Free Outcast by Gary D. Svee Page A

Wake up, Miles Standish. Wake up and start the fire in the stove. Send a stream of smoke into the sky in supplication to the gods of breakfast. Do this, and I will share the repast with you.
    Nothing. No movement. Dread trickled into Arch’s mind. Maybe something had happened in the dark hours of last night. Maybe the shadows had come to take Standish as they had taken Klaus. The boy stiffened. Not that! He didn’t want to creep into the cabin again to find death there. He didn’t want to find Standish tangled in throes of death.
    The boy shivered, partly because of the bite in the morning air, and partly because of his recollections of that time. The cabin had been dark, darker than Arch had ever seen.…
    Arch jerked his thoughts away from that day, going instead to the other days he had spent in that cabin. Always there had been life there. Bele, sitting stiffly as his formal European background required, smiling as he told Arch about life in Slovenia. Bele’s need for companionship and Arch’s need to know had melded. Bele had begun to teach the boy, rudimentary and then more difficult math. Rudimentary and then more difficult reading.
    The teaching of ratios melded with the teaching of physics, simple physics of the kind that explained what Archimedes had meant when he said, “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the world.”
    Crowbar equals lever. All the force of his eight-year-old frame was compounded by four times, when he pressed one end of a crowbar to pry a rock from the earth. Math, physics and simple learning had brightened the boy’s days. Bele had ordered books from the Emporium, and the two had spent evenings together in the cabin, Arch reading and Bele correcting.
    But then came the coughing and the pain and the blood-stained handkerchiefs Bele had tried to hide from the boy. Arch had learned to read the pain then, as he had learned to read pages in the books, until that morning.…
    Arch stared at the cabin through the dull black of the very early morning, before the sun reached out to touch the horizon, before the world turned from different shades of black to the soft colors of dawn.
    No movement. There had to be light for there to be movement in that cabin. But there was no light. Yesterday had been hard work. Arch had gone to bed with his muscles aching. He had lain awake, hoping that something would come out of the darkness to ease the pain and Morpheus had come to take the boy’s hand.
    Maybe yesterday had been too hard for Standish. Maybe, he had fallen asleep, not to awaken. Maybe if Arch stepped into the cabin, he would find Standish cold and twisted, overcome with the business of dying.
    There would be food then, more food than Arch and his mother had known for a long time. Another ham waited in the cooler as well as two more slabs of bacon. Arch had seen them, wondered at how they would taste once introduced to the heat of a stove.
    But even the hams and the bacon and the cans of peaches and peas and beans wouldn’t fill the hole in Arch’s life. Losing Bele had gouged a chunk from the boy’s chest, left a pain that he didn’t understand. If Standish was lying dead in that cabin, the boy would be in shreds, too weakened to stand.
    Arch sighed, and he thought it was the loudest sound he had ever heard, louder than anything in the trees around him…except.
    The sound came too low to register, more like a disturbance in the air than a sound. Then it grew in volume. A discernible snuff and then a bass trembling of the air. Only one thing made that kind of sound. A bear, black or grizzly, was behind him. A bear was thinking of him as he was thinking of bacon sizzling in a pan.
    Arch wasn’t going to lie down like a slab of bacon on a shelf. He was going to save himself. He burst into full speed, not waiting for his body to catch up with his intention, but it wasn’t fast enough. The bear had him by the