Authors: Gary Paulsen
“I’ve been out six days?”
“Closer to seven, counting the night.”
“And did you say we’d come twelve miles?”
Coop nodded. “First three days—no, four—we let you to lay. Everybody thought you would die and there wasn’t no sense dragging you. Then there was Paul, with his belly wound. If we tried to move him he would scream like a panther. Then we rigged up a drag and started to pull you back of one of them oxen they left behind when they ran.”
“All the bumping.”
Coop nodded, spit tobacco juice in the fire and listened to it hiss. “We couldn’t stay too long and thought you could die just as well dragging as you could laying up somewhere. If we’d left you, something would have come along and ate you, so … here you are.”
“My head …”
Coop nodded. “Good cut from that ’hawk. Carl took some deer sinew he had and an old needle he carries for fixings and sewed it up right pert’. He said in case you lived wouldn’t be much of a scar. Across your forehead.” Coop smiled and with some pride added, “It come on to having green pus and everybody knows that’s bad, so I made up a spit and ’baccy poultice and tied it on with a piece of rag. Pus cleared up in two days.”
“So I’ve been laying for six days?”
Another nod. “Coming on seven.”
“Well, how …” With a start, Samuel realized he didn’t have any pants on underneath the coarse blanket that covered him. “How come I’m not all messed up?”
“We took your pants off. Got them wrapped in a blanket pack with your rifle. Indian must have been in a hurry
or he would have took it, sweet little shooter like that. Also got your possibles bag and powder horn. What you feel under your rear is fresh grass. Anytime you messed we just threw the old grass away and pulled in a half a foot of fresh new grass. Slick as a new calf, or maybe slick as a baby’s bottom.”
“Maybe I should put my leggings on.”
“Only if you ain’t going out of your head again.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Suits me. I was the one having to get new grass all the time. You ain’t et nothing other than a little broth I got down you one time and some water now and again. Man can go long time without food, no time at all without he has some water.”
“I’m starving,” Samuel said automatically, but with the words came the feeling and he realized he was as hungry as he’d ever been.
“You’d ought to drink something soft first.” Coop handed him a wooden bowl with a mixture of broth and meat. “Go slow. This is from some salted ox they was cooking when we jumped them.”
Samuel took the bowl. He tried to drink slowly, but as the taste and smell hit him he couldn’t help gulping at it, meat and all, so fast that he gagged and threw up.
“Slow,” Coop repeated, coming back with a blanket roll and putting it on the ground next to Samuel. “You’ll founder, you don’t go slow.”
Samuel started over carefully. There was silence as he
ate, chewing completely before swallowing, small bites, small swallows.
It’s like fire, he thought, when you’re cold. Fire moving through your body. He ate the first bowl, handed it to Coop and watched him refill it, this time with broth and chunks of glistening fat as well as meat.
This second bowl he drank and ate more slowly than the first, and while he ate he made a mental list of questions to ask when his stomach was full.
Why are you here? How many of you are there? Where are you going? Is there any way you can help me find my mother and father? Are you, will you, can you, do you … questions roaring through his mind.
He finished eating.
He lay back.
He opened his mouth to ask the first question and his eyes closed at the same instant and he was immediately asleep.
And the last thing he thought as he went under was that he still hadn’t put his pants on.
American Spirit
Although poorly trained and weakly led and improperly fed—so badly that soldiers sometimes had to eat their shoes—the Americans took comfort from fighting on home soil and usually had much higher morale than the British. While they were often outnumbered and fought with inferior equipment, this spirit had an enormous effect and they took the phrase “morale is to fighting as four is to one” to heart on the battlefields.
T
his time the sounds of men coughing and axes chopping wood for the fire awakened Samuel. He opened his eyes—the pain was much less—and saw that it was daybreak. Men were moving all around him.
He started to roll, but the head pain stopped him, as well as the sudden memory that he had no pants on. The bedroll was next to him where Coop had put it. He snaked his pants out, pulled them on and fastened them with the leather cord around the waist.
The pain in his head had abated; it only jabbed if he moved suddenly. The wound felt tight, as if someone were pulling the top of his scalp together.
When he unrolled the blanket, his rifle half fell out and he saw that the lock had dirt jammed around the flint and pan, pushing up the striker plate, or frizzen, so the rifle was not able to fire.
The men were making fire, tying bedrolls. One man had what looked to be a permanently bent left arm held up at a slight angle. He was sitting on the ground cleaning his rifle. It made Samuel feel embarrassed that his own lock was so dirty. He found his possibles bag in the blanket roll. This was a pouch with the powder horn attached that hung around his neck, where he carried odds and ends of equipment for cleaning and firing his rifle. Inside, he had a tiny piece of steel wire. After blowing the dirt out of the pan and frizzen and flint, he used the wire to clear the touch hole, which fed the jet of flame from the pan into the powder charge. Then he used an oily rag to clean the whole area and put some finely ground black powder into the pan. This was the ignition powder that the flint-metal sparks would fire into the powder charge. He closed the frizzen over the pan, eased the hammer to half cock, safety, and set the rifle aside.
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.
H
e 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 hurry; 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.