by Greg Hunt
An enormous sense of relief settled over Mel as he entered the familiar woods east of his farm. Everything he needed to survive was in these woods, and a thousand men would have the devil of a time flushing him out if he didn’t want to be found. But as it was, nobody even knew he was gone except the one real friend he had made in all this madness and confusion, Major Elliot—a man he was not likely to ever encounter again here on this earth.
PART TWO
THE ADDERLY FARM RESCUE
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mel woke with a start to the sound of rustling and grunting at the edge of the cane thicket. He knew it was probably the hog that had taken up residence here, voicing his complaints about an uninvited squatter. He cautiously drew the sheath knife and stood up facing the commotion.
“Git, hog!” he called out, loud and gruff, kicking the nearby cane stalks and making as much commotion as he could. If it was one of his own pigs, that would be enough. And if it was one of the wild, mean razorbacks that roamed all through these mountains, at least he could make a fight of it with the knife. “Git, hog. Git on out of here!” Eventually the hog wandered away, grunting and snorting its offense at the injustice.
Mel settled back on the ground, lying flat on his back with his head resting on a hump of sod, enjoying the feel of the cool morning breeze, listening to the soft rustle of the cane tops, watching the feathery clouds floating past against the bright blue sky.
In spite of everything, it felt good to be alive on God’s green earth. Being buried alive and shoving the dead aside to rise again would do that for a man. So for a while he just lay there letting his senses take charge, not worrying about anything that had already happened, or what was ahead.
He was staggering with fatigue when he reached this spot last night. The moon was down before he made it here, but these were home woods and he trusted his instincts to guide him to the one place where he knew he would feel hidden and secure. From the moment he lay his head down on the soft carpet of leaves and moss in the cane thicket, to the instant when the grumbling hog woke him, he hadn’t moved a muscle or stirred awake for an instant. He wasn’t sure he had even dreamed.
Mel felt rested, at ease in his mind about his own safety, at least for now. But he was as hungry as a spring cub, and his smarting, throbbing wounds reminded him of the abuse his body had taken over the past few days.
When he sat up again, he noticed the squirrel for the first time. It lay near his feet, its head half gone, skull open and empty. It was a familiar sight, one he had found countless times lying on the back step of the cabin or on the ground nearby. Looking around in the cane thicket, he spotted the shaggy matted bundle of gray fur hunkered down on its haunches a dozen feet away.
“Hello, Smokie,” Mel said with a smile. “Glad to see you made it through all this mess.”
Smokie had been his mother’s pet cat, roaming in and out of the cabin at will, spending the evenings in her lap as she mended clothes, shelled beans, or read by the fire, earning his found by keeping the rodent population down. But when Mother passed, Smokie never had taken to Mel or his father in the same way. Over time he lapsed into a feral life, lurking around the barn and outbuildings but shunning the cabin, staying near but never close, bedding who knew where, and feeding himself in his own mysterious ways.
The one habit he maintained even after the passing of his mistress was his almost daily contributions of meat for the household. The fresh kills varied. One morning it might be a rat or chipmunk, the next a squirrel or rabbit or bird. Mel never could figure out why he did it, and of course the gifts were never eaten. But Smokie didn’t seem to notice.
This morning, though, down in the cane thicket, everything was different, and he had the distinct feeling that the old ragged gray cat was looking out for him, sharing the night’s kill so he wouldn’t go hungry. And for the first time in his recollection, he was glad to see the mangy old cat, and the fresh meat was actually welcome.
“Much obliged for breakfast, old feller,” Mel said, lifting the squirrel and saluting Smokie with it. He deftly skinned and gutted it, cut off the head, wrapped it in a bundle of leaves, and stuck it in his pocket for later when he had the chance to safely build a fire. When Mel looked up after a few minutes, Smokie had disappeared, his mission completed.
Mel worked his way out of the dense cane thicket, moving stealthily. He was still within half a mile of his farm, and if its occupiers had any sense, they would have patrols out in the woods. But Mel was confident that he would hear them before they heard him, and here on his home ground, none of them would see him unless he chose to be seen.
At the creek flowing alongside Dogleg Trail, he stripped naked and gave his clothes and body another good scrubbing. The bullet nick on his shoulder was healing, but the gash the rifle butt had made on the side of his head was starting to fester. He scrubbed off the bloody scab with a handful of moss, then let the wound bleed and cleanse itself. The creek ran pink with his blood for a while until he packed a hunk of sphagnum moss over the wound and tied it in place with a strip torn from his shirt.
It wasn’t as good as cleaning a wound with a splash of corn liquor, or dealing with the smart of it with a long hard pull on the jug, but it would serve for now.
Filling his hollow, complaining belly came next. He had the squirrel for a main course, and for someone who knew what he was about, the woods were filled with many other edibles. In the creek there were crawdads that skittered backward under rocks at his approach, and minnows in the shallow pools that could be netted with a shirt or caught by hand. There were watercress and other edible plants in the pools. Mushrooms grew on the forest floor and the rotting trunks of trees, some delicious and some deadly. Even the beetles, grubs, worms and snails that flourished under rocks and fallen trees were edible and said to be nourishing. But Mel gagged at the thought of it, and figured he’d have to be nearer to starving than he was now before he’d choke down any bugs.
He risked a small fire in a sheltered gully along the creek, using dry kindling that hardly smoked. While strips of squirrel and little slivers of meat from the crawdad tails cooked on a hot rock, he ate the rest of his foraged meal raw, even the minnows, whose heads he pinched off before swallowing them.
While he ate he thought about what came next. Returning to his own farm was no longer possible, so only one choice seemed left for him. He would head over to the Adderly farm and see how Rochelle and her family had fared through all of this. Getting there would be hard, though, as the major had warned. Both armies seemed bent on controlling the roads, and they probably wouldn’t be interested in allowing a lone man pass, no matter what errand he claimed to be on.
The valley and meadows that threaded through the steep wooded hillsides were another possibility. But there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t find some of them full-up with fighting men, too. The army that had fought their way up the length of White Tail Valley must have traveled overland for many miles, and there were no roads out where they came from.
A thought occurred to Mel as he stuck the last dry, tough strips of squirrel meat into his back pocket and kicked the embers of his fire into the creek. He still had one unlikely ally nearby. He started carefully up Dogleg Trail, pausing often to look around, listen, and test the wind. It was an enormous risk moving toward his farm rather than away, but it had to be done.
At the crest of the hill where he had put the Arkansas lieutenant down with a sweet, clean shot in the back, he stopped and inspected the brush and weeds around him. Now, three days after, there wasn’t much left in the vicinity that resembled a human body. The forest creatures had been working hard at their trade, some of them possibly Mel’s own hogs. The scattered tracks in the dirt included cloven hoofprints, as well as the larger, five-padded prints of wolves and wild dogs, and the splayed, taloned prints of buzzards. He imagined that there had probably been some lively disagreements about who ate first, and who got what.
Random bones and mangled scraps of clothin
g were scattered up and down the trail and in the surrounding brush. Scouting about, he found one boot, a fine expensive one in fairly good shape, but clearly too small for him. The lieutenant’s skull was a mangled, grisly find, and he gave it wide berth. It occurred to Mel that this man’s people down in the Arkansas Delta would never know what became of him. Over time they’d probably make a hero out of him, and maybe attribute preposterous heroic deeds to him. Even if they somehow miraculously heard the truth about him—that he had thrown away the lives of his men with bad leadership during a fool’s mission, and was shot in the back by a stranger because he was such a loudmouthed little jaybird—they would never accept it. But Mel figured they had a right to believe what they wanted of him if it gave them comfort.
Soon Mel found what he was searching for, the lieutenant’s rifle, sidearm, and ammunition. The pistol belt and holster were chewed a bit, but still usable, and a feeling of relief came over him as he strapped them on. He was a different man, no longer a defenseless creature hiding in the weeds like a weasel, as soon as he was armed again. Both the rifle and pistol would need cleaning and fresh charges, but already they felt like trusted comrades in his hands.
The overland route he chose to the Adderly Farm would lead him in a loop around the north end of White Tail Valley. During the fight for his farm, this would have been the rear area for the attacking men in blue. Although this end of the valley was deserted now, there was plenty of evidence that thousands of men had passed this way. All the cast-off waste and flotsam of an army moving dynamically with the tides of battle were there. And in this case, the “waste” included rows and rows of graves for the men who had not, and never would, move on with their comrades to the next battle.
Mel was surprised by his own reaction to the hundreds of graves, so fresh that the wind still stirred up dust as it blew over the dry untamped dirt. Chills washed over him, as when spirits are passing by, and he didn’t let his eyes or thoughts linger long on this land of the dead. His own experience as a buried man himself was still too fresh a horror.
Before moving on, he did manage to salvage a few things that might come in handy—a cast-off rucksack, a hatchet, a pair of socks, a few yards of decent hemp rope, and a wine bottle that would serve nicely for water.
White Tail Valley curved west on its northern end, and Mel could have followed it for miles in the direction he wanted to go. But he was ill at ease out in the open for too long, even though he had not seen another living person since waking that morning. So he stuck to the edge of the woods as much as possible, as was his habit while hunting. With elk, deer, bear or man, the idea was to spot them before they spotted you. That gave you the choice of what happened next.
His progress was steady, although he could feel the toll that several days of hard living, poor food, and physical abuse had taken. Moving through the forest with his long, farm-boy strides, he refused to let his thoughts dwell on the destroyed home and razed farm he left behind, or the devastation and suffering he might find ahead.
Instead he turned his thoughts to Rochelle. When it came right down to it, he knew that the hard and dangerous trip he had ahead of him was really all about her. Otherwise, why wouldn’t he have set his mind to check on Ike and Martha Butternut, who lived a few miles southwest of his farm, or Jared Hardt, who ran the sawmill ten miles west along the post road? There were other neighbors hereabouts, none close, but all as likely to be in danger as the Adderlys while this uninvited war tore, stomped, destroyed and slaughtered its way across the countryside.
In his thoughts he pictured Rochelle as he had last seen her, tan, slender and pretty, shy as a sparrow, but mostly a ripe, full-grown woman already. Countless times following old Doc across the fresh-turned furrows of his fields, or laying alone at night in his pitch-dark cabin, he had brought to mind the memory of that backwoods community dance, and the incredible turmoil of love and need, guilt and wonder, that had washed over them on that grassy hillside out back of the one-room log schoolhouse. Once they had started down that path, neither one of them could have stopped it.
He had lived in close quarters with his parents long enough to know that marriage wasn’t always a smooth downhill ride. There were squabbles, deprivation, hard times and hard work aplenty for people who lived their isolated lives far out in the hills like this. But knowing that marriage would also include plenty more of what he had experienced that night with Rochelle, warm and hungry in his arms, tipped the scale heavy to the good side.
A storm blew through in early afternoon, sweeping in fast and angry. The trees whipped and lashed, and for a short time the sheets of windblown rain grayed the landscape and obliterated anything more than a few yards away.
Mel hunkered down against the trunk of a huge spreading cedar, not getting quite as soaked as he might have out in the open. It wasn’t the kind of rain that farmers prayed for, falling fast and heavy, and mostly running off instead of soaking in like a soft, steady, all-day rain. But any kind of rain was better than no rain, and he imagined how welcome this downpour would have been to his fledgling rows of corn. Now there was no corn to worry about.
After the storm moved past, racing hard and determined to the northeast, Mel emerged from his shelter into a dripping, suddenly sunlit world, as fresh and clean as the day the Lord made it. He wrung his shirt nearly dry, then sat on a log to wipe his guns down and check the loads. Daddy had shared grisly stories about what sometimes happened to men with damp powder in an Indian fight, and the lesson had stuck.
At the edge of the woods where the trees began to thin, a six-point buck stepped out of a blackberry thicket and paused to look around for threats. He was a fine animal, healthy and proud, his sleek brown hide still dripping rainwater. He hadn’t yet detected Mel, who stood unmoving beside the trunk of an oak tree.
Mel knew that when the buck looked away he could raise his rifle and take the shot. But he wouldn’t. It would be an insult to such a fine animal to end its life and then leave most of its meat as carrion. He was hungry, but he could wait until other food presented itself. A man who knew what he was about could always find something to fill his empty belly in woods like these.
In a minute the buck seemed to sense Mel’s presence, possibly catching his scent on the breeze. Its gaze fixed in his direction, seeking any sign of movement that would confirm danger. And then it was gone, whirling and leaping away so abruptly that it actually startled Mel.
The buck burst into the open valley, heading toward the denser woods on the other side, covering ground with the long healthy bounds that never failed to make Mel’s heart pound with excitement. But he didn’t make it. The bullet struck him broadside, punching him sideways in mid-leap and rolling him clumsily in the knee-high grass. The crack of the rifle shot sounded an instant later, echoing for a moment down the valley before dying away. Mel didn’t know who or where the shooter was, but he admired the marksmanship. Dropping a grown buck like that running full-out over open ground was no common feat.
The buck was thrashing on the ground and Mel figured he still had some run left in him. The stamina and will of even a severely wounded deer was astounding. More than once he had spent hours following the blood trail of a wounded deer that, by the rules of nature, should have fallen dead where it was shot.
This buck fully intended to die someplace else on his own terms, but as he struggled to his feet and started forward again, a second shot, skillfully placed to the front of his chest, dropped him dead.
He heard the sound of horses approaching down the valley from the west. For better cover, Mel dropped a few yards back into the forest. There were about thirty riders in the group, gaunt, dusty, hard-featured men mounted on the kind of sturdy, blooded horseflesh that Mel could scarcely imagine ever owning. There wasn’t much about them that gave Mel any clues about which army they were with. But it really didn’t matter. Both sides were equally dangerous to him now.
When they reached the fallen buck, one of the riders who seemed to be in charge
gave an order, and most of the horsemen dismounted. A few stayed in the saddle, scattering out in all directions around the main band. That was their version of sentries, Mel supposed. A couple of the outriders rode closer to where he was. He knew the sensible thing would be to get out of there, but he was well concealed, and curiosity kept him from leaving just yet.
The men who dismounted by the deer began to fill their pipes, roll smokes, drink from their canteens, and gnaw bits of food they took from their saddlebags. A couple of them fell to work cleaning and quartering the deer, and tying the pieces on some of the horses. They’d have roast venison for supper tonight, and most of them looked like they needed it.
The outriders closest to Mel patrolled the edge of the woods restlessly, obviously on guard for any sign that their party might be at risk of attack. Every time they came near him, he hunkered down until he heard the hoofbeats of their horses move on by.
The rattle of gunfire flared up unexpectedly, then died away, somewhere down the long valley to the east. It was no more than a score of shots, but enough to signal trouble. The horsemen near where the buck had fallen leaped into their saddles and readied their weapons. Clearly they were used to this kind of thing, because there was no panic or confusion. But instead of riding off, they pranced their horses around restlessly, waiting as the outriders rejoined the main group. Of the three who rode off down the valley, only two came back. The third riderless horse trotted along behind.
The two men made their report to their leader, pointing repeatedly to the east, then he conferred with some of the others. They seemed uncertain what to do, and Mel figured it could be because they didn’t know how many opponents they were up against. When a decision was made, two men separated themselves from the rest and rode hard to the west. The rest rode east, toward where the shots were fired, screaming their battle cries.