Free From Sea to Shining Sea by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

story about the whippoorwill call, that Mrs. Clark could not tell without getting a quaver in her voice. It was one of Edmund’s favorite stories, and it glowed in his imagination like a legend of knights and ladies.
    The woods were thinner here, and Edmund could see a paleness ahead which he knew was the river, reflecting starlight and the first rose-gray of morning. The leaves under his feet gave way to grasses and reeds now, and he walked now and then in shallow, chilly water, his feet sinking in cold ooze, the smells of muck and decay rising. He was in the marshy place now, where frogs dinned in the springtime and all the kinds of web-foot fowl lived and where in the summer the air was so thick with mosquitoes that a body couldn’t hear anything else.
    Edmund walked through the cold water knowing he was leaving no spoor to frighten the deer, and he soon felt the land rise a few inches. He perceived a large tree he had had in mind, and stopped there, and stood with his back to it. There was a forked sapling in front of him and beyond it lay the river. A fish jumped in the river, then again, and again. There were no insects in this season and so the fish, Edmund reckoned, must be jumping for the sheer joy of it. The sky was paling downriver to the east and the trees on the banks began to separate from the gloomy background on the far shore and become distinct, one by one. The river steamed in the cold air.
    Now it was almost light enough to see gunsights, so Edmund put the rifle butt on the ground and tilted the powder horn over the muzzle and poured a charge down the barrel. The weapon was about as long as he was tall. He felt in his bullet bag for a lead ball and patch. He put the ball in the oiled cloth, andpushed them down the barrel and tamped them firmly in with the hickory ramrod. Then he slid the ramrod back into its groove and lifted the rifle, and opened the flash pan to trickle in the priming powder. He eased it shut, felt the flint to be sure it was tight, then rested the gun-butt on the ground again and began waiting, shivering. Cold is just one of those things that be, George had taught him, and you have to make yourself believe it doesn’t feel any worse than warmth, or otherwise you couldn’t stand it. Edmund listened to the gurgle of the river and the other little sounds: a muskrat in the reeds, the croak of a heron, another owl far off, the hush of a tiny breeze as the air stirred with the coming of morning. Edmund gazed downstream and thought of how this river ran into the York, some twenty leagues down, and thence into the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, where, the family stories said, the Rogerses and the Clarks had first landed in the Colony, some three or four generations ago. All that ancestral lore was vague in Edmund’s eleven-year-old mind, but he was ever aware of it, and especially when he gazed down the Mattapony in the direction of the sea.
    Edmund now heard his own empty stomach skitter and grumble as he waited and shivered. The surface of the river was like silver now and the stars had faded out. It was true what George had said: to be cold and hungry made one a keen hunter. And now Edmund heard the faint sounds he had been listening for: the sound of steps in the frosty dead leaves.
    He raised the rifle to rest the heavy barrel in the fork of the sapling, and put his hand over the icy steel flintlock.
    Then he saw the buck come out of the edge of the woods and walk gracefully through the reeds to the water’s edge, raising its knees high, pausing, stepping again. When it was silhouetted against the surface of the river, Edmund pulled back on the flintlock and felt the strong spring compress, and kept pulling back until he felt it cock. The deer turned its head both ways, downriver first and then upriver so that it was looking straight toward him, but if it saw him it mistook him for a part of the woods, and lowered its muzzle to the water, its branched antlers now silhouetted against the