Don Gutteridge: Death of a Patriot

“But this crick’s runnin’ away from the river, ain’t it?”

“Right. We’re goin’ upstream, which is puzzlin’ to me.”

The arrival of Muttlebury stopped further discussion of the matter, and the troop tramped forward once again.

The next bend lay a hundred yards ahead of them, and as they approached it, Billy could see plainly that the tracks had veered away to the right-to the west and towards the river. The Yankees had apparently decided to make a break for the shoreline. No doubt a ship or several boats had been placed along the Detroit at strategic intervals, just in case the liberators should encounter the unthinkable: opposition from the ordinary serfs of Queen Victoria’s fiefdom.

“They’ve headed west into the bush!” Billy shouted back to his captain against the rapidly building northwest wind.

“We’ve gotta pick up our pace, then,” Muttlebury puffed, struggling to maintain his dignity while clutching his rebellious belly.

“They could’ve left a picket just inside the bush over there to slow us down,” Corporal Curry suggested, remembering the lectures on withdrawal tactics that the colonel had delivered with such passion back in Toronto and repeated after their arrival here.

Muttlebury tried to take this in, blinking into the slanting sunlight with watery eyes. “What’s best to do?” he said at last, unconcerned that a commissioned officer was asking the advice of a junior not yet permitted in his mess.

“The safest way, sir, is to send a volley at that spot where the tracks disappear,” Billy said.

“Yes, the safest way,” Muttlebury said, and nodded at his sergeant.

A half-minute later the squad was positioned in rank and Muttlebury was poised to bring his sword down to ignite the volley, when they saw the cedar boughs at the point of target waver. Muttlebury swung his sword, the forest was rocked by the thunderous discharge of twenty muskets, and the cedar boughs shattered before them. Several agonizing cries assured Billy’s troop that a suicide picket had indeed been set up to ambush and stall the pursuit. Apparently they had made the fatal error of choosing to wait until the enemy had come within easy killing range before firing upon them.

Billy didn’t bother waiting for the obvious order, and it did not come. He sprinted across the creek ice with bayonet bristling, and Mel and the others simply followed suit.

Two shots suddenly erupted from the bush ahead. Billy heard a bullet whiz past his left ear. Someone behind him yelped, but Billy kept on going. The time to attack, the colonel insisted, was during the moment of greatest confusion among the enemy, before they could regroup and inflict serious damage. Casualties could be expected, of course, but they would be within the “perimeter of tolerance.” Billy did not have time to think that he could be one of them. The adrenaline pumping through him had either anaesthetized fear or been its manifestation. With a war cry that would have impressed Tecumseh, Sergeant Billy McNair leapt up onto the low bank and plunged into the evergreens.

There would be no more shots. Three men lay dead, sprawled grotesquely in various postures of flight as the volley had roared in upon them. A fourth lay moaning on his back, his Kentucky rifle still clutched in one hand and smoking.

“It’s all right, lads,” Billy called back to his advancing troop. “We’ve wiped them out.”

Mel was already busy examining the bloody corpses. “Only one of these muskets has been fired,” he said to Billy.

Billy nodded and then knelt beside the dying soldier. His eyes were blinking furiously and his lips trembled in a parody of speech. Billy leaned down farther, and the whispered words rose up to greet him.

“Tell my daddy I got shot in the gut, will ya?”

“You were the bravest of this lot,” Billy said, feeling suddenly sick. The soldier was no older than he was. “But why didn’t ya shoot at us sooner?”

Through a bubble of blood between his lips, the soldier said in what Billy afterward remembered as a kind of laugh, “We ain’t got no bullets. None of us. That’s why we run.”

Captain Muttlebury had come up to survey the scene. “We need to get this man back to the village,” he said. “We can make a stretcher outta them cedar boughs, eh, Sergeant? Chalmers has got a busted arm, but he can walk okay.”

“Too late, sir. This fella’s a goner.”

The trail of the remaining fugitives through the bush-treacherous with sudden swamps, breakaway ice, and waterlogged deadfalls-was not hard to follow. At least one of the Yankees had been wounded and was conveniently depositing droplets of blood as vivid as Hansel’s bread crumbs. But the pursuit was arduous and demoralizingly slow. They were about half an hour into the bush, heading due west and probably no more than a mile from the river, when Billy whispered to Mel beside him, “Don’t this terrain seem awfully familiar to you?”

Mel paused, glanced around, and said with a chuckle, “Every tree’s been lookin’ the same to me fer the last hour-mean and ugly.”

But before Billy could respond, he, Mel and the captain had stepped out into a broad clearing, a beaver meadow, in the middle of which stood an impediment that was neither tree nor swamp. And suddenly they knew precisely where they were.

“My God,” Mel breathed, “it’s the old sod fort.”

It was indeed the abandoned earthwork redoubt that they had visited less than two weeks before, on the last day of Indian summer, to remove the stashed powder, rifles, and ammo. They had, of course, then approached it from the main road that lay due west.

“It’s a good thing we got that ammo out of there when we did,” Mel said, but Billy, who had assumed the role of scout without being assigned it, was already crouched behind a small cedar with his hand raised for silence.

A minute later he came back to his captain and said, “I don’t see no movement of any kind from behind the walls, but their tracks are pointin’ towards the fort as far as I can tell. There’s too much sunlight on the snow fer me to be sure. But the bastards’ve put up a Stars and Stripes to let us know they been there.”

“They wouldn’t sit in there with no powder or shot, would they?” Mel asked.

Jonathan Muttlebury, hardware merchant-cum-militia captain, did not, as might have been expected in the circumstances, seriously entertain the question. Billy’s reference to the impertinence of running up a Yankee flag on their own fortification-however devalued-had the effect of a red hanky flung across the bull’s nose. “Lads, I’m sick and tired of this goddamn cat-and-mouse game,” he cried, and brandished his sabre like a paladin of old. “Follow me!”

Billy knew he should have grabbed his commander by the arm and pulled him back towards common sense, and he would regret his indecision for the rest of his life. Instead, he waved the men behind him forward. With bayonets glittering in the mid-morning sun, Company C of the Windsor Regiment sped across the clearing towards the crumbling redoubt. While Billy was braced for a sudden assault from the still-silent ruin ahead of him (he was not ready to believe utterly that the Yankees had no bullets left), neither he nor any of the others was prepared for the abrupt and devastating ambuscade that roared out at them from the woods on the right.

Billy felt bullets zinging past him, one of them grazing his right thigh. He dropped to his knees, his head spinning and his ears deafened. A second later he was almost blinded by a wave of gun smoke that rolled over him on the northwest breeze.

Relying entirely upon instinct, he twisted around to discover the source of the ambush, fully expecting a second and more lethal volley. In the woods thirty yards away he could see men shuffling about and branches swaying. Somewhere in the numbness of his terror, his brain was telling him that a bayonet assault was imminent, that he had to get back onto his feet and prepare for hand-to-hand combat, as he had been trained to do. But as the smoke cleared, he could detect no one moving out of the woods or in it. Groans, curses, and sobs sullied the air behind him.