by Nathan Jones
Skyler went back to explain the change of plans to Tabby. He was half afraid his friend would be miffed about being ditched, not just with watching the livestock but the time they spent together during training. But she just grinned and pulled him into an excited hug. “That sounds really cool!” she told him eagerly. “This is something you won't die of boredom doing, right?”
“I guess,” he said, feeling his cheeks heat as she stepped back. “Thanks.” He wasn't sure what he was thanking her for; covering for him until he found someone to take his place watching the livestock, of course, but he supposed also for always being so supportive.
“No problem. Talk to you later!” Tabby waved goodbye and headed back to work.
Skyler turned to find Brandon grinning at him. “What?” he demanded.
“Nothing,” his friend said innocently. “You and Tabby are spending a lot of time together these days, huh?”
He did his best not to scowl. The guy was getting the wrong idea . . . there was nothing going on between him and Tabby. And anyway, he wasn't about to abandon his feelings for Lisa that easily. “You want go find my mom and gossip about my love life, or can we get started?” he snapped, then winced in horror and looked over his shoulder to see if Tabby had overheard.
If she had she showed no sign of it, which was a relief.
Brandon chuckled. “Easy, cowboy. I remember what it was like to be your age and have all my emotions dialed up to eleven.” He clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, let's go.”
* * * * *
The next morning, Skyler was ready to go before Trapper even woke up, for once. He sat on his bed, mind churning with ideas for ways the skirmishers could foil Sangue's plans and hit them hard with minimal risk.
When the mountain man finally emerged from his room, Skyler immediately shot to his feet. “Finally! Let's go!”
His adoptive dad chuckled. “The other volunteers won't even start showing up for another half hour. Let's get some breakfast and knock out some chores before heading over.”
That was the last thing Skyler wanted to do, and anyway he'd already eaten. So he headed out to water and care for the animals while Trapper ate, hoping it would mean they could get there a bit earlier. His efforts turned out to be a waste, since they left early anyway; even the mountain man seemed eager to try out the idea of skirmishing, and wanted to get a good crack at the volunteers before training started to see who wanted to join Brandon's squad.
He grilled Skyler on ideas as they headed to the firing range at the north end of the valley, and tossed out a few of his own ideas as well. Some of them were pretty grim, like training with the limited number of bows and crossbows from his dad's scavenged cache. They could use them to shoot fire arrows at the tents and supplies of sleeping bloodies, then in the confusion and with their targets well lit by the fires shoot as many as possible.
Not that Skyler didn't think the idea had merit, of course.
Brandon was already waiting at one of the firing perches, as eager to get a good start as they were. They talked over which volunteers would be best to invite into the skirmishers based on marksmanship, athletic ability, and woodscraft. There were plenty of good candidates, but less confidence any would be willing to sign up.
The first volunteers to arrive for training were Neal, Reina, and several of their old bar crowd. Brandon exchanged dubious looks with Trapper, but still made his way over to greet them and began pitching his idea.
Brandon was well respected, especially after coming back with an entire destroyed convoy as a notch in his belt. But the idea of going out to wage a constant running war against the enemy was obviously a lot to digest, and the volunteers were looking at each other dubiously as he finished.
“I'll leave you to think about it, talk it over,” he said, clapping Neal and a couple others on the shoulder before heading back to rejoin Skyler and his adoptive dad.
Most of the group didn't seem all that interested, but it seemed like something to talk about so they did just to pass the time. Although Skyler noticed Reina having a furious conversation with Neal. Or at least, she was talking furiously while he protested feebly, then finally shook his head in resignation. The two headed over.
“Looks like I'm signing up,” the bartender said.
“You want to join the skirmishers?” Trapper demanded, tone full of disbelief. Which Skyler didn't think was entirely fair; the man had proven to be a decent volunteer, enough to earn the mountain man's respect in spite of Trapper's obvious dislike of him.
“Want to?” Neal snorted. “Heck no! You guys are insane for even thinking of doing this.”
“So . . . you're not joining?” Brandon asked, looking irritated.
Reina was glaring at the former bartender, who shifted guiltily as he answered. “By which I mean I don't want to, but I'm volunteering for it anyway.” He threw an affectionate arm around the former barmaid's shoulders. “Need to keep an eye out for my girl here.”
Brandon looked between the two, frowning. “You'd both do well skirmishing, I can't deny that. But I'm not sure I want someone who's not serious about what we're doing. Not for a dangerous task like this.”
“He's serious,” Reina assured him, then poked Neal's side. “At least as much as he ever is.” She straightened beneath his arm, dark eyes flashing. “And if you have any doubts, I'm serious enough for the both of us.”
Well, that had been true pretty much since the pair joined the volunteers: Reina was determined in protecting Camptown, while her lover just seemed along for the ride. “Why did you decide to join?” Skyler asked. Brandon nodded.
She glared at them fiercely. “Neither of you should need me to tell you why any woman would want to fight to keep those SOBs from winning. Besides, if I haven't proven myself by now-”
“You have,” Brandon cut in hastily, holding up his hands in defeat. “And I'd be glad to have you along. Neal just wasn't exactly selling your case, that's all.”
Mollified, Reina grabbed Neal's arm and led him back to their friends. Brandon exchanged glances with Skyler and Trapper and shrugged. “Guess that's two.”
The Knudsen family's volunteers and defenders, including Tabby, showed up not long after that. Skyler wanted to go say hi to his friend, but Brandon dragged him over to the volunteers in the group to talk about joining the skirmishers.
It was small surprise that Andy was willing to sign up, since he was the ranch hand's best friend. But Teddy and Dennis, Tabby's dad, both refused the offer. Apparently even being a volunteer was straining the limits of what they were willing to sacrifice, when they had their family to consider. In fact, Andy's sister Wendy took the opportunity to sign out of the volunteers and jump into the defenders.
So that was three skirmishers so far. As the other volunteers and defenders trickled in they snagged a few more, including old Pine the explosives expert. It was a bit of a surprise when Ray Mickelson, who Skyler had thought didn't much like Brandon, also jumped on board. The leader of the new skirmisher squad was also able to wheedle a handful of the volunteers' best marksmen into joining.
By the time everyone had showed up and it was time to start training, they'd managed to gather fourteen people besides Brandon. Not exactly the best and brightest of the volunteers, either; in fact, two were dredged from the more promising recruits, Derrick Nowak and Skyler's friend Mer. While their marksmanship left something to be desired, Skyler could vouch that Mer at least was willing to bash a passed out Sangue's skull in with a rock if needed.
With their selection of skirmisher trainees gathered, Brandon and Skyler left Trapper to his training and left to get started on their own work. “It's going to be hard,” Brandon warned the small group. “All day every day for a week. And then we go fight the bloodies.”
“Food's provided, right?” Neal asked. Skyler rolled his eyes. Of course it was him.
“We'll have what we need,” Brandon said. “Including enough to go prepare caches out in the areas we'll be operating in, s
o we don't have to worry about finding food or risk heading back to Camptown to resupply.”
“Fair enough,” Pine said. “Let's get to work, then.”
* * * * *
Skirmisher training was surprisingly fun.
Of course, probably more so for Skyler, who didn't face the prospect of deadly cat and mouse chases with Sangue at the end of it. Something he tried not to think about much. Or, well, not too often. He certainly didn't waste time resenting the fact.
Brandon had decided that the best way to train for what lay ahead was to have his trainees be the victims of skirmishing themselves, see what it was like for them and figure out how to respond to it. That way when the shoe was on the other foot, they'd be better able to anticipate just how well Sangue might be able to counter their efforts.
As the best trained for that sort of fighting, Skyler got to be the skirmisher most of the time at first, sometimes with Brandon or Andy or both joining him. He'd find some place to hide, within the area his parents allowed him to be in, of course, and the other skirmishers would warily hike on by. Then he'd fire a shot or two, using blanks from the small store of them the town had available and pointing his rifle at the ground, to test how long it took the trainees to pinpoint his location.
If they even could.
That proved surprisingly difficult that first day, and Skyler was able to fire a few or even several more shots before they finally found him most of the time. Brandon kept his skirmishers at it until they could find him on the first shot, usually within a few seconds. While they were celebrating that accomplishment, which would no doubt come in handy in a fight, he warned them that the bloodies were probably all even better at that sort of thing, so they should plan for that when engaging them.
That pretty much ate up the first day. On the second, now that the leader of the new skirmishers was satisfied his people had that basic skill, he had Skyler move after the first shot, concealed all the while, and find a new vantage point to shoot from. Then they had to find him all over again. They usually could, and fairly quickly, which was a warning for what the enemy would be able to manage when the situations were reversed.
That only took a few hours, then Brandon went on to counter-skirmishing. Or in other words, once Skyler revealed his position his friend immediately had the skirmishers begin moving from cover to cover to surround him and get a good shot at him. For that they used dummy rifles with scopes, or just binoculars, and relied on a trust system of a person scoring a “hit” by keeping the crosshairs firmly centered on their target for a slow count of one.
Chasing down a skirmisher was easier said than done in the heat of battle, and in a lot of those exercises Skyler was able to eliminate over half the trainees before one of them called that they'd got him. That was certainly a heartening experience for everyone, a hint of what even one skirmisher could manage. At least until old Buzzkill Brandon reminded them that the bloodies would probably be skilled enough to find cover and snipe back almost immediately.
On the third day, now that they'd gotten a good idea of what facing a skirmisher was like, and what they could expect from an enemy experienced at facing skirmishers, they began having two or three trainees at a time try their hand at skirmishing while the rest tried to respond to them. Two skirmishers were far more than twice as effective as one, and three even more so.
Skyler hated to think of what it would be like to face an entire squad of skirmishers, and was glad that Sangue didn't know enough about their positions or movements, and wasn't familiar enough with these mountains, to employ those same tactics against them.
Unfortunately, the most important and challenging of the exercises was one Skyler never got to practice himself, because it was too important that he be on the other side of it. The lynchpin of skirmishing: evasion.
They started that exercise on the fourth day, with lone trainees practicing making one or at most two shots at the enemy, then immediately bugging out. Not only did they flee at the best speed they could manage, but they also had to be careful to have a route set up beforehand that allowed them to get out of there quickly, leave no trail, and give their targets a hard time determining where they'd gone.
Skyler really shone there, identifying where a shot had come from, closing on the sniper's abandoned position, and then finding their trail and following it in hot pursuit. And, of course, telling the other trainees what he was doing every step of the way, so they could learn to do it themselves.
The quick conclusion they reached from that exercise was that if the bloodies had anyone with half his tracking skills, escape was going to be seriously difficult. Brandon also trained them as well as he could to prepare them for evading pursuit from dogs, even going so far as to instruct the skirmishers to take out dogs as a highest priority in their initial attack, even above officers or other important targets.
Thanks to the earlier parts of the training, they'd determined what Sangue would likely be able to manage when it came to discovering where they were shooting from, closing on their position, and finally tracking them down. With that knowledge gained, Brandon threw all their focus into escaping after hitting the enemy starting on the fifth day.
That included leaving false trails, for humans and dogs both, hiding or erasing their tracks, picking ground to move on that left no good tracks or was hard to follow someone along in other ways, and things of that nature. Skyler had a lot of good advice to offer there, since following tracks was his specialty.
The skirmishers worked themselves to exhaustion with that sort of training, but Brandon was relentless in making sure they kept pushing themselves. “Our best friend when it comes to running away from the enemy will be being in better shape than them,” he said once when the trainees had all collapsed, some throwing up, after he led them at a breakneck pace up a steep mountain slope choked with thick undergrowth. “I want us to be faster, and I want us to have more endurance. And lucky us, doing these exercises in the thin mountain air is going to give us massive lungs of solid iron, something our Sangue friends training in the lowlands won't be able to boast.”
“Question . . . what if Sangue boot camp is in the Andes or something?” Neal asked, scrubbing an unsteady hand across his mouth after emptying his guts.
“Answer . . . shut up,” Brandon replied, whistling piercingly for emphasis. “Enough rest, let's move! And enough with giving me the stink eye! Today it's just me yelling for you to move your rumps, next week it'll be the bloodies chasing you down to put a bullet in you!”
Part of evasion training, what they worked on that afternoon and evening, was something Skyler particularly liked; when the fleeing skirmishers led their pursuers into an ambush. Brandon had them practice judging whether Sangue was being reckless in the chase, like that one squad had been when chasing Skyler, Trapper, and the volunteers after the failed ambush.
Another ambushing force laying in wait could've done serious damage to the enemy while they were tunnel visioned on their prey, and he wanted to make sure the skirmishers didn't hesitate to exploit those sorts of opportunities. Even if it was something as simple as having another skirmisher hidden along the route of retreat to shoot at the pursuing enemy, then withdraw and flee to safety as well.
They could've spent days or even weeks on that aspect of skirmishing alone, but on the afternoon of the sixth day Brandon decided they had evasion down, or at least spent as much training time as they could spare on it. At that point he moved them on to the final focus of their training: tracking the bloodies. They needed to be able to locate the enemy in the mountains, they needed to be able to guess where they were going to plan good ambush or sniping points and getaway routes, and they needed to be able to trail them unseen, probably for long periods of time.
“Skyler, I've probably said this before, but you have no idea how glad I am to have you with us,” the skirmisher's leader told him near the end of the sixth day. “Seriously, these guys couldn't find Bigfoot walking through a muddy field trailing spring fl
owers behind him.”
“Hey, screw you Gerry!” Neal shouted from across the clearing. “I don't recall you being the one who caught that bent twig.”
Brandon turned a glower at the bartender. “You mean the one that wasn't actually made by our quarry, that we spent five minutes running around in circles chasing phantom trails because of, until Skyler had to step in and put us on the right track?”
Neal hunched his shoulders defensively. “No, I meant the one just barely.”
Their leader snorted. “Okay fine, you're officially the Master of Bent Twigs. Reina can be in charge of making sure they're the right bent twigs.”
The barmaid snickered. “Don't worry, I know a thing or two about bent twigs.” The other skirmishers laughed or groaned in response; Skyler didn't get it, which probably meant it was something dirty. “And believe me, he's definitely master of one,” she continued, which drew more laughter.
The bartender shot her a wounded look. “I'm pretty sure there's some rule that girlfriends aren't supposed to make fun of their boyfriends about that. I mean, like, the one thing.”
Aside from not understanding the banter, although from context he could guess, Skyler would've found it more amusing if the topic wasn't the skirmishers' painfully slow progress learning to track. He supposed he couldn't really blame them for it, though; how did you distill five years of knowledge passed on by a mountain man, five years of honing his senses and learning his own lessons and insights, into a couple days of training?
He just had to hope that since the bloodies all traveled in squads of twenty, they'd be leaving enough obvious signs that they'd be easy to follow. And that more sneaky enemies wouldn't be lurking out there to catch the skirmishers in a trap.
He supposed that was why, even though it was pointless and would probably just get him in trouble, he decided to ask Brandon to take him along as a tracker. So when they finally trooped back home at the end of that day's training, he pulled his friend aside. “I want to join the skirmishers.”
