Woods Runner - By Gary Paulsen Page 0,4

with people all talking over each other about the meaning of the battles. It seemed that the strong and sturdy log walls no longer protected his family. The loud outside world his parents had escaped by moving to the frontier had found them. Samuel was excited and frightened and overwhelmed all at the same time.

“What does it mean?” Ebenezer Clark asked Olin. His face was red and round as an apple because he drank home beer, three quarts every morning for breakfast.

“It could be local. Just some trouble in Boston,” Samuel’s father said. “A riot or the like. There’s always a chance of rabble-rousing in the cities. And it doesn’t seem likely that a group of farmers would try to take on the entire British army.” He paused, then added thoughtfully, “England has the most powerful army and navy in the world, and a gaggle of farmers would have to be insane to fight them.”

“Likely or not”—this from Lund Harris, a soft-spoken and careful man whose wife, Clara, sat nursing an infant—“if it happens, we have to think what it means for us out here on the edge.”

Nobody spoke. Samuel could hear the crackle of the fire in the fireplace. In the homey, safe cabin, the craziness of the information from the east seemed impossible.

There was always some measure of violence on the frontier: marauding savages, drunks, thieves—“evildoers,” men who operated outside the walls of reason. Harshness was to be expected in the wild.

But nothing like this, nothing that challenged the established order, the very rule of the Crown, the civilized life that came from the English way of living.

The very idea of fighting the British was too big to understand, too huge to even contemplate. These settlers had always been loyal to the rules of the land, obedient to the laws of the country that ruled them.

Ben Overton stood. He was a tall, thin man whose sleeves never seemed to come to his wrists. He said, “Well, I think we should do nothing but wait and see how the wind blows.”

And with nods and a few mumbles of affirmation the rest got up and went back to their own homes.

Not a single person in that cabin could have known what was coming. And even if they had seen the future, they would not have been able to imagine the horror.

Frontier Life

The only thing that came easy to people of the frontier was land. A single family could own hundreds, even thousands of acres simply by claiming them.

If getting the land was easily accomplished, using the land was a different matter. It had to be cleared of trees for farming. Some oaks were five or six feet in diameter, and each had to be chopped down by ax, cut into manageable sections and hauled off. Then the stump was dug out of the ground, often with a handmade wooden shovel. One stump might take a week or two of hard work, and a piece of land could have tens of dozens of trees.

If a family was lucky they might find a clearing left by beavers, which log off an area and dam a creek to make a lake, rotting out all the stumps. When the trees and the food are gone, the beavers leave, the dam breaks down, the water drains off and there is a handy clearing left where the lake was.

CHAPTER

3

The woods were never completely quiet.

Even in silence, there would be a whisper, a soft change that told something. If you listened, complete quiet could speak worlds.

Samuel had gone five ridges away from home, hunting, feeling the woods. Something was … off. If not wrong, then different. The woods felt strange, as if something had changed or was about to change.

Samuel shrugged off the feeling and kept going. It was hard to measure distance, because the ridges varied in height and width and the forest canopy blocked out the sun. He was hunting bear, so he moved slowly and followed the aimless game trails looking for signs of life.

Five ridges, going in a straight line, might have meant four or five miles. The wandering path he followed probably covered more like seven or eight.

He had seen no fresh sign until he came halfway up the fifth ridge, a thickly forested round hump shaped like the back of a giant animal. Then he saw fresh bear droppings, still steaming, filled with berry seeds and grass stems, and he slowed his pace through the thick undergrowth until he came to