Woods Runner

by Gary Paulsen

  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.

  “Stay in the wagon until they’re out of sight,” Abner said. “Until they’re gone. Then come up on the seat. We’ll talk.”

  Samuel was confused. He’d decided to trust no one and yet this old man had come forward and lied for them. He wasn’t sure what to do, but some part of him wanted to trust Abner.

  He watched the cavalry unit disappear around a bend in the road and then stood and climbed alongside the load until he was at the seat looking down at the backs of the mules. Annie sat down in the middle next to Abner, and Samuel took the outside.

  “How did you know they were … wrong?” Samuel asked.

  “The dogs. They told me.”

  “The dogs told you?” Annie scoffed. “I didn’t hear nothing.”

  “That’s because you don’t know how to listen. It’s in the way they stand, how their ears set, the hair on their back. If you know the dogs and they know you, they will tell you what to expect.”

  “How did you know we might think the British soldiers were bad?”

  Abner slapped the reins on the mules. “Pick it up, pick it up! How could I think otherwise? Somebody comes down the trail and you hide in the bushes. This is largely a British road. You come out carrying a gun at the ready.” He laughed. “It’s hard to think you’d act that way with a friend.”

  “We don’t like the British,” Annie said suddenly. “They’re all bad. Every damn one of them.”

  They both stared at her. “They killed our folks, our family….” Her voice cracked. “And I miss them. I miss my ma and my pa—I even miss the red chicken that pecked my toes.” She started crying, leaning against Samuel.

  “I think,” Abner said, “you’d better tell me what happened.”

  And to Samuel’s complete surprise, he took a deep breath and did just that.

  New York City

  New York was the main city where prisoners of the British troops were held. By the end of 1776, there were over five thousand prisoners in New York and, since the population of the city was only twenty-five thousand, more than twenty percent of the people within city limits were captives.

  At that time, there was only one prison in New York, so the British held their prisoners in warehouse buildings or on Royal Navy ships anchored in the harbor. Although these ships were built to hold 350 sailors, the British kept over one thousand prisoners at a time on board. The only latrines were buckets, which soon became full and spilled into the prisoners’ sleeping quarters.

  Disease was rampant. At first, an average of five or six prisoners died on these ships every day. In the end more American soldiers died in prison than in actual combat.

  CHAPTER

  14

  Abner sat silent for a long time after Samuel had finished telling the story of the attack and the raid, although he was less bloody in his telling than he might have been, because Annie was listening.

  At length Abner coughed and spit tobacco juice between the mules. “So you’re thinking your folks are in New York.”

  “It’s a guess. From what I understand, Philadelphia is in American hands, and I don’t think the British would take them there. Caleb heard them talking about going to New York.”

  “And once you’re in New York you’re going to find them somehow, and then with your little shooter you’re going to lope in there and shoot your way out?”

  “Well, no. I mean, I don’t know….”

  “Right in the middle of the whole British army you’re going to sneak in and take them clean away.”

  “When you put it that way, I guess …”

  “I heard they had fourteen thousand troops for the battle to take Brooklyn Heights alone; the Continentals never had a chance, started running before the fight started. They’ve probably got twenty, twenty-five thousand troops swarming all over the area. And you’re going to jump in the middle of ’em—it’d be like climbing into a swarm of bees.”

  “I don’t have a plan just yet. All I know is to follow them as best I can and then work on something if I find them. When I find them.”

  “You know what I think?” Abner looked at him.

  “No, sir.”

  “You don’t have to call me sir.”

  “Yes, sir. I mean, no, I don’t know what you think.”

  “I think you need help from an old coot and a couple of dogs, that’s what I think.”

  “You’d do that? Couldn’t that land you in a lot of trouble? I mean, you’ve got that pass that lets you go places—why would you want to help us and risk losing the pass?”

  Abner snorted. “Ain’t no pass at all. Got a friend in Philadelphia with a printing press, and I had him make me a peck of forms with the date blank and a place for somebody to sign. Official-looking. I just fill in the blank with the right general’s name and sign it—works every time.”

  “That still doesn’t answer the question. About helping us.” Samuel watched as the dogs moved to the front of the mules, one on either side, looked ahead intently, then dropped back.

  “Somebody’s coming,” Annie said. She’d seen the dogs move. “Shouldn’t we stop?”

  “Not soldiers,” Abner said, shrugging and spitting. “Just people traveling—maybe getting out of New York. Was it soldiers, the dogs would have stayed up front, kept watching.”

  “How do they know?”

  Abner shook his head. “No way to know that unless you’re a dog. They kind of feel things, in the air, maybe, or along the ground. Sometimes they’ll put their noses down and tell it that way. But they’re always right.”

  And they were right this time. A freight wagon was coming. Not as full as Abner’s, and pulled by a team of oxen rather than mules. There was a man walking on one side of the oxen, carrying a wooden staff, which he used to guide them, and a woman walking on the other side. On the wagon seat were two children, probably three and four years old.

  They passed head-on and Samuel thought neither of them would say anything. The man just nodded at Abner. But before he was well past, Abner called: “Dragoons ahead, patrolling the road west.”

  “Thankee,” the man said with a nod. “We’re obliged for the knowledge, but we’re going south at the turn. Head down for Philadelphia, if ’n it’s still held.”

  “Held solid. Good journey,” Abner said, “for you and the family, and good health.”

  “The same to you.”

  And they were gone.

  “Why don’t the British soldiers come at them? Do they have a pass?”

  “Probably not. I doubt anybody really gets a pass like mine. But the soldiers aren’t always a problem. Sometimes they take things, act up rough, but other times they seem to follow some kind of rule. Unless they be Hessians. Then even the pass might not work.” He shook his head. “They ain’t nothing good about the Hessians. They were born bad.”

  Annie nodded. She had been so quiet Samuel had almost forgotten she was there, sitting between them. Her voice was brittle, like it could break in the middle of a word. “They’re all bad.”

  It will be years, Samuel thought, before she can forget. Maybe her whole life. And I don’t blame her—I feel the same and I didn’t see my parents bayoneted.

  The thought of his parents brought back the memory of the question he had asked Abner, which had not been answered. “We never heard why you want to help us,” he said. “Couldn’t it make trouble for you?”

  “No more’n I make for myself.”

  “Still.”

  “You’re pushing at this, ain’t you?” Abner smiled, though in the hair and spit stains it was hard to tel
l. “Kind of like a root hog, digging at it.”

  “I want to know. It doesn’t make sense. You don’t know anything about us. But you’d risk trouble to help us? You’ve got to admit it seems strange—I mean, I’m grateful. Mighty grateful. But …”

  “Well, thinking on it, there’s two reasons.”

  “We’re listening.”

  “First, when you get old and start to smell an end to things, your brain starts doing things on its own, whether you like it or not. You might be looking at a piece of meat cooking on a fire, hungry and ready to eat, or sitting up here alone, watching the mules pull on a lazy sunny afternoon, and your brain starts in adding and subtracting, measuring your life.”

  “What do you mean?” Annie looked up at him.

  “Well, it says you’ve done this many things wrong and this many things right. Like a ledger with lines down the middle. Maybe you helped somebody load a wagon once and that would go on the good side, and then maybe you ate a piece of pie somebody else wanted, somebody else deserved, and that would go on the bad side.”

  “Well, we all do that, don’t we?” Samuel asked. “Think about things and then try to do the right one?”

  “We can hope so, but until you get old you don’t really start adding them up. When you’re young you forget some of the things, both good and bad, but when you get old, it’s amazing how much you remember. I keep pulling up parts of my life from when I was barely off the milk, bawling after my mum in Scotland. I stole a tiny piece of bread I wasn’t supposed to eat on the ship on the way over here, and that’s in there, waiting to be added in, even though I puked it up not two minutes after I ate it.” He snorted and spit, this time almost to the noses of the mules. “I wasn’t one for sailing. The boat rocked once, the first time I got on it, and I was sick all the way across.”

  He stopped the wagon because they met some young men on foot, obviously fleeing. There were three of them and one had bandages around his upper left arm. They waved but kept moving west along the trail at a trot.

  Abner warned the men about the cavalry and they nodded. Samuel thought they should be moving off the side of the trail into the brush but didn’t say anything. They probably knew more than he did, since they’d been fighting.

  He was very glad that he and Annie had run into Abner but knew that if they hadn’t, they would have traveled as much as possible in the thick brush. In the woods was life. Out here in the open …

  “You said two,” Samuel said, watching the men until they were out of sight. If the cavalry were coming back they would be caught, probably killed. It all seemed so crazy: men walking down a road, somebody coming along and killing them. “Two reasons to help us. What’s the other one?”

  “Well, the first one was almost all rubbish. I mean, it’s true, but maybe a little too flowery to be real. I like the way it sounds, though, almost like it might be written somewhere.” Abner chuckled. “Being alone most of the time, I don’t get much chance to flower things up. Maybe I should write it down. Somebody might read it sometime and think I was more than I really am.”

  Lord, Samuel thought, for somebody who spends most of his time alone, he sure does like to hear his own voice. He waited.

  “But the second is quick. The truth is that I’m too old to fight.” Abner laughed; Annie jumped and Samuel realized she’d been dozing. “I like a good scrap and I’m too old for this one. So I go back and forth with news. Try to help.”

  “You’re a spy?”

  “No, no, that’s too hard a word. Though I ’spect these redcoats would hang me proper if they knew. I go back and forth with news about things that are happening that some might be interested in hearing about. I sell a little and buy a little and carry a word now and then, and I help them that needs it when I can. I can’t really fight—my bones would break. But if I help those who are against the redcoats, it’s right close to fighting. I can’t stand the redcoats and you don’t like them, either. Is that good enough for you?”

  Samuel nodded, watching the dogs move up the trail and back again. “That’s good enough for me. And thank you for the help.”

  Covert Communication

  Both the American and the British military forces disguised their communications so that messages could not be easily read if captured by their enemies. Prearranged letters or words replaced other letters or words, all of which had to be memorized by huge numbers of different people, but the secret codes were frequently and easily broken. Mathematical codes were experimented with, but the complexity limited their effectiveness, especially given the length of time it took to pass messages from one party to another.

  Invisible inks that could be made visible with heat or a series of chemicals, as well as messages hidden in common publications such as pamphlets and almanacs, were common ways to ensure the security of sensitive information.

  CHAPTER

  15

  They were still several days away from the city of New York and an almost constant stream of refugees came at them.

  Some had obviously been soldiers, or fighting men of one kind or another. There were many with wounds, wrapped in crude bandages. Abner stopped the wagon and furnished bandages for those who didn’t have them; he also had a supply of laudanum, a painkiller that was half opium and half alcohol, and he gave some of the more gravely wounded a small bottle. “Take it sparingly,” he said in his deep voice, “best at night before sleeping.” To everyone he said, “Stay off the roads, redcoats are about.”

  Cart after wagon after cart passed them, being pulled by mules or oxen. A goodly number of the people were soldiers, but the vast majority were civilians—often whole families.

  “Where do you suppose they’re all going?” Samuel thought of the devastation on the trail to his rear. It certainly didn’t seem like a safe place. Hessians, soldiers, savages. “Down to Philadelphia?”

  Abner nodded.

  At times travelers were so thick Abner had trouble moving the wagon through.

  “Are they running from the redcoats?” This from Annie, who teared up when she saw a little girl trudging along and holding a doll by one arm.

  “That. And more,” Abner said. “Not just the soldiers—like I said, some of them aren’t that bad. I mean, a while ago, we were all loyal Englishmen. It’s more what redcoats signify—the English Crown has become a way of life these people no longer want. Part is they’re scared, don’t know what will happen, but along with that, these people are sick of being told what to do by a crazy king who lives three thousand miles away and doesn’t care about them one way or the other.”

  “What do you mean, ‘crazy’?” Samuel asked.

  “King George,” Abner said, “they say he’s teched, crazy as a bag of hazelnuts. They’ve got people to catch him when he runs wild, put his clothes on when he tears them off, watch him when he sleeps so he doesn’t kill himself—he’s no man to run a kingdom.”

  “Did he start the war?” It seemed a logical question; the war was so crazy. Maybe a crazy man started it.

  “Probably not. It began on this side of the ocean in Boston, not over there. People were sick of being treated like livestock.”

  The dogs had been going ahead now and then to greet some people, their tails wagging, holding back with others, but now they dropped well back and Abner stopped the wagon. “British coming.” If he hadn’t seen the dogs, he would have known anyway; all the men who looked like patriot soldiers evaporated off the trail into the brush.

  The soldiers came marching in a file. Not Hessians but regular British soldiers. There must have been two or three hundred of them, as near as Samuel could estimate, marching in loose route step, followed by supply wagons. They did nothing threatening, they didn’t stop at all, except to work around wagons that couldn’t get out of the way soon enough.

  Abner watched them go by in silence, nodding at some of them, and when they were gone, he started up the mules. It was late in the day and he said, “Why don’t we stop for a good meal tonight?”
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  They had been eating corn and the venison, which was about gone. Samuel had been thinking he should take his rifle and head off into the woods for another deer tomorrow. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean have somebody cook us a meal … say the people in that farm over there.” He pointed to a farm set well back off the road, with neat white fences and a white painted house. “Right there.”

  Samuel and Annie said nothing. The house reminded Samuel of Annie’s home before the Hessians and he wondered if she felt the same.

  As they had gotten closer to the city, there had been more and more cleared farms. Some were nice, even beautiful. Some had been attacked and burned—probably by the Hessians—but many had not. It made no sense, nor did it follow any logic—like so much of what had happened.

  Abner pulled the wagon into the long drive and then the yard. There was a wooden watering trough by a hand pump and the mules went to it and started drinking. Abner, Samuel and Annie climbed down from the wagon.

  “Let them drink,” Abner said. “Mules won’t blow themselves by overdrinking the way horses do.”

  There was a barn—painted red, as Caleb’s had been. Samuel sneaked a look at Annie, but she seemed to take it in stride.

  A man came from the barn. He was tall, thin, and had a tired felt hat, which he pushed to the back of his head. He started to say something but before he could get anything out, Abner held up his hand.

  “Name’s Abner McDougal. Honor to the house and we come in peace. I have a fine surface-sharpening stone wheel and I repair and sharpen all tools, in the house and barn, all work for one good meal for me and the bairns.”

  “Well …”

  “Also buy and sell rags. Have some nice linen rags if the lady of the house needs some soft garment material.” He spoke fast, never letting the man get a word in. “If you don’t need anything we’ve got, we’ll just thank you for the water for the mules and be on our way.”