Have your musket clean as a whistle, hatchet scoured, sixty rounds powder and ball, and be ready to march at a minute’s warning.
Major Robert Rogers, founder of American Rangers
LAKE GEORGE, PROVINCE OF NEW YORK
WINTER 1753
He was numb, the wind-whipped snow driving icy shards into his exposed skin, the grip on his rifle weak. All the while a fire burned in his mind, driving him forward as he half clawed up the frozen mountain. He was no longer the commander of the Ranger Corps scattered in the valley below but a boy bent on saving his own life all over again.
Strange what came to a man when thirty-odd years flashed before his eyes. The thwack of Pa’s axe. His little sister’s gap-toothed smile. Chilled pewter mugs of cider atop a trestle table.
Winded, he pressed on amid snow blindness as other images assailed him like arrows. Mam’s gathering basket that bore the scent of herbs, rosemary and rue foremost. Her candlelit profile as she read aloud to them at night, eyes closed in weariness between words strewn like bread crumbs in his consciousness.
For I know the thoughts that I think toward you . . . peace . . . not evil . . . to give you an expected end.
And then calamity had struck on the heels of those words as if to refute them, consuming all that he knew in a few smoky, charred moments, leaving a black footprint on the frozen ground.
They’d said Indians weren’t winter raiders. An outright lie.
Gripping a brittle mountain laurel, he pulled himself up with his free hand. He tightened his hold on his gun while battling his way forward even as his shoepacks slid beneath him. Each harried second brought the fear his chest might explode from the pressure of his climb. He was all that was left to carry on his family name. Blackburn. A fine Scots name that needn’t die on this whitewashed mountain.
He wanted another, better kind of life. As he thought it, that stubborn childhood vision slammed into him like the knifelike wind, his breath powdering the air in front of him as snow thinned in a scraggly stand of pines. The mountain suddenly gave way to a wending river . . . a blooming orchard on one side of it . . . a handsome house up a greening hill. Clear as a painting on a parlor wall. He’d first encountered the vision soon after that fiery day he’d lost his childhood. A fancy? It revisited him only when he hovered between life and death. It returned now with all its color and clarity, something not even a blizzard could obliterate.
He looked back, his trained eye detecting a flash of motion just below. Abenaki? French militia were not far behind, yet the encroaching darkness was in his favor, silvering the snow and forming a hazy wall that pushed the enemy back.
He had in mind more than survival. If he got free of this present danger, he vowed to go in search of that other, peace-laden place.
Almighty God, help me.