War Path (6 page)

Major Michael Ransom dove forward as the Pennsylvania long rifle flashed fire in the pan then loosed an authoritative thunderclap, spewing powder smoke and flame. The lunatic had tried to kill him was Ransom's first thought, as he dove face down in the dirt. Then he heard a cry behind him and rolled over on his shoulder in time to see a French lieutenant, brandishing a pistol in either hand, stagger backwards, his aim hopelessly interrupted by the fifty-caliber rifle ball that shattered his sternum and lodged in his heart. The lieutenant had hoped to claim the English officer for his own glory but found that glory had its price, one that fate and Johnny Stark forced him to pay.

The lieutenant emptied his pistols into the air and toppled backwards. Ransom staggered to his feet, his ears still ringing from the proximity of the rifle and the flame that had nearly singed his eyebrows. Stark grabbed him by the sleeve of his coat and dragged him toward the woods as another hundred guns echoed Old Abraham.

The Colonial Militia had regrouped and followed Robert Rogers to the sound of the hunting horn. The men had quickly formed a skirmish line in the underbrush where they had prepared to receive the French and Indians.

Though outnumbered by the force sweeping toward them, the first volley from the Colonial Militia blunted the attack, for practically every rifleman found his mark. The Abenaki warriors and French marines recoiled from the terrible effect of those rifles which shot truer than any Brown Bess musket or Le Carabine. They fell back upon themselves as another volley rang out.

Stark hauled the officer into the shade of the white oaks and flung him behind a stout trunk while he reloaded.

“The Regiment …” Ransom managed to say in a voice that was almost shrill with desperation. His first command and it had to be this debacle, one that was none of his doing. But he would get the blame. Not Farley. History would no doubt accord him heroic stature and in the same entry describe the battle as Ransom's rout. The very notion galled him to no end. But maybe he could yet salvage his career and good name. “I must … the Regiment.…”

“Went that way,” Stark replied with a nod in the direction of the road down which the 1st had fled. The stragglers were still visible. Indeed the entire force, all that remained, had slowed at the sound of the Colonial rifles. But they continued their trek southward down the road that must eventually lead to Fort Edward.

“We can still salvage this day,” Ransom blurted out.

“Major Ransom,
this
day was lost the moment Colonel Farley refused to let me scout that meadow. I reckon Atoan himself's out there and I can guaran-damn-tee you he'll rally his men and have them after us in no time.”

Rogers, Moses Shoemaker, Locksley Barlow, Sam Oday and half a dozen others emerged from the thicket to join Stark and the English officer by the oak tree. The Colonials were busily reloading their rifles and pistols as they approached. And then all around them, Ransom sensed movement as the militia withdrew, following the regiment through the trees, each man choosing the course best suited to him.

“The heathen has regrouped. But he ain't quite as anxious as before,” Rogers grinned. “Fool thing, Big Timber, standing out yonder in the middle of the wagon tracks, tooting on that horn of yours.”

“Figured on them seeing me would keep the Frogs busy while you and the lads got into position to welcome them,” Stark said.

Moses Shoemaker fingered the tears in the big man's buckskin shirt. Musket balls had passed close enough to tear the hide but leave the man unscathed. “I got to teach you the difference betwixt a ‘welcome' and a ‘sacrifice,' you overgrown rooster. Remember even the cock o' the walk can wind up in the stew pot.”

“Now see here, I am ordering.…” Ransom tried to interject.

“Can't hear you, Major, my ears is all plugged up and I'm nigh deaf from all the shooting.” Shoemaker shrugged.

“Mine too,” said Barlow. The silversmith touched a knuckle to his forehead in deference to the officer's rank then scrambled off after his gray-haired comrade at arms.

“Reckon it will be fall back and fight until the heathens have their fill,” Sam Oday suggested.

Rogers glanced in Stark's direction. Both men were the sort that inspired others to follow them. He saw that the man he called Big Timber concurred. It was the way of Indian fighting, a running battle, keeping to cover, making the pursuer pay for every yard of earth and keeping him cautious to a fault.

“Get them home, Robert. I'll be along shortly.”

“Now, Johnny, there's nothing you can do for the lads at Fort William Henry,” said Rogers. He didn't like this at all and made no attempt to hide his displeasure. Ransom stood off to the side, furious at being ignored but at a loss for words. What was Stark up to now? Coward, lacking respect for the major's authority; the list of his transgressions was lengthening.

“Atoan would like nothing better than to hang your hair from his war belt,” Oday spoke up. His fingers fluttered to the black scarf covering his mutilated scalp. He knew whereof he spoke.

“I say, I shall gather the regiment and follow you, sir.”

“You can't follow me, Major. You've some stalwart lads, who have no lack of backbone when they aren't being slaughtered for no reason but there's nary a one can walk the trail I'll be forced to take. If I'm to reach Fort William Henry alive, I'll have to walk and make no sound of my passing, leave no trace, not even a shadow to give me away.”

Ransom glanced at Rogers and Oday and as if to check whether or not they were finding amusement in the long hunter's exaggeration. But both men appeared utterly serious. Ransom did not like being played for a clodpate.

“As commander of His Royal Majesty's …” He glanced about him. And for the second time this day he asked, “Where the devil is Stark?”

6

S
ee the dead, adrift on the whims of a moonless night. They were soldiers once, British-born and brought to the New World by the lords of empire; they were colonists, frontiersmen bred free and determined to stay that way. See the dead? They were the women who followed their husbands and lovers into the wilderness, who struggled to make a home on the shores of Lake George. They were the children, the precious few who danced and frolicked on the banks of Bloody Pond, who skipped stones and played with carved wooden dolls and soldiers and never suspected their lives would be cut short by tomahawks and war clubs, and like their parents left to perish beyond the walls of Fort William Henry.

See? Ravens have eaten their eyes.

Screech owls for their funeral dirge, stone and mist and black shadows write an epitaph for the dead.

Who are they searching for? What do they want? Redemption? Too late for that Revenge? Perhaps. Or maybe just to laugh again, to love, to live. Broken bodies, ghostly arms twist and wind like a snake, writhing across a fresh dug grave. But no grave for these. And so they come. And so they pass. And pause on their spectral journey as if sensing the one who sits with his back to the birch tree, long legs stretched before him, rifle across his lap, head lowered, chin to chest, slumbering, his right hand holding his long rifle, finger curled around the trigger.

This one rests. This one breathes. This one burns with the same force that fuels spring.

And so the specters begin to circle, like gossamer
moths attracted to a flame, round and round, ever closer, thirsting for all that has been stolen from them, the sweet smell of rain-washed pine, the cool kiss of autumn showers, the bracing winds of winter, the seeping warmth of a summer's day, how the sunlight seems to melt into the skin and heat the coursing blood.

See the silent stalkers descending on their prey. The one they seek is all they were and could have been and would never be again. Martyred children with holes for eyes, women with faces like blank pages, men who died in anguish, everyone wounded, maimed, everyone reaching out to the one who lives, to take the breath from his lungs, the beating of his indomitable heart, to claim all that he is or ever will be.

The dead must have their due.

Johnny Stark bolted awake, cried out despite himself, swung his rifle around and fired into the fading remnants of his nightmare. The tongue of fire lapping from the rifle barrel and the ensuing blast brought him fully awake. He staggered to his feet and brandished his rifle as if to crush the skull of his attackers, swung from left to right, staggered back against an oak.

Mist left a damp kiss on his stubbled features. His chest heaved and fell as he struggled to regain his composure. The nightmarish visions took their own sweet time about dissolving, but at last they returned to nature, reassumed into the haze of the suspended water droplets that spawned them.

“Bugger this,” the long hunter muttered and quickly reloaded, then hurriedly gathered his possibles bag and slung it over his shoulder. No telling who could have heard that gunshot. It had been a fool thing to do. “I'm as clumsy as a bull calf in a gospel shop.” He was in enemy country now despite the fact that Fort William Henry was only another few hours' walk from this stand of timber where he had chosen to take a moment's rest.

Stark had spent the previous day dodging war parties and patrols of French Marines as he made his way from the bloody meadow, skirting French and Indian patrols. He avoided the road entirely and kept to the hills, working a zigzag course that he hoped would bring him to Lake George and the ramparts of Fort William Henry. But an overcast night like this left him in danger of blundering into the same enemy patrols he had earlier evaded. At last he chose to wait out the remaining hours of darkness and hit the trail during the wee hours of dawn.

The long hunter had not meant to fall asleep, especially so deeply. Now the rifle shot placed him in a world of trouble. The sound would carry in these forested hills. But there was nothing to be done for it, except to put as much distance as possible between himself and his cold camp.

He tried to shake off the unsettling effects of the nightmare. The ghosts had seemed so real. What had they wanted from him? Or was this a warning? He was not a man given to superstition. And yet this was the wilderness, a place of mystery and the impossible, a place of beauty and death. Here on the frontier, nature and the supernatural were entwined. But that skein was unraveling as the world of the “savage” collided with the encroachments of civilization. But he had seen things … ghost lights fluttering like angel's wings down in the valleys, lightning that fell to earth like bundles and rolled sizzling across the land, the tracks of beasts unknown to him, left behind from an earlier time and etched in stone, the skeletal remains of that which seemed both beast and human.

This latest experience had marked him, filled him with a sense of foreboding. What awaited him on the shores of Lake George? What had befallen the garrison? The questions continued to plague him across the landscape of this moonless summer's night.

The answers waited on the other side of dawn.

•  •  •

Atoan knelt by a stand of white spruce and listened to the stillness, enjoying the absence of gunfire and the cries of the dying. A man born for battle, he longed for a time of peace, a time before the coming of the French and English to this land, when the Abenaki walked these proud hills and were the masters of all they surveyed. In those days the People of the White Pines hunted the vast forests, ranged the mountains, fished the rivers, and answered to no one.

Now the sacred places were crowded with white-eyed interlopers, these “civilized” men who did not hear the spirit of the wind nor fear the heart of the wolf. They blocked the game trails, cleared the forests, scarred the earth with forts and towns, brought their spotted sickness to destroy the tribes, made treaties and broke them whenever they chose. And if they weren't stopped, soon, all would be lost. The People of the White Pines would grow weak and die or be crushed beneath the tread of the French and English and the colonists who continued to encroach on the hunting grounds and sacred places.

Atoan glanced over his shoulder at the campfires of the twin encampments gleaming in the night, one for the French marines of Captain Lucien Barbarat and the other, for the Abenaki warriors who had pursued the remnants of the English troops from “bloody meadow” back down the road to Fort Edward. With the militia to bolster their numbers, the English rout had stiffened and become an orderly retreat; one long continuous running battle as Major Ransom's command withdrew in stages, always contesting the advancement of their pursuers.

Every time the Abenaki tried to flank the troops by moving through the woods, they encountered a number of ambuscades set by the Colonial Militia. These marksmen kept under cover, fired a few rounds then disappeared back into the forest like … well … like the Abenaki themselves. Atoan could sense the presence of the man called Stark in these tactics although no one had claimed to have seen the big frontiersman since the fight in the meadow.

Atoan heard his companions approaching. He knew it would be his son, Kasak, and no doubt some of the young braves keenly loyal to him. The Grand Sachem of the Abenaki stood quietly, framed by a pair of white ash trees on the crest of a low hill. The night was moonless, a faint wind soughed, he lifted his gaze to the clouds, adrift on the whispering breeze.

“Father … why have you called off the pursuit?” Kasak challenged, in a tone of voice neither of his two Abenaki companions would have ever dared to use. He gestured toward the two warriors who had followed him from the encampment. “Tabid and Lobal have returned from scouting the English. They are not so far ahead. Our people are prepared to attack them once again.”

Lobal was a youthful looking fighter, built much like Kasak, slender and powerful, his naked torso like his youthful features, streaked with war paint, his head shaved but for a topknot. He carried a musket and powder horn and a lot of bravado.