Woods Runner Read Online Free Page A

and … just
being
. And now all gone. Gone. He could not stop crying, thinking of his parents, wondering, worrying.
    It took five hours to bury everyone. It was still dark when he finished and looked around him. Then he realized that he should have said something over the bodies.
    He did not know the right words—something about ashes and dust—but he took another torch and went back to each grave and bowed his head and said:
    “Please, Lord, take them with you. Please.”
    It was all he could think to say and he hoped it was enough.
    He went back to the campfire by his own cabin site and sat looking into the flames.
    Praying.
    Praying for safety for his parents.
    And the others who had not been killed.
    Praying for all who survived but praying most for his parents and, squatting there by the fire, also praying for daylight to come so he could begin looking for them.
    And in half an hour, a little more, his eyes closed and sleep came and took him down, down, until he was lying on his side by the fire, sleeping deeply with all the bad dreams that he’d known would come; sleeping with twitches and jerks and whimpers at first, and then just sleeping.
    Sleep.

The Americans
    The American army consisted of three parts: the Continental (or regular) Army, the volunteer militia (including the elite Minutemen) and the Rangers, or small groups that were trained in guerrilla tactics.
    The Continentals bore the brunt of the fighting and they were equipped much like the British, with smoothbore Brown Bess muskets and sometimes bayonets. Many of them also carried tomahawks, or small hand axes, which could be very effective once past the first line, the line of bayonets.
    The militia volunteers were usually used to supplement the Continentals, but were quite often not as dependable or steady as they could have been had they been trained better, and they often evaporated after receiving the first volley and before the bayonets came. Most of them were also issued smoothbore muskets and some had bayonets for them, but others had rifles, which were very effective at long range but could not mount bayonets.
    Special Ranger groups, such as Morgan’sRifles, had an effect far past their numbers because of the rifles they carried. A rifle, by definition, has a series of spiral grooves down the inside of the barrel—with the low pressure of black powder, the rifling then was with a slow twist, grooved with a turn of about one rotation for thirty-five or forty inches. A patched ball was gripped tightly in the bore and the grooved rifling, and the long bore (up to forty inches) enabled a larger powder charge, which allowed the ball to achieve a much higher velocity, more than twice that of the smoothbores. And the high rate of rotation, or spin, stabilized the ball flight, resulting in greater accuracy.

CHAPTER
5
    S amuel was just thirteen, but he lived on a frontier where even when things were normal, someone his age was thirteen going on thirty. Childhood ended when it was possible to help with chores; for a healthy boy or girl, it ended at eight or nine, possibly ten.
    Because of his parents’ nature—their lack of physical skills, their joy in gentleness, their love of books and music, their almost childlike wonder in
knowing
all they could about the whole wide world, but not necessarily the world right around them—Samuel had become the provider for his family.
    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’sparents 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