Woods Runner (8 page)

H
e found Annie huddled in some hazel bushes, crying. When she saw him, she ran and threw herself at him, grabbing the edge of his shirt, silent except for the soft sobbing.

For three days.

Unless she was asleep or tending to herself, she would not get more than four feet away from him for three solid days. She held on to his clothing and did not say a word in all that time. At night he would wrap her in his blanket and sit away from the glow of the fire and doze, and she would cry in her sleep, almost all night.

It bothered him that she had no shoes or moccasins, and he had no leather to make a pair for her, but her bare feet were amazingly tough and she kept up with his rapid pace much better than he would have expected.

They drank from creeks, which were common, and
shared the small amount of food Ma had given him. Annie did not eat for the first three days and he worried at that—although she drank—but in the evening of the third day she took some food and seemed to come out of the cloud she was in, little by little.

He was having a very difficult time. With almost everything. The jolt from what his life had been just short weeks ago to what it was now had been so sudden, the gulf so vast, that he felt he was in a completely different world, one dominated by violence and insanity.

The woods were the one thing he knew and still believed in. He was thankful for the haven of the forest as they traveled.

Still, his rage would not go away. He stifled it, but he seethed with anger every time he thought of the Hessians and how they had killed the Clarks, of how they had tried to kill Annie, of how the raiders had slaughtered the peaceful settlers for no reason.

He wanted to punish them, make them pay for what they’d done, and could think of nothing to do except act as insane and violent as they had.

Kill someone.

Find someone in a red coat and shoot him.

He knew it was not something he could do, even though he thought of it. And so he drove himself—and, unfortunately, Annie—in a forced march that covered over fifteen miles a day. It would not have been so hard except that the trail had become a proper road. There was
still forest on either side, but settlements, then small towns, appeared regularly. They often saw local people or detachments of redcoats marching on the road.

They avoided everybody. Samuel trusted no one, not even people who might have been friendly. Annie complained only once.

“We jump into the woods every time we see somebody,” she said. “They can’t all be bad.”

“Yes,” Samuel said, thinking of the Hessians, “they can. Every single one of them can be bad. So we hide. And that’s it.” His voice had an edge that kept her from arguing.

They worked around settlements and small towns, sticking to the trees, and on day five—they’d been out of food for a day and a half—Samuel shot a deer and took an afternoon, well back in the woods, to make a small fire with flint and steel and a little powder. He cooked the two back legs of the deer with stakes holding them over the fire and, when the meat was still rare, cut pieces from one of the legs, and they ate it squatting by the fire. He also cut off the strips of meat alongside the lower backbone—the tenderloin. Although it was quite small, he cooked that as well, to save for later.

They ate a whole back leg sitting there, until Annie’s face was coated with grease. They wrapped the excess in the cloth Ma had given him and were up and moving again, Samuel not wanting to waste daylight.

He could think of little but finding his parents and
getting them away from their captors. But he also realized that the odds were not good. He knew nothing of cities, or even towns, but New York City must be large, and filled with people who would not be helpful since the British were there. Try as he might, he couldn’t think of a way to get into the city safely to find his mother and father.

With meat in his belly he fairly loped along, so fast that at last Annie gasped, “You got to slow down. I can’t run like a deer.”

He slowed but kept the pace steady, so that when it was dark, hard dark, and he stopped, Annie fell asleep almost the instant he wrapped the bedroll blanket around her.

He decided to make a cold camp and didn’t start a fire. Since there was no smoke, the bugs, mostly mosquitoes, found him at once. They weren’t as bad as they’d been on his hunting trips on the frontier, but then he’d always had a fire with the smoke to keep them away.

He was tired, although not like Annie, and he had some thinking to do. It took him a while to get his mind off the mosquitoes, and by that time there was a new sliver of a moon. In the pale silver light he saw Annie’s face, wrapped in the blanket, just showing enough to let her breathe, and his heart went out to her.

She was only eight, he thought, maybe nine, and her whole world had been absolutely destroyed.

Were there many like her? Everything gone because of this war? The innocent ones were the worst part of it all. His mother and father making a life on the frontier, just
wanting to be left alone, his mother trying to get the garden to grow, his father learning how to use tools, how to make his own house, wanting only to work and read and think and live a quiet, simple life with his family.

All gone. His own life gutted, not as much as Annie’s, but enough.

He had to get his parents back.

How? What to do? There were so many unknown factors that the questions seemed impossible.

He was one person with a rifle.

Oh yes, he thought, smiling grimly, and a knife.

And he felt that the entire world he was heading into was against him. He would have to get around them, the people in that world, some way, somehow….

How?

His eyes closed, opened, closed again, his questions spiraling down as he leaned back against a tree and slept.

T
he signs were on the side of a tree, two boards hacked into the shape of an arrow and nailed up with large, handmade cut nails.

One pointed to a trail that went straight south. Crude letters: “Philadelphia—41 m.”

The other arrow pointed straight east: “New York—38 m.”

“What do they say?” Annie asked. “I can get the letters but I can’t put them together so good. Yet.”

Samuel told her. “About the same to either place. A three-day walk…. Let’s get off the trail. I’ve got to think on it.”

They moved back into the undergrowth and settled out of sight.

“What’s to think about?” Annie said. “We go to New York to get our ma and pa.”

She did not realize what she said, but Samuel heard the
our
. Something had happened in her mind, she’d found a way to stand it all, to keep going.

Samuel nodded.

What had Caleb said? Oh yes, New York was British.

But the Americans still held Philadelphia, the center of the new government. Had his mother and father come by here and seen this sign? Did they know that safety and refuge were just forty miles away, and then did they have to go on to New York?

He shook his head.

“I should … I ought to take you into Philadelphia, where it’s safe, and find a place for you.”

“No.”

“But—”

“No. I ain’t going to leave you. You’re the only family I have. It won’t help to leave me someplace because I’ll just run and follow you. No matter what you say. We’re going to find our folks. That’s all there is to it. We’re going to New York.”

“What I was going to say—”

“Together.”

“—was that it would take too long to go down there and come back—six or seven days—so I guess we’ll stick together.”

“Good. That’s settled.”

Samuel almost smiled. She looked so ragged—her dress was indescribably dirty and so was her face. Her hair
stuck out at odd angles. The dirt was caked on her legs, and her feet looked like shoe leather—and yet she was ready to do what had to be done. I’m proud, he thought, to have you as a sister.

“All right then,” he said. “Let’s go.”

They had a stroke of luck after they turned toward New York. Later that day they saw a farm with fresh corn in the field. They crept into the edge of the field and took enough ears for dinner.

Just after leaving the field, back in the woods alongside the trail, they heard an awful racket coming up the road from the rear. Something on wheels was clanging and clanking and rattling along. They were far enough back in the thickest part of the undergrowth so they couldn’t see what it was. It stopped nearby.

All was quiet, and then Samuel heard dogs panting. Before he and Annie could move, two black-and-white mostly collie dogs came up to them in the brush, looked at them each for a moment—directly into their eyes—and gently tried to push them out toward the road, using their shoulders against Samuel’s and Annie’s legs.

“Hey!” Samuel whispered. “Leave off!”

He heard a laugh.

“You might as well come out of there,” a coarse, deep voice shouted. “I know right where you are and I’ve got a two-gauge swivel gun aimed at you.”

“You stay here,” Samuel whispered to Annie. “I’ll see what’s going on.”

But no, she was not going to stay, and they both stood and walked out of the brush, the collies nudging them along.

A huge freight wagon stood on the road, so stacked up with all sorts of everything—from bundles of rags to loops of tin pots tied up like garlands, to two saddles, to barrels and buckets and a rocking chair—that it looked enormous: a junk pile on wheels being pulled by two scruffy mules.

“How’s your day?” the man on the wagon asked, spitting, and in such a thick Scottish brogue that it was difficult to understand him. “I’m Abner McDougal, tinker at large. The two dogs are William and Wallace—named after a Scottish hero.” He saw Samuel’s rifle and he held up his hands. “Don’t shoot, I was making a jest about the swivel gun. I’m not armed, as you can see—don’t believe in shooting things.”

He seemed to be dressed in sewn-together rags and looked as untidy as the junk he was carrying. His voice had a horrible rasping sound, like a steel shovel edge hitting rocks in gravel, and he was absolutely covered in unkempt gray hair. It was almost impossible to see his face for the hair, and the lower part of his beard was soaked with tobacco stains from dribbled spit.

“I’m Samuel,” Samuel said, “and this is Annie.”

Abner nodded and then looked at the dogs, which had
moved in front of the mules and were peering down the trail in the direction of New York.

“Get in the back of the wagon,” Abner said.

“What?”

“Get in the back of the wagon. Hide the rifle. Now. Quick. Someone wrong is coming.”

“Wrong?”

“Move! Hide the gun!”

Abner’s firm voice left no room for argument. Samuel took Annie’s hand and they climbed up in the back of the wagon. There was just room for them to sit with their legs out on the opened wagon bed. Samuel hid his rifle and powder horn beneath a pile of cloth.

He had no sooner done this than there was the sound of hooves. A troop of British cavalry dragoons came around the bend in front of the wagon and stopped. Samuel could see through the side of the wagon. There were about twenty riders in red uniforms and high fur hats and knee-high boots. They were carrying short muskets and sabers. The horses were well lathered, snorting and breathing hard, and the group broke formation and spread around the wagon. Two men pulled their sabers and started poking in the load from the sides until Abner said, “Careful there! There’s my bairn’s bairns inside.”

“Your what?” The commanding officer pulled up next to Abner.

“My grandchildren. Don’t go poking them with your stickers.”

“The purpose of your trip?”

“We’re headed for New York. I buy things and sell things. Would you be looking for anything in particular yourself?”

“You could have any kind of illegal goods in there”—the officer nodded at the wagon—“any kind of contraband.”

“I could, but I don’t. And besides, I have a merchant’s pass from the commanding general’s staff, handwrit and signed and sealed. All official.”

“Let me see it.”

Samuel heard the rustle of paper being passed back and forth—he could not see the front of the wagon—and then the officer’s brusque voice: “All right then, pass on. But watch for anything suspicious. We’ve just taken New York and a lot of the rebel runners and deserters are trying to make their way to Philadelphia.”

Samuel looked at the troopers around the back of the wagon, who were looking at him. One smiled and nodded at Annie but she sat quietly, her eyes big and her jaw tight.

“Fall in!” the officer commanded, and the men wheeled their horses into formation and rode past.

“Up, Brutus! Up, Jill!” Abner slapped the reins across the rumps of the mules and they grunted and started pulling the wagon, which began to roll ahead slowly.