Woods Runner

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Authors: Gary Paulsen
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Orphans
    Children orphaned by war, as countless were during the Revolutionary War, suffer from nightmares and sleeping problems, headaches, stomachaches, anger, irritability and anxiety. Severely traumatized children may become withdrawn, appearing numb and unresponsive and sometimes becoming mute. When the danger and devastation end, children can show remarkable resilience and recovery if they are in a safe and stable environment where they are cared for and nurtured.
    After the Revolutionary War, however, many orphans, if they were not taken in by other family members, grew up in institutions. Formal adoptions were very rare.

CHAPTER
12
    H e found Annie huddled in some hazel bushes, crying. When she saw him, she ran and threw herself at him, grabbing the edge of his shirt, silent except for the soft sobbing.
    For three days.
    Unless she was asleep or tending to herself, she would not get more than four feet away from him for three solid days. She held on to his clothing and did not say a word in all that time. At night he would wrap her in his blanket and sit away from the glow of the fire and doze, and she would cry in her sleep, almost all night.
    It bothered him that she had no shoes or moccasins, and he had no leather to make a pair for her, but her bare feet were amazingly tough and she kept up with his rapid pace much better than he would have expected.
    They drank from creeks, which were common, andshared the small amount of food Ma had given him. Annie did not eat for the first three days and he worried at that—although she drank—but in the evening of the third day she took some food and seemed to come out of the cloud she was in, little by little.
    He was having a very difficult time. With almost everything. The jolt from what his life had been just short weeks ago to what it was now had been so sudden, the gulf so vast, that he felt he was in a completely different world, one dominated by violence and insanity.
    The woods were the one thing he knew and still believed in. He was thankful for the haven of the forest as they traveled.
    Still, his rage would not go away. He stifled it, but he seethed with anger every time he thought of the Hessians and how they had killed the Clarks, of how they had tried to kill Annie, of how the raiders had slaughtered the peaceful settlers for no reason.
    He wanted to punish them, make them pay for what they’d done, and could think of nothing to do except act as insane and violent as they had.
    Kill someone.
    Find someone in a red coat and shoot him.
    He knew it was not something he could do, even though he thought of it. And so he drove himself—and, unfortunately, Annie—in a forced march that covered over fifteen miles a day. It would not have been so hard except that the trail had become a proper road. There wasstill forest on either side, but settlements, then small towns, appeared regularly. They often saw local people or detachments of redcoats marching on the road.
    They avoided everybody. Samuel trusted no one, not even people who might have been friendly. Annie complained only once.
    “We jump into the woods every time we see somebody,” she said. “They can’t all be bad.”
    “Yes,” Samuel said, thinking of the Hessians, “they can. Every single one of them can be bad. So we hide. And that’s it.” His voice had an edge that kept her from arguing.
    They worked around settlements and small towns, sticking to the trees, and on day five—they’d been out of food for a day and a half—Samuel shot a deer and took an afternoon, well back in the woods, to make a small fire with flint and steel and a little powder. He cooked the two back legs of the deer with stakes holding them over the fire and, when the meat was still rare, cut pieces from one of the legs, and they ate it squatting by the fire. He also cut off the strips of meat alongside the lower backbone—the tenderloin. Although it was quite small, he cooked that as well, to save for later.
    They

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