Free TEOTWAWKI: Beacon's Story by David Craig Page A

story gatehouse. The existing watchtower remained their only lookout.
     
     
    Bull
    Beacon waited patiently where the game trail turned uphill as Bull stormed back up from the marsh. As usual he'd barged on ahead using strength to bull his way through the woods rather than pay attention to the sign the animals had left. He'd missed the faint trace at the turn in the trail and pushed through some briers stopping only when he was ankle deep in mud.
     
     
    Beacon started up the trail as Bull approached swearing under his breath, using his big bore rifle as a battering ram against the briers.
     
     
    "Wait," Bull bellowed, "I want to lead the way."
     
     
    "Back into the fort," Beacon finished silently for him. Billy 'Bull' Waitly was supposed to be learning bushcraft from Beacon. Instead, as usual, he was using size and muscle to bully his way through the forest ignoring all of Beacon's softly spoken advice.
     
     
    Taller and thicker than most; Bull looked his nickname. Before The Blowup any high school football coach would have loved to have Bull as an offensive lineman. But Bull had developed a bad habit of using his size and strength instead of his brain.
     
     
    It had made him popular on high school football teams and with some girls, but the choice to concentrate on brawn and ignore developing his brainpower had stifled his growth into manhood.
     
     
    Bull's armament reflected his philosophy in life; he carried an iron sighted rifle chambered in a caliber named after an African Big Game hunter. The .470 Capstick would stop a rhino in its tracks but was overkill for the game around the Settlement.
     
     
    Beacon told him, "Bull, if you shoot a deer with that cannon it'll destroy half the meat."
     
     
    Bull said he wanted to have "enough gun to do the job." But it really didn't matter because with all the noise Bull made tromping through the forest he never got close enough to see a deer much less shoot one. Which was a good thing because Bull didn't have much the ammunition for the elephant gun; the ammo for it had been hard to get even before The Blowup.
     
     
    Bull's sidearm was a Dirty Harry .44 magnum revolver with a barrel over eight inches long again too much gun for the available targets but ammo was easier to find.
     
     
    The teaching session was a total loss. Unaware that he was still several miles from the fort Bull was rushing to be first through the gate so as to proclaim his conquest of the forest. Beacon just wanted the patrol to be over so he could report Bull's failure and refuse to ever take the young man out on patrol with him again.
     
     
    There would be resistance to his decision. Bull's sister had demanded Beacon teach her brother the "easy" job she claimed Beacon was keeping to himself. She would demand her brother be assigned to share the fort's scouting, hunting and trapping duties.
     
     
    Beacon had already made up his mind. Bull couldn't find his way once he got off beaten paths and in his bullheadedness had become thoroughly lost three times turning what was supposed to have been a one day patrol into an overnight stay in the woods. Bull hadn't liked that.
     
     
    Caught out in the wilderness without blankets or cooking utensils Beacon had made do. Spotting a squirrel midden Beacon chopped down a six foot sapling about an inch in diameter with his Randall and cut off all the branches. Then he tied it between the two trees nearest the midden with rawhide.
     
     
    Reaching into an inner pocket of his buckskin shirt he pulled out two thin tightly coiled brass wires which he tied to the middle of the sapling about two feet apart. Each wire had a small noose at the other end. He bent the wire up so the nooses were exactly over the top of the sapling.
     
     
    The snares set, Beacon guided Bull up into a box canyon scouting for a campsite. In the late afternoon he led the exhausted Bull back to the midden where two dead squirrels were hanging in the wire nooses.
     
     
    Beacon