Adrian's War

by Lloyd Tackitt

  Four men came running down the trail at full tilt, weapons in front of them, cocked and ready. Again he waited until they passed by, stepped out, and released two arrows. They found homes in the meat of the men’s backs. Adrian stepped back into the woods and ran forward, swiftly and silently, to get ahead of the four men. When he had passed by their position he returned to the trail. The four men were gathered in a knot, facing out in all directions, guns at the ready. No problem, Adrian only needed to stick the arrows into them; it didn’t make much difference where. He lined the men up behind a short sapling and squatted down out of sight of the men, then fired two quick arrows over it. The arc of the arrows carried them up and then down into the cluster of men. By only partially drawing the bow he could adjust the arc and use the bow from out of sight. It wasn’t the most accurate way to shoot, but it worked. The effect was also psychological: it was extremely demoralizing to the targets to have silent arrows fly in out of nowhere. His volley wounded one new man and put a second arrow into another.

  Adrian shifted over thirty yards, lined up, and let fly two more arrows. He missed with both, but they were close. He could hear the men panicking, not knowing when or where the next arrows would come from. Adrian moved back towards the camp, staying alongside the trail. These men would return or more would come—either way was fine with him. The panicked men soon came running by, heading for camp as fast as possible. One was still unwounded. Adrian drew and let fly, hitting the man high in the back of his shoulder.

  Adrian figured they wouldn’t send more men out for a while, so he returned to his vantage point to watch the show. He reached the observation point after the men had all returned. The camp looked like a hornets’ nest that had been kicked, men scurrying everywhere. They were taking positions where they could watch the forest, each with a rifle. They acted as if they were expecting Adrian to charge the camp with a knife between his teeth, waving a sword and Jolly Roger flag in his hand. Adrian laughed and enjoyed the show.

  That night, Wolfgang put out a heavy guard. Men were roaming in and out between the buildings. Unfortunately, they were out of bow range of the woods. Adrian thought about sneaking in and sticking a few more of them; it would be easy in the dark. But instead he decided to leave them alone for a couple of days to build the tension. He walked the several miles to one of his food caches, pulling a bag of bear pemmican from a tree. Then he retrieved the hunting rifle and ammunition he had taken from his dead assailant.

  He carried them back to his vantage point. Before daylight returned he built a low lean-to with dead wood and fresh tree branches. It provided shelter and camouflage. He lay inside the shelter, watching the sub-humans. It was a good time to learn more about them. The rifle was loaded with the safety off, ready to go. From this range he could pick the men off as fast as he could aim and pull the trigger. Not that he wanted to use it. But if things changed, he might have to leave the Stone Age and return to the rifle. If so, he would be ready.

  Adrian watched for three days, without attacking, as the camp settled into a routine of sorts. The guards remained posted as heavily as before. No one went into the woods. He had no way of knowing how long their food supply would last, but given their poor woodcraft skills he doubted that they had been able to kill a lot of meat. He also doubted that they would have obtained a lot of food from the few local people. His best guess was that with as many mouths to feed as they had, it wouldn’t be long before they were forced to venture out and find food.

  He could also tell that over the past three days, the wounded had begun falling ill, slowly succumbing to the poison’s doom. One of the cabins had been emptied of healthy men and turned into a hospital ward. It was a smart move to separate the wounded and dying from the healthy, but it didn’t fool anyone. They had by now realized that the arrows were poisoned, and that what had seemed almost trivial wounds were in fact lethal. The diabolical nastiness of the poison arrow attacks was eating at the men’s morale. They didn’t understand this level of hatred, or why it was directed at them.

  If it weren’t for the eyewitness accounts, they would have sworn there were dozens of men waiting in the forest. The fact that it was one lone man had them badly shaken. A dozen men they could find and fight. One man, good at woodcraft, was near impossible to deal with. Over time he could pick them off one by one. He could get tired of playing with bows and arrows and start using one of the rifles they had not recovered. That might seem preferable to some of the men, since the crazy man so far was killing anyone he cared to kill slowly and painfully. At least a bullet would be a quick end.

  After three days of increasing terror, they sent out four hunting parties with three men in each. Adrian knew that three men could take short night watch shifts. Three men could watch out for each other far better than two, and just as well as four or more. Three men wouldn’t get in each other’s way when hunting. Three men could travel quickly and quietly. Adrian respected the three-man team decision. He assumed that only half these teams were actually out to hunt elk to help feed the men back at camp. He suspected that two of the teams were out to look for him. He knew where the elk were, so he knew where these men would have to go to find them.

  Though he doubted that these men knew where the elk were. They probably went into the woods and wandered around at random, looking for tracks in the snow. They might blunder on elk, or they might not get within miles of them. If Wolfgang’s men were hungry and didn’t get food soon, they would be forced to leave the mining camp, no doubt to raid the village. In fact it was inevitable that sooner or later they would hit the village up for food, since pillaging was in their nature.

  Adrian decided to allow them to hunt. It would give them a couple more days to wonder if he was still at war with them or not. Adrian could spend the rest of his life carrying on this war. He was in no hurry, had no plans of going anywhere. In his mind they had snatched him from blessed relief, planning to torture him for information. He had never actively hated anyone before, but he hated these men with a cold, unrelenting rage. Adrian was intelligent, but he did not understand that this hatred was his mind’s way of dealing with pain of Alice’s death. Hatred is an anodyne.

  The hunters did not return that night. It was a sign that they had not killed meat, or had killed it so late in the day they didn’t have time to get back. The two groups that were most likely snooping around the abandoned cabin would be looking for a trail to pick up. They were out of luck. All of the tracks that could have led them to Adrian were gone thanks to the periodic snowfalls. Adrian was looking forward to spring. He would be able to hunt them more aggressively. He wouldn’t leave tracks once the snow was gone, and it would be easier to hide when the foliage was more abundant.

  As Adrian slept that night, a lone deserter snuck out of camp. He’d had enough. The screams from the dying men were penetrating his cabin wall all night, every night. When it was his turn to tend to the wounded, the stench of the gangrenous, putrefying flesh in the room was beyond nauseating. The room smelled like a pile of rotten meat after several days in the hot sun. It was ghastly. He was supposed to return to medic duty in the morning, but he couldn’t take it again. He deserted instead. Even though he was taking a chance on becoming one of those screaming men if he ran into the insane archer, he had to get away.

  Much later, Adrian would learn that this deserter had spread the word of Adrian’s war on Wolfgang, creating a rapidly spreading legend and making a mythological hero of Adrian. It was hero worship that Adrian didn’t want and damn well knew he didn’t deserve. He slept that night as the seed of his legend slipped away into the dark forest, but he didn’t sleep peacefully.

  Chapter 12

  TWO FULL DAYS PASSED BEFORE all four of the hunting parties were back. They had brought in two elk, a lot of meat. And, disgustingly, their haul also contained a human carcass. It wouldn’t last that many men long, though. Fresh hunting parties were sent right back out. This time, Adrian expected they would all go for elk or humans, and wi
th directions from the previous hunters, they should be back with meat relatively quickly. He didn’t think they would keep looking for him; he hadn’t done anything to them in several days, and had left no tracks. By now they were thinking he had left, or something had happened to him putting him out of action. Psychological warfare on this level was pretty simple. Demoralize the men, keep them pinned down by their own fear, then pick them off one at a time until they were all gone. Or until they turned inwards on themselves and finished the job for him.

  It was about mental leverage. He had the leverage. He could move freely and easily and strike from a thousand places. They were big, easy targets. They knew that every time they went into the woods they risked not just death, but slow, painful death. Giving them several days of peace and quiet had lessened the tension; now it was time to let them know he was still here. Let them know he was toying with them as he pleased. This would ratchet up their fear far beyond where it had been before.

  These men were, like men everywhere, creatures of habit. They had three well-defined footpaths they used to travel in and out of camp. As the trails went further into the woods, they branched and branched again until each individual trail disappeared—like tree limbs, then branches, then twigs. It was functional and efficient, but it made for poor security. Good security meant entering the woods at different places each time, avoiding the habitual use of a singular trail to the point that it became worn and obvious. Even now, while under threat, they still used these trails. Adrian thought it would be interesting to try to train them to avoid all but one trail, just to see if they could be manipulated so easily.

  With the simple objective of inflicting contaminated puncture wounds, there were two easily made traps that would be effective on these trails: punji pits and swipes. Punji pits were small holes dug in the ground. The diameter only needed to be enough to fit a grown man’s foot—eighteen inches in diameter was a good size. They only had to be about fourteen inches deep. After digging the pit, the excess soil is carefully placed on a piece of leather and carried off so as to not leave any fresh dirt to attract attention. Sharpened sticks were driven into the bottom of the pit, sharp end up. Cover the sharpened punji stakes with dung, then cover the hole with something flimsy, like small twigs. Lay bark over the twigs and cover them with the same dirt and leaves that covers the rest of the trail. When done properly it was near impossible to see. After a snowfall, they were simply undetectable.

  Sooner or later, one of Wolfgang’s men would come along, walking as he normally would, without scrutinizing the ground below. As his foot passed through the flimsy covering and he shifted his weight onto it, the sharpened stakes, placed at various angles, would impale his foot and leg. The stakes had the same barbs cut into them, making it impossible to remove them and leave a clean wound channel. The infection followed just as with the arrows.

  Adrian placed a few punji pits at random, but the first few were strategically located to improve the odds that the men would pass over them. One of Adrian’s favorite spots was behind a log that had to be stepped over. Between roots or rocks that the men had to navigate around also worked well. Sometimes there would be a sharp bend in the trail—another good place. Once the targets knew to watch, though, they watched those places, making them no longer effective. The randomly placed ones kept the targets on edge and sometimes worked. The downside of the punji pits was that the wounds were typically inflicted on an extremity which could be amputated, saving the man’s life. On the other hand, the sight of a man with only one foot hanging around camp was sufficiently demoralizing in and of itself. Not to mention, the amputee would be out of action, and another useless mouth to feed.

  Swipes were tree branches or saplings that could be pulled back and tied off, then connected to a trip line. When released, they sprang back to their original position, smacking the person that tripped the cord. They didn’t hit with enough force to cause serious damage, but the sharpened stakes tied to them hit hard enough for their sharp points to penetrate. These were made the same way as the punji stakes. Swipes were relatively easy to spot because the trip lines were difficult to hide. They were best placed in sharp curves, or creek crossings. They were also easily disengaged by wind and animals. Still they were effective, especially psychologically.

  Adrian spent all night rigging two of the trails with both types of trap. After he had tricked up the first half-mile of each, he set traps parallel to the trails. He knew that the men would, after half a mile, decide that walking the trail was no longer a viable option, but being lazy they would try to walk next to it. He chose places where moving off the trail to the side was inviting—game trails or natural breaks in the brush. The men would soon learn that being anywhere near these trails would be dangerous. Swipes were much harder to detect off the trail, but quick and easy to create.

  The other terrifying thing about these traps is they could be put anywhere. The men that he was hunting knew this. It would make them move slowly and extremely carefully after a few men had been wounded. But Adrian could move freely; the traps would work when he was miles away. It could make the simple act of leaving or returning to camp a game of Russian roulette. Twelve men would be returning to camp soon, using one of the three trails or the road. Two of the trails had been heavily booby-trapped. Adrian left one trail and the gravel road clear, for now.

  Adrian waited in the woods for two days before one of the groups returned. He waited near one of the two trapped trails, out past the last of the traps. The six men who took this path had been successful, each carrying a large load of meat by backpack. They were walking slowly; Adrian could see they were tired. After the last in line passed, Adrian he shot him in the buttocks since the meat was protecting his back. He only shot one arrow, then faded into the woods. He moved forward and came back to the trail ahead of the men. In only a few minutes they came by him again, moving fast, leaving the wounded man to hobble along and fend for himself. “Nice,” Thought Adrian. “Real nice. No loyalty for each other. They’re treating him like a dead man already.”

  Adrian shot an arrow into the last man in line. Then he hiked cross country to the other trail he had rigged with traps. The men he had just left would be expecting him to hound them all the way to camp. They would be panicked and going as fast as they could. Their quick and careless travel would mean more of them would be snagged by booby-traps along the way. Pretty soon they would be in sheer terror, looking desperately for traps and waiting for arrows to fly silently out of the forest. His tactics were intended to create terror as well as kill.

  Adrian traveled cross-country to perform the same tactics against the other men if they came down the one of the other booby-trapped trails. He waited until dark, but no one showed. Either they hadn’t come back yet, or they had taken a different route. He had one more little trick to play before daylight, and then he would rest the following day. He walked back to the mining camp, avoiding trails as he always did. He was careful to leave as few tracks as he could in the snow. The snow on the ground was his worst enemy. If the cannibals ever got a lead on him it would be because of the tracks he left. He timed most of his movements for just before and during snow storms, so that fresh snow would cover his tracks. This wasn’t always practical, though.

  When he had no fresh snow to depend on, he used rocks and streams as much as possible. There were windswept places where snow was blown off the rocks, places he could use to his advantage. Better yet were the many streams in the mountains. He could walk up and down them on the ice and not leave any mark. If the weather warmed enough that the ice melted, then he walked in the water. This was cold work, but effective. It meant that he had to build a fire that night to dry his feet and boots, though, so he had to camp out far away from the mining camp. His best bet by far was to hole up during the pretty, still days and travel during the snow flurries. This required careful navigation and knowing all the local landmarks intimately.

  He traveled up and downhill using streams and cross terrai
n to cover his tracks, or rocks where he could. Effectively this meant that he left tracks on the side-slope portions of his area of travel, tracks that went from stream to stream. A tracker could follow him to a stream and then go up or down it. They might find a few tracks high up among the rocks, but then the tracks would disappear at another stream. A skilled and dedicated tracker could follow him, eventually. That tracker would have to move slowly to get all the clues, and would be under constant threat of ambush. Adrian didn’t think they had any skilled trackers as he had seen no signs yet that anyone had come close to finding him. He also thought that even if they had someone clever enough to work out the tracks they didn’t have anyone brave enough to face the threat of constant ambush.

  Adrian watched the camp from the woods until the stars told him it was around four in the morning. Then he snuck into the mining camp for the first time. Getting past the sentries was easy; they were mostly asleep. The difficult part was making no noise while digging. Using the trowel he had found by the upper mine, he slowly and silently dug a punji pit in front of the door to the hospital cabin. He placed contaminated punji stakes in the hole, then covered it. When he was done it looked just like the bare earth that it had been before, a worn spot in front of a cabin door does not attract close inspection. Or it hadn’t before now. After tomorrow they would never walk in or out of the cabins again with looking hard at the ground.