Free Blood Brothers in Louisbourg by Philip Roy Page A

sir?”
    â€œAh, I don’t think there will be much killing, Jacques. They took the tiny garrison on the mainland with little loss of life, yes?”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    M. Anglaise sighed compassionately. “I am not entirely unfamiliar with the weight a son must bear for the conscience of his father, Jacques. But if it is a weight God Almighty has seen fit for us to carry, perhaps it is not for us to question it so anxiously?”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œGood, then. Don’t keep my lovely child waiting. I expect she has rosined her bow already.”
    â€œYes, sir. Thank you.”
    I climbed the stairs with a sense of doom. But perhaps M. Anglaise was right. Perhaps a month in the wilderness of the New World would not be the worst thing in the world, though I truly did not want to go, not least of all because I knew I might actually get killed.
    â€”
    I saw so little of my father during the first few months at the fortress I didn’t know when he slept. He was taken up with wartime activities and the reconstruction of the fortress in the places where it was crumbling. The fortress itself was perfect, he insisted, it was just the elements that were not so agreeable. Wind, rain and salt were a vicious trio that caused much damage. Yes, I thought, but they didn’t fire muskets and cannon or lay siege or steal sailing ships. Towards the end of summer the English turned the tables on us, capturing some of our own privateers that had captured theirs. They remained in the sea not far away, determined to cut off our supply line. Not to worry, said my father, we were about to strike them where it hurt – overland to Annapolis Royal, their stronghold in the south. We would pick up forces along the way, Acadians and Mi’kmaq, and hit the English with the fury of a hurricane.

Chapter Fourteen
    W et mud was difficult to dig and carry, but the summer had dried the ground beneath the swamp grass enough that it could be dug out with strong branches, scooped into baskets and poured into the channels. Spring runoff had sharpened the edges of the narrow trenches and it wasn’t hard to find places to conceal a tunnel opening. Each tunnel was not long, about twenty feet at the most, but digging a series of them was an enormous amount of work. Two-feathers worked very hard indeed. He did not need to be rebuked by a spirit twice. By the end of summer he could cross one small corner of the swamp without ever showing his head above ground. The muskrat spirit was satisfied.
    The scent of autumn was in the air. There were apples in the woods and rich tubers in the ground. Now was a busy time of gathering and storing food for the winter. Two-feathers spent many hours fashioning baskets out of reeds. With these baskets he collected berries, chestnuts, acorns, flowers, seeds, apples, tubers and anything else that was edible. He placed the baskets inside the burrows of his tunnel system and protected them with birch bark and spruce boughs. He began to collect wood from the beach and stockpile it. He planned to winter in the swamp, where he knew the winter would be particularly cruel. Survival was all about preparation.
    But there was one task for which he would have to leave the swamp and travel inland for several days, far from the fires, smells and sounds of the bluecoats’ great village. He would walk until he reached the hills where he would find bears. There he would pray to the spirit of the bear to let him kill one and take its coat for a winter blanket. He did not like to kill such a noble beast but he could not survive the winter in the swamp without a thick fur covering. He would kill an old bear, one who would not be too sad to leave this world for the next.
    Before leaving, Two-feathers wanted to visit the girl of the rainbow and try to explain to her that he would be gone for a while but would come back. He wanted to give her something so that she would remember him and know he would