Woods Runner (2 page)

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.

S
amuel 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.

“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.

T
he 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.