Woods Runner - By Gary Paulsen Page 0,5

the top of the ridge. To his surprise, the trees were gone, and he could see miles in all directions.

He had hunted this direction many times, but had never reached this ridge before. The thick undergrowth in the summer and early fall had kept him from seeing this high point. He was amazed to find that below him on the western side of the ridge lay a small valley perhaps half a mile long and a quarter mile wide. The graceful chain of round meadows and lush grass was already perfect farmland. The treeless patch just needed rail fencing and a cabin to be complete.

“Perfect,” he said aloud. “Like it was made to be used.”

A crunching noise to his rear, to the east, brought him around. The bear was forty or so yards away, a yearling, slope-shouldered, dark brown more than black. Like a large dog, it was digging in a rotten stump on the edge of the clearing. Samuel cocked his rifle, raised it and then held. He looked above the bear across the tops of trees.

Smoke.

Thick clouds of smoke were rising to the east, almost straight to the east, a goodly distance away. Forest fire? But it wasn’t that dry and there had been no thunderstorms, the normal cause of forest fires.

Then he remembered that their neighbor Overton was going to burn limbs and brush from trees he had felled and cleared. The direction and distance looked about right for the settlement.

The bear moved, stood and looked at him, then dropped and was gone without Samuel’s firing. Another missed kill.

The smoke was in the right direction and at the probable distance, but there was something wrong with it, the way there had been something wrong with the feel of the woods today.

He eased the hammer down on his rifle and lowered the butt to the ground. He stood leaning on it, studying the smoke the way he would read sign from a wounded animal, trying to see the “why” of it.

The gray smudge was wide, not just at the base but as it rose up, too wide for a single pile of slash. That could be explained by wind blowing the smoke around.

But it was a still, clear day.

All right, he thought, so Overton set fire to the slash and it spread into some grass and that made it wider. But the grass in the settlement area had been grazed to the ground by the livestock and what was left was still green and hard to burn.

And would not make a wide smoke.

Would not make such a dark, wide smoke that it could be seen from … how far?

Maybe eight miles?

Smoke that would show that dark and that wide from eight miles away on a clear, windless day had to be intentional.

He frowned, looking at the smoke, willing it to not be what was coming into his mind like a dark snake, a slithering horror. Some kind of attack. No. He shook his head.

No.

There had been years of peace. Even with a war, a real war, starting back east in the towns and cities, it would not have come out here so soon; it had only been a week since they’d heard the news.

It could not come this soon.

But even as he thought this, his mind was calculating. Distance home: eight miles in thick forest. Time until dark: an hour, hour and a half. No moon: it would be hard dark.

Could he run eight miles an hour through the woods in the dark?

It would be like running blind.

An attack.

Had there been an attack on the settlement, on his home?

He started running down the side of the ridge. Not a crazy run, but working low and slipping into the game trails, automatically looking for a turn or shift that would take him more directly home.

Home.

An attack on his home.

An attack on his mother and father?

And he had not been there to help.

Deep breaths, hard, and deep pulls of air as he increased his speed, moccasins slapping the ground, rifle held out in front of him to move limbs out of the way as he loped through the forest. The green thickness that once helped him now seemed to clutch at him, pull him back, hold him.

An attack.

And he had not been there to protect his parents.

PART 2

RED

War—1776

Weapons

A single rifle—something every frontier family needed, something that was an absolute necessity—might take a year or more, and a year’s wages, to get from one of the rare gunsmiths, located perhaps miles