobacco and poked it in their cheek or lower jaw. They put the leftover meat on the skid, wrapped in a piece of green ox hide to keep the flies off, then used the bucket to fetch water from the creek to put the fire out.
With no effort at all, they were moving along the trail.
Two men went well ahead, one left, one right of the trail. The rest formed a column—if five men could be called a column—just ahead of the ox and Samuel.
In Samuel’s weakened condition, there was absolutely no way he could have kept up with the men.
But the ox saved him. He knew that oxen tend to plod a little less than two miles an hour, and this ox was slower yet. Even Samuel had no trouble keeping up with him, and when his legs felt a little weak, he would move to the ox’s side and hold on to the yoke, letting the ox pull him along for a time.
Every hour and a half the two men walking ahead would come in and two others would move out. On one of these cycles, Coop came back and walked near Samuel.
It was what Samuel had been waiting for.
“You kept me alive. Thank you.”
“It weren’t much. A little tobacco and spit and tough meat.”
“I’d have been done if you hadn’t come along.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. One never knows how a wind is going to blow.”
“Why did you all come along? Where are you going?”
Coop spit—the men all spit, almost all the time. Samuel had once tried tobacco, first in a clay pipe, then taking a chew, and it had made him sick as a dog. He couldn’t see the sense in using it, but all these men seemed to chew all the time. And spit like fountains. Maybe something happened to your taster when you got older, he thought, so you didn’t mind it.
“We’re going to jine up,” Coop said, pointing east with his chin, “and fight them redcoats. There be a feller named Morgan roundabout Boston City starting up Morgan’s Rifles. We all shoot rifles and we figure to give them redcoats a taste of good shooting. They got nothing but muskets, good for nothing after fifty, sixty yards. Carl here”—he pointed up to where his brother walked beside the head of the ox—“he can pink a man on a horse out to two, three hundred yards. Every time. Wouldn’t even know what hit him, nor where it come from….” He nodded his chin at the group. “Every man here can hit a foot-square piece of paper every time at two hundred yards. I s’pose you could, too, took a mind to it.”
“I’m not sure about killing.”
“You did that Indian back there. Laying dead and had a bullet hole in him.”
“I wasn’t aiming. He shot and I pulled the trigger.”
“What you gonna do when you find your mam and pap? Shake hands with them that took ’em?”
Samuel felt like spitting, too. “I haven’t thought that far yet.”
“Best be thinkin’ on it, and keep your powder dry and your pan primed.”
“Right. Thing is, I didn’t even know there was anybody to fight. Who was good or bad, which side to be on.”
Coop snorted. “Don’t take much thinkin’. Them that starts in to killing people for no reason, them that comes and takes your folks with a rope around their necks—they’s the bad ones. Your good people don’t do that.”
“What reason—” Samuel stumbled on a rock. To his surprise, the ox was aware of it and hesitated to let him catch up. “Why did those British redcoats and Indians attack us like that? There was no reason. We weren’t against the Crown or rebels or anything.”
Coop spit, neatly taking a fly off the ox’s ear. He snorted. “Redcoats doing it because they’s redcoats and ain’t worth a tinker’s damn. Follerin’ orders. Indians doing it because they was hired to do it. They’s Iroquois, most of ’em work for the English, always have, always will. Ever since that French War. They get all the plunder they can carry and scalp money from the redcoats. Heard there’s a man named Hamlin, some kind of redcoat officer, buys so many scalps they call him Hair Buyer Hamlin. What I don’t understand is why they took your folks instead of killin’ … Oh look, the front line is comin’ in.”
The column stopped by a clear-water creek and everybody drank. Then the men took the meat off the drag and sat in a circle cutting pieces and chewing. At first Samuel hung back but Carl motioned him to squat and eat. Samuel was feeling stronger by the minute and the meat heated him like fire.
No one talked much except for Coop, and when they finished, they rose, took a chew of tobacco and set off. Coop and another man went ahead.
Samuel walked in silence, hanging on to the wooden shaft tied to the ox. It was midmorning and the sun fell through tall trees on either side of the trail so they seemed to be walking in a lighted green tunnel. Now and then insects caught sunlight and flashed white like small lamps. Any other time, Samuel would have been taken by the beauty of it.
But now he could not stop thinking of what Coop had started to say.
Why hadn’t the raiders killed his parents? And would they do it now?
I’m way behind them, he thought, six, maybe seven days. Dragging along with an ox. God only knows what’s happening to them.
I have to go faster.
The Hessians
The British also used mercenary soldiers, issued with the same Brown Bess musket and bayonet. Most of them were troops from Germany, called Hessians. While they were relatively effective as combat soldiers, they brought with them such savage, atrocious behavior, and committed war crimes so far outside civilized behavior—bayoneting unarmed captive soldiers who had surrendered, farmers, women (including pregnant women), children and even infants—that they became known as little more than beasts and were treated in kind.
CHAPTER
11
He lay under overhanging hazel brush and studied the farm—here, very close to the middle of the wild, was an almost perfect little farm.
It had been three days since Samuel left the men behind. He’d eaten more and more meat, become stronger and stronger, and, at last, couldn’t stand the slowness of walking beside the ox. The men were in no particular hur
ry; or, as Coop said, “Still gonna be a war, catch it now or catch it later.” And they had gear to move, so had to go slowly.
But Samuel became more frantic with every step. At last, when they’d stopped to rest, he had told Coop he was going to take off on his own.
Coop had nodded. “There’ll be people wantin’ to kill you,” he said. “Well. Let me cut those stitches out of your head. Healed up good.” He set to work as he spoke. “Almost everybody you meet will maybe want to kill you, so keep to the brush, keep your head down and don’t walk where others walk.” He took out the last stitch.
There was nothing more to say, so, with a nod, Samuel turned away and trotted ahead of Coop and the rest of the men.
Samuel took the advice to heart and worked well off the trail, which was becoming more like a road with two tracks. Even so, he doubled his speed.
He had brought meat with him and took care to eat sparingly. After three days, it was nearly gone. He’d have to get more soon. Deer were as thick as fleas and it was just a matter of shooting one. He was moving quietly through the woods, ready to do just that, when he came upon the farm.
It had not been attacked and burned. It was a shock to see buildings standing and unharmed.
And aside from that, this was a proper farm, not a frontier cabin hacked out of the woods. True, there was deep forest all around it, but the farm itself was neat as a pin, with split-rail fences all whitewashed and a frame house, and a barn made not from logs but from milled lumber. More, the house was painted white and the barn red, with white trim on the doors and windows. As he watched, he could see chickens in the yard.
Several thoughts hit him.
First, chicken would taste good. The thought of a roasted chicken made him salivate.
Second, if they hadn’t been attacked it must mean they were friendly to the raiders, who must have come right through here.
Third—an easy jump in thinking—it would be all right for Samuel to “confiscate” a chicken, assuming the farmer was friendly with Samuel’s mortal enemy.
Now, how to bring it about?
He could wait until dark, but that was still at least eight hours away. He couldn’t waste time sitting here.
The farm was in the middle of a large clearing.
The tree line came close to the barn. If he worked his way through the trees, he might get close enough to grab a chicken and run.
He was moving before he stopped thinking of it. Since he saw no people as he moved around to the clearing in back of the barn, he moved fast. He kept the barn between him and the house to block their view. In moments he stood against the barn wall not ten feet from a small flock of chickens pecking at the ground.
Just as he started to make his move, he heard a scraping sound overhead and a barn loft door opened. A little girl, eight or nine, was looking down at him.
“I saw you through a crack in the wall the whole way. You thought you was sneaking, but I saw you. You looked like a big, two-legged deer. What’s wrong with your head? How come you’re running like that? What are you after—oh, the chickens. You want a chicken, go ahead. I don’t like them anyway.”
Samuel was so stunned he couldn’t say anything, then he croaked in a whisper: “Is there anybody else here?”
“They’s all up the house eating. They’s eating squash and it makes me puke, so I came to the loft to play with my dolls. Go ahead, I won’t tell.”
“Thank you.”
“Take that big red one. She’s mean. Chases me all over the yard and pecks at my toes.”
In for a penny, in for a pound, Samuel thought. He made a darting motion and, by luck, actually caught the big red chicken. It squawked once but he held it tight and it quieted.
He started to leave, then turned. “What’s your name?”
“Anne Marie Pennysworth Clark,” she said, “but everybody calls me Annie.”
“Well, thank you, Annie. I’ve got to be going now.” He turned to leave, but her next words stopped him.
“You look just like the man who was here, ’cept he was older and his head wasn’t all cut up.”
“What man?”
“Some men and a woman came here, some on horses and some in a wagon.”
At that instant an enormous man holding a rifle came around the end of the barn. He had shoulders like a bear and his gun was pointed at Samuel’s face. Samuel dropped the chicken, raised his own rifle and aimed it at the center of the man.
After a second, Samuel lowered his weapon. As soon as it moved, the man dropped his. Samuel had forgotten to breathe. He took a deep breath now.
“My name is Samuel,” he said.
“I thought a fox was in the chickens when I heard the hen squawk.” The man shrugged. “Wasn’t too far off.”
“I don’t steal”—Samuel’s face burned—“but I’ve been on some rough trail and I got hungry.”
“He wasn’t stealing, Pa,” Annie piped up. “I told him to take that red one. She keeps trying to eat my toes.”
“I never turned anybody away from my door hungry,” the man said. He held out his hand. “Caleb Clark—come up to the house and eat.”
It all seemed so natural and open that Samuel forgot his earlier suspicion that the farmer was on the enemy’s side. He took the man’s hand. “Thank you, sir.”
“Let’s stop by the pump and wash your head first. It’s a sight. Ma will have a fit.”
“I got hit by an Indian—and these men came along and sewed me up.”
“It looks,” Caleb said, smiling, “like you got hit by a club and then some men stitched it up and smeared some kind of dark mud or something on it.”
“Tobacco juice,” Samuel said. “And spit. They made a poultice. And it saved me.”
They were at the watering trough and pump. Caleb took Samuel’s rifle—Samuel handed it over without thinking. Caleb held Samuel’s head under the pump and started working the handle.
“Scrub,” he said, pumping harder.
Samuel winced at the pain, but went to work. Carefully.
Finally the wound was clean enough to suit Caleb and they went to the house. Annie followed and, sure enough, the red hen pecked at her toes. Annie yelped and scurried ahead of Samuel and Caleb to the house.
Samuel had never been in anything but a cabin, most often with a dirt floor or at best a crude plank one, and Caleb’s house seemed too fine, as if Samuel somehow shouldn’t be allowed in; at least not without being boiled clean first.
The house inside was as neat as the outside, with plastered white walls and a sugar-pine board floor, polished and rubbed with beeswax.
“Company, Ma,” Caleb said. “You got another plate?”
Caleb’s wife was quite round, with red cheeks and hair up in a bun. She had flour dust on her cheek. She pushed a bit of hair back and smiled at Samuel with the briefest of looks. She pointed at a chair that backed to the stove. “Sit and eat, we just started.”
There were only three people, four with Samuel, but the table absolutely groaned with food. There was squash, as Annie had said, with maple sugar and butter melted in the middle. There was a roast of venison and potatoes, a loaf of bread with apple butter and some kind of jelly, and corn on the cob with melted butter dripping from the cobs.
Samuel had never seen anything like it. Huge bowls of food, and a gravy tub that held at least a quart of rich brown steaming-hot gravy. His stomach growled as Caleb poured him some buttermilk and they all sat. There were a fork and spoon and knife at each place. Samuel waited to see how things were done. Caleb smiled. “We’ll say grace.”
They held hands, which seemed strange. Annie was to his left—she decided that since he was there she’d sit to eat—and she grabbed his hand. Caleb’s big paw took his other hand and in a deep voice he rumbled:
“Thank you, Lord, for this food and this company. In Jesus’ name, amen.”
And they set to. Nobody spoke. Ma heaped his plate with food. It seemed more than he could possibly eat—he was sure his s
tomach had shrunk—but he somehow got it all tucked in and felt full as a tick.
Then Ma brought out rhubarb pie with thick cream sprinkled with maple sugar and somehow he got that down as well.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said. “I’ve never eaten like that, not in my whole life. Even at fall feast it wasn’t that good, or that much. I won’t have to eat for a week. I just wish my folks …”
He stopped, remembering what Annie had said. He turned to her. “You said some men came and one of them looked like me.”
Caleb cut in. “Some British soldiers came here with two wagons holding fugitives or captives. Five of them. I fed the soldiers and they were civil enough and didn’t bother us, though I heard some bad stories of the Hessians that hit some farms east of here. Then I took food and water out to the captives and one man, had his wife with him, was very polite and thanked me. He looked like you, same eyes and nose.”
“He was my father. And that was my mother.”
Samuel looked down at the floor and blinked away the burning in his eyes. Annie softly patted his shoulder.
He told the story of the attack, leaving out the worst details because of Annie. When he was finished, Ma was crying and he was having trouble holding tears back himself.
“When were they here?” he asked. “How long ago?”
“Two, no, three days. After they ate, they watered the horses, and while they were waiting for the horses to blow and settle the water, the lead officer pulled out a little traveling chessboard. I don’t know how to play but he went to the captives and your pa sat and played a game with him on the edge of the wagon.”
