Free The Deserter by O.C. Paul Almond

steel, not the flint. After a few tries, the charcloth began to smoulder and then glow. Quickly he folded in the tinder around the glowing embers and blew gently. The glow spread and, after a bit, burst into flame. His first fire.
    The crisp sizzle of silvery bodies in the iron frying pan allowed him to relax. Be ever vigilant, he warned himself, but if the smoke were detected by a sailing ship, it might be thought of as coming from some native family. Would His Majesty’s Navy go to the immense time and trouble of tracking him down in this wilderness? Probably not. But he knew Jonas Wickett would go to any length to catch him, and he did not feel safe for a second relying on Jonas’s ability to forgive and forget. Other ships would be passing, no doubt. Any one of them might set landing parties ashore in this area, prompted by Wickett’s desperation. Don’t let down your guard, he warned himself.
    And what about Fury, who had lost his son? He and his friends might well come hunting for him, looking to finish him off. If they did, very little could save him. Double reason to be on guard.
    Washing down his fried trout and the fiddlehead ferns with a container of icy brook water, he marshalled his optimism and focussed on the enormities ahead. Around him, patches of snow were melting. But another winter would be upon him almost before he knew it. No matter how sturdy a cabin he might build, he had nowhere near enough money to buy stores for those long dark seven or eight months. He had to find an instructor from the Micmac.
    But would only a spell of teaching prepare him to snare enough game? He had no new powder or shot from the trading post, it being probably forbidden to sell to Indians.
    This silence too was new, a silence filled with unfamiliar bird calls or the distant yapping of a fox. How he missed the flurry of footsteps on the winding stone staircases of the castle, or indeed the slap of lines and whine of the wind as the ever boisterous seas crashed about his man o’war. Fine to be negative, he thought, but look, now, for the first time in his life, he had no one else to worry about. He was quite alone: the gurgling brook his only companion. Running as it did down from the interior hills to the sunny bay, it abounded with trout. Solid food for the summer. Why not rejoice in what he had?
    A squirrel scolded him overhead. Starving, he thought. Don’t bluster at me, mate, just go find those nuts you’ve hidden. A moose bird swooped low over his head with a squawk and lit on a branch, watching with sharp eyes. Such a bright blue, must be his breeding colours. He longed for some means to identify these new friends. Often on the trail in the last couple of days, he’d heard the most haunting call, sounding like, “Oh happiness happiness happiness.” What should he call that warbler?
    The moose bird sat gawking at him and his trout. All right, he thought. He picked up an uneaten head and tossed it to the tree. He waited. The bird kept tilting his head on one side and the other to peer at it. Thomas went on eating and before too long, was rewarded by the moose bird flitting swiftly down. With a raucous rattle, it grabbed the morsel and flew off into the trees. At least, he thought, two of us are getting sustenance.
    Ten days later, Thomas stood back to look at a square of six-inch logs, five layers or so high, twelve feet square, notched at the ends in the manner of military building. It stood well back from the brook, above any trace of high waters that broke over the banks in the spring flooding. The site he’d chosen was also hidden from the brook by a screen of young cedar.
    It was getting late in the afternoon, and he wanted to try for another round of logs before dark, but right now he needed to eat. He had fished this morning, as usual, and had left the trout securely held on a twig through their gills, dangling in the stream to keep cool. The last of the bread he’d been given by Burn was getting mouldy,