Woods Runner (4 page)

As he embraced the forest, his skill at hunting grew. Actually, the forest embraced him, took him in, made him, as the French said, a
courier du bois
, a woods runner. Soon he provided meat for nearly the whole settlement, and in turn, the other men and women helped Samuel’s
parents with their small farm and took over Samuel’s chores when he was in the woods.

Samuel’s knowledge grew until when he heard a twig break, he would
know
whether it was a deer or bear or squirrel that broke it. He could look at a track and
know
when the animal or man made it, and whether or not the creature was in a hurry and if so, why, and how fast it was going and what, if anything, was chasing it and how close the pursuer might be.

And the more he was of the woods, of the wild, of the green, the less he was of the people. He sometimes enjoyed being with others, and of course he loved his parents. But his skills and his woods knowledge set him apart, made him different. His neighbors in the settlement saw this and they sought him out when they had a question about the forest or about game. They marveled at him, thought of him as a kind of seer, one who could know more than others, divine things in a spiritual way. Samuel knew this was not the case. He had just learned to see what others could not.

Now he brought to the fore all his knowledge to read sign as he met the day.

He was on his feet before the first light broke through the trees. He woke desperately thirsty and went to the creek that trickled past the rear of the cabin, and he drank long and hard. The water was so cold it hurt his teeth and so sweet it took some of the taste-stink from the evening before out of his mouth. He was hungry, but he could find
no food that the marauders had overlooked. He would have to shoot something along the way.

For now, there was nothing to do but read sign and try to figure out what had happened, how it had happened and exactly when.

He started by circling the cabin, forcing himself to take time to be calm, carefully studying the ground, looking closely at the soft dirt away from the grass.

First he found small tracks from moccasins he had made for his mother. Then he saw his father’s prints, also from moccasins, the right foot toed in slightly from a time when, showing off as a small boy, he’d broken his ankle jumping from a shed roof.

Both sets of prints were in the soft dirt in front of the door of the cabin, in the normal patterns they would make going in and out.

Then, in the dirt at the side of the cabin, more moccasin prints. Larger, flatter feet, digging deeper, running, as the attackers came. And still more prints, too many to tell them apart. On top of those, which meant they had come later, hard shoes with leather soles and heels. At least three men with regular shoes—two of normal weight and one heavier. On top of all the marks, Samuel saw horse prints. Two, maybe three horses, all unshod and being led, because there was no extra weight on them.

No men in the settlement wore shoes, or could afford horses to ride. Only one man had a single workhorse. Others who could afford animals had oxen, because when
they became too old or broken to work, they could be eaten.

The attack had been fast. They had come up along the creek—Samuel backtracked and found their prints in the soft soil there—and exploded out in the clearing by the cabin. His parents were probably outside and must have been overrun with no time to react. His father wouldn’t have had his musket close anyway. It was like him to leave it inside when working near the house.

Samuel’s father had seen bad things happen to other people, but was too good inside, too generous, to believe that they could happen to him.

He must believe now, Samuel thought.

The attack widened rapidly. He saw where Overton and others had fallen, saw the blood, now covered with flies, where they had been hacked to the ground with tomahawks. It was a mystery to Samuel, though, why his parents had not been killed. He was grateful, but it didn’t make any sense.

He lost their tracks as he followed the spreading attack. Larger moccasin prints and the shoe prints of the three men were everywhere. He could imagine the terror of the people in the settlement—the war cries of the attackers mixed with the screams of the victims and the smell of blood and fear and death.

He saw where at least two of the men in shoes had mounted their horses. Here and there he found single or double tracks of his mother and father as they were jerked
or pulled—the tracks scuffed and misshapen. New tracks joined theirs as other people were also spared, all of them dragged or pushed toward the eastern side of the settlement.

Finally he saw how it had ended. The last of the cabins were burned, the surviving victims—probably neck-tied to each other with rope—lined up and pulled along the trail. The horses were in front and the attackers split, some in front and some in back. There was no indication that any prisoners had been wounded or killed.

When?

When had it happened?

He started following the tracks—which a blind man could have followed—and let his mind work on that question.

He’d left home early the day before, moving west until he came to new country, since he’d hunted out the forest around the settlement.

Say by midmorning he was out of earshot of gunfire—
if
anybody had used a gun. All the victims he’d buried had been chopped down with either tomahawks or war clubs.

So … the attack could have come midmorning. That would have been the soonest. If that was the case then they were just under twenty-four hours ahead of him. Maybe twenty, twenty-two. Moving slowly—as they would with prisoners—they might make two miles an hour. With a rest of perhaps six hours they might have traveled fourteen to sixteen hours. Twenty-four to twenty-eight miles.

He shook his head. Probably less. He studied the trail ahead and the spacing of the footprints, trying to estimate their speed. They were close together. Even the horses’ tracks showed they were moving slowly. Twenty miles, at the most, yet still only a guess.

But he turned out to be wrong.

Later he discovered that he’d forgotten that there was another settlement of four cabins ten miles farther on.

And the attackers had taken the time to stop and slaughter the people who lived there.

A
s he walked, Samuel felt as if he were following some kind of a killing storm.

Even the tracks seemed savage. From the footprints, it was evident that the prisoners, tied together, were constantly jerked and pulled to increase their speed. Their prints were scuffed, ragged, and he felt his mother’s anguish terribly. She was small, and thin, and very strong in her own way, but this brutal treatment, probably with a rope around her neck, might be too much for her. If she was too slow they might … He could not finish the thought.

The shock Samuel had felt since he’d come upon the devastation in the settlement and dealt with the bodies had left him numb. Now it turned to anger, coming into rage, and that was worse because he had to remain calm.

He had no idea what to do except to follow his parents’
tracks—he saw their footprints now and then. He had to follow and rescue them. How he could do that, free his parents … he’d have to wait and see. Wait until he knew more.

He would learn by studying sign. He could not forget himself and his skills now. The people who were leaving the tracks were the people he had to deal with. He had to understand them by the time he caught up with them.

He stopped and tried to slow his harsh breathing, tried to still his mind and remember all he had taught himself about studying trails and the surrounding ground.

It seemed that all of the captors and captives were walking on the trail, but there might be others off to the side.

Quickly, he started to swing to the left and right of the trail. It was mostly grass, and hard to read, but at last he saw scuff marks and some moccasin tracks in open dirt. They had scouts on each side of the main group.

On the second swing, he found the first body. It was a man in his thirties who’d been picking berries when they’d come upon him. He must have had a rifle or musket—no one would be out in the woods without some kind of weapon—but it was gone, along with his powder horn and “possibles” bag. He had been scalped. Mutilated. Sadly, there was no time for Samuel to give him a decent grave. He scraped a slight trench with his knife and covered the body with a minimum of dirt. He bowed his head, then went back to the trail.

Covering the body hadn’t taken much time, but it upset him. As he walked on, he tried to still the shaking of his hands. He picked up his speed, and came into the clearing of the next settlement before he was ready for it.

He thought he knew what he would find. It was just the few cabins, but unlike Samuel’s home it had a name—Draper’s Crossing.

And it was gone. At first it seemed the same devastation he had found at home. Smoke rising from burned cabins and sheds. But when he stopped, he saw that he wasn’t alone.

On the southern side of the clearing, there was a figure. It was an old man. As Samuel approached, he saw that the man was spading dirt with a wooden shovel onto a mound that was clearly a grave.

And he was singing.

Samuel stopped ten yards away. He saw no weapon but he stood ready, rifle held across his chest, thumb on the hammer. As the old man patted the dirt with the shovel, Samuel could see four other grave mounds where the cabins had been. The man said in a singsong voice: “There to sleepy, little darling, there to sleepy with the
Jesus boy, all to sleepy, little darling, all to sleepy with the Jesus boy….”

Samuel coughed, but the old man did not turn.

“… Jesus came, the Jesus boy came and took them all up to heaven—”

“How long ago were they here?” Samuel finally interrupted the man’s song.

The man turned toward Samuel and kept up his singing.

“… Lordy, then the Jesus boy came and took them all to heaven. There was Draper and Molly and they came in and took them all to the Jesus boy….”

“How long ago? Can you tell me when they were here?”

“… in the dark they came. Took them all to the Jesus boy, took them all but not Old Bobby, no sir, didn’t take Old Bobby ’cause Old Bobby he sat eating dirt and pointing up at the Jesus boy and talking through his ear holes, ear holes, and they thinking Old Bobby was teched but it wasn’t so, wasn’t so, wasn’t so….”

“Water. Is there water or food here?”

“… wasn’t teched at all, just knew how the Jesus boy could save us, save us, so I sat there eating dirt and laughing and praying….”

With piercing, intense and otherworldly green eyes, he stared, but not at Samuel. He looked through Samuel at some far place that only he could see, only he could know. He picked up the shovel and started walking off to the
south where Samuel could see one more burned cabin. Beside it lay what looked like a pile of rags, but Samuel knew it wasn’t.

One more body …

Now he remembered something he had heard about the Indians. Considering that he had lived his whole life on the frontier, he knew very little about them, and what he did know he had learned by listening to adults, to rumors and stories they sometimes told after they’d had a little too much hard cider or blackstrap rum.

He remembered that some tribes saw crazy people as graced by the Higher Power, and that they believed that old people who did not think straight should be protected, or at least not harmed.

Which must be why they had let Old Bobby go.

“Maybe he is crazy,” Samuel said aloud, watching him walk away with the shovel. “And maybe not … Either way, he’s alive.”

He turned back to the trail. If Old Bobby was right, they had come “in the dark.” Probably just before dawn, if they had stopped to rest at all.

That meant Samuel was gaining.

And
that
meant he had to keep moving.

H
e had been running for forty hours now. Just as he left Draper’s Crossing, he passed a cornfield that the attackers had tried to burn. Some ears of corn had been roasted.

Hunger took him like a wolf and he grabbed a half-dozen ears, jamming them in his clothing. He ate as he walked, letting the sweet corn juice slide down his throat and into his stomach. The hunger was so intense that eating the corn made his jaws ache. The food made his body demand water. He hadn’t taken time to find a well or where one was. When he came to a small creek, he stopped to drink.

The water was muddy where the creek crossed the trail, so he moved off into the thick underbrush twenty yards upstream to where the creek ran clear. He knelt to put his mouth to the water and this act saved his life.